Cornered by television cameras in a side street on his travels, the Prime Minister stumbled out, in tones of ringing insincerity, words of sympathy for the families of the four men who died in the Gleision coalmine. It was “a desperately, desperately sad situation”.
Best sad face for the camera – no wonder he calls himself the true heir to Tony Blair. This is how he, too, would have handled the death of Princess Diana. It would have been convincing, if you didn’t know it was all part of the touchy-feely charade of so-called caring conservatism.
I could have kicked the TV screen in.
When the miners staged their great strike for jobs in 1984-85, Cameron was still at Eton. I imagine he was only dimly aware of events in the coalfields, where whole communities were facing destruction at the hands of his hero, Margaret Thatcher. What little he did know, I’m sure he approved of. He can’t speak about trade unions without a particularly snide tone entering his voice.
He, and the other Tory politicians who slip easily into the Blairspeak of “communities”, haven’t the faintest idea of what a mining community was – and, to a certain extent, still is – like. “Community” is very much a buzzword. It has a nice, soft feel. Politicians and their ilk use it to describe anything and everything. Hence, the spooks belong to “the intelligence community”. City rip-off merchants belong to “the banking community.” It can’t be long before we have “the Tory 1922 Committee community” and “the MPs’ expense fraud community”.
But it’s all, as the late Damon Runyon would have said, phonus-bolonus. A genuine community is made up of people who work at the same trade and usually live in close proximity, often in houses provided by the employers near their place of work so they can be sure of getting them in on time. Miners certainly fell into this category, as did fishermen, steelworkers, railwaymen, dockers and similar working-class trades. They worked together and socialised together, hence the cultural features like brass bands, working-men’s clubs, football and cricket teams.
This way of life was all but destroyed in the Thatcher years. Such pits as remained open drew their workers from widely-dispersed towns and villages. The docks migrated to container ports, which were then privatised and – where the employer could – de-unionised. The fishing industry is a shadow of its former self. Ditto the steel industry. Many working-men’s clubs have closed. There are no working men – they were mostly men – to form the backbone of these communities. That is not to say the women did not figure largely. They did. They were the mainstay of the home, but as Women Against Pit Closures demonstrated, they could also be roused to collective action when their way of life was threatened. After all, it was theirs, too.
With the dramatic rise in world coal prices, there has been a limited resurgence of the British coal industry. The Russians reopened Hatfield Colliery in Ed Miliband’s Doncaster North constituency. A number of private mines (which always existed, even in nationalisation days) have restarted production, especially in the rich anthracite area in the west of the South Wales coalfield. There is money to be made out of Old King Coal, though Britain’s power stations are largely fuelled by imports from Russia and South Africa.
And, irony of ironies, the Russians, supposedly Arthur Scargill’s strike paymasters a quarter of a century ago, are deeply reluctant to recognise the National Union of Mineworkers. The NUM is also a shadow of its former self. At last week’s Trade Union Congress in London, it had one delegate, general secretary Chris Kitchen, a former official at Yorkshire’s Kellingley Colliery. The union’s official membership tally is 1,713 – smaller than a single branch at one of the old “big hitters.” I still go to the former pit village of South Elmsall, near Pontefract, once a month to drink with and talk to the ex-miners. They are the best reminiscers in the business. Frickley Colliery, which called itself “second to none”, because only a handful of strikers out of 1,800 scabbed, closed in 1994 and virtually all traces have been wiped out. The slag heap is a country park, laid out with a path that records the old seams.
Officials of the former Frickley Colliery branch continue to operate from a small office in the pit lane, still called “the union box”, giving advice on everything from compensation claims to disability allowance testing. There is a great deal of disability, much of which is only now showing up medically. But funding for this small social enterprise is drying up. Labour-controlled Wakefield council says it can’t afford the few thousand quid a year it costs to run. Ditto, the twice-weekly village market, when South Elmsall comes alive. And now the authorities threaten to shut the fire station.
Community? Don’t make me weep. While he cries crocodile tears for the Welsh dead, David Cameron pursues policies that are dedicated to the final destruction of the genuine communities from which they sprung. For this alone, he deserves the label “hypocrite”.
