DURING her campaign to emasculate the National Union of Mineworkers and destroy its members’ communities across the country, Margaret Thatcher branded the miners as the “enemy within”. It was a scaldingly malevolent remark, coming in the same sentence as a reference to having just beaten the “enemy without”, Argentina in the Falklands War.
Although the miners were not actually named, nobody mistook the message. The NUM was a threat to national freedom and therefore national security. In the Thatcherite blitzkrieg on manufacturing industry, the forces of the state were deployed to take the miners out and the labour movement down. The resolution of the miners meant that it took a year.
But, as the NUM’s current president, Ian Lavery, says on page 12, the effects of that eventual defeat in 1985 resonate today, but not only, as he argues, in relation to the looming energy famine which clean coal technology can help avert.
The strike was a milestone on the road of industrial and political change which delivered the current, still in place, Tory anti-union laws, the “new” Labour project, the deregulatory regime, inherited and embraced by its Government and the economic nosedive in which the country funds itself today.
The route has been hereditary and Prime Minister Gordon Brown is unable to alter the genetic political makeup of his Government. That the major catalyst was the collapse of the American sub-prime market, and that the problem is global amount to marginal mitigation of the fact that “new” Labour, with Mr Brown in the driving seat as Chancellor, championed the system which led ultimately and inevitably to the crash. That much is abundantly obvious in spite of Mr Brown’s insipid attempts to shrug off responsibility. But it is history.
The responsibility now – whether or not Mr Brown bows to puerile press demands for an abject apology – is to take a grip on the present and the future. That does not mean Downing Street-orchestrated diversions over the pension arrangements of a scapegoat banker, shocking as Sir Fred Goodwin’s venal reward for failure is. It does not mean turning a childish race for the first European placing over the threshold of the Oval Office into a diplomatic, political and economic triumph. Mr Brown goes to Washington was none of these. What it requires – Tribune readers will have heard this before – is a fundamental shift of economic policy and priorities. Regrettably, one that is unlikely to happen.
Among her canon of society-challenging remarks, Margaret Thatcher also once said: “It is not the creation of wealth that is wrong, but the love of money for its own sake.” Too little has been done to sustain the creation of wealth in a wider sense, and the maintenance of manufacturing industry, and too much to encourage the love of money for its own sake.
Why is the Government so ready at the drop of a banker’s hat to throw more and more billions at institutions which still stubbornly refuse to play the common wealth creating, economy-saving game while still handing out bonuses of up to 50 per cent of salary?
The answer lies in the collective mentality of the Government advisor who was revealed this week to have told industrialists and trade union leaders: “Manufacturing has no value, but the financial sector has to be supported at all costs. Manufacturing and engineering have no real value…only financial services and the City have any real value. They must be supported at all costs – the rest of the country can be turned over to tourism.”
The current crisis is an opportunity for the centre-left to take the moral high ground. But everything about the current Government suggests they remain trapped in Baroness Thatcher’s neo-liberal genes. None more so than the current Cabinet ascendant Peter Mandelson, now the most powerful member of Government outside Number 10, where even there his influence, if not dominance grow daily.
Currently indulging in his favourite pursuit of taking on the Labour Party and the unions over the Royal Mail, in a destructive bid to split both and see off the left after a general election defeat, we know where to look for the real enemy within.
