#miners strike

[lostfunzones]

Buying an ice cream at Yorkshire Miners’ Gala. June 1984. Photo: Brenda Prince.

[colonellickburger]

John Harris. Police and striking miners at dawn. Lea Hall Colliery, Staffordshire, England March 1984

[maggierosem1980]

One of my favourite movies is Pride. In all my visits to London I've never came across the book shop and here it is. I just stumbled into it on a walk, during Pride month too. Seeing the blue plaque for Mark made me a little emotional too, he was truly an inspiration, rest in power my man

[cathkaesque]

The Battle of Saltley Gate took place on Thursday 10 February 1972, and remains a huge moment in British trade union history. But visiting the site today, we couldn't find a single thing that marked it - no sign, no plaque, nothing. So we wanted to send a message to the Wakefield District Unison workers at National Coal Mining Museum for England who've been on strike since August over pay, and over the future of their museum which keeps the memory of our coal industry alive. Solidarity to you all, and never let our past be forgotten. An article from the 50th anniversary in 2022 You can see a 1972 map of the site here: (the gas works gate where we took this video is on Nechells Place in the top left corner)

Just realised I never shared this little video from visiting the site of the Battle of Saltley Gate in Feb, with a message from the Birmingham bin workers trike to the National Coal Mining Museum strike. Some of the striking museum guides took part in the battle way back in 1972.

The Nechells gas works as it was on the day, where 10,000 mostly car factory workers joined miners to shut the coke depot and hasten the miners' victory:

[lesbiansandgayssupporttheminers]

Honestly if we had won the miners strike, UK history would be so different.

[mariemariemaria]

Activism NOW! zine — the legacy of the 1984-85 Miners' strike for working class communities in Wales

[ostensiblynone]

And yet to talk about the [Miners'] strike as conspiracy, as plot, frequently gets you accused of outdated class warriorship and victim complex, of the politics of envy, bitterness and paranoia, of living in the past. (To which I say: guilty as charged. It’s hardly an irrational response.) What’s been good about most thirty-years-on retrospectives on the strike is the relief, when reading, that it wasn’t just you, that this stuff has been and is being documented, argued, quantified, recorded. You aren’t simply railing into the wind. First off, a confrontation of this kind was a foregone conclusion, planned at least as far back as 1977. The involvement on the government’s side of increasingly swivel-eyed anticommunist agitators suggests that the strike was invested with symbolic and strategic significance stretching far beyond the British coalfield. Yet at the time events were marked by mealy-mouthed denial and obfuscation. With few exceptions, the national media throughout 1984 cheer-led with wholesale misinformation and with a state-sanctioned demonization of the British working class.

—On Enemies Within: growing up with the Miners’ Strike in memory, myth and history | Rhian E. Jones | April 30th 2015

[youfillmewithinertia-xoxo]

Mine rescue team in Dinas, Wales (1989)

by David Hurn