EVERY year I am reinvigorated by the unity and solidarity the Big Meeting demonstrates — it’s the true and genuine epitome of working-class values and trade union strength.
 
Isn’t it great that Maggie’s grandchildren were decimated in the recent general election? She was bad but they were additionally cruel and ruthless in their protection of the richest 1 per cent while letting children starve outside of term time.
 
Let’s not forget that the Tory governments of the last 14 years were the architects of considered barbarity: the bedroom tax; austerity; the wholesale decimation of communities; a world where, for many, work does not pay; attacks on the disabled; the destruction of public services; the attempted wholesale privatisation of the NHS; and waiting lists of seven million.
 
All the time lying to the people and bringing politics to a new low with “partygate” and other corrupt practices.
 
Britain, the sixth-richest nation in the world, is shamed by the lowest pensions in Europe and those who should have dignity in retirement are forced to choose between heating and eating. Fourteen million people are in poverty, and one million are in destitution. They even threatened to jail the homeless. Rendition to Rwanda.
 
Millions are reliant on foodbanks. People dying younger and diseases that we thought had been eradicated coming back.
 
There was a period, during Covid, when they pretended to respect the dignity that all work and every role brings to making our world work and keep everyone and everything going naturally. But, of course, it did not last and the self-serving sh*ts quickly reverted to type.
 
Claiming — falsely — that wages were driving inflation, that workers in all sectors could not have a rise while scrapping the cap on bankers’ bonuses and giving tax breaks to the rich!
 
Then we saw a summer, winter, and summer of discontent as they called it — we called it solidarity — when workers in every sector rose up and took action and were counted in the fine tradition of the miners — fighting for each other and for their communities.
 
We saw solidarity and unity across the movement — solidarity and unity that we had not seen for decades — and every success was not just a success for the union or group of workers concerned but for our whole movement and for our class.
 
That’s why I wish the doctors well in their ongoing dispute for pay justice.
 
At Aslef, as train drivers, we are in the 23rd month of our dispute — a dispute caused by the dogma of the previous government which we will resolve not to my satisfaction but the satisfaction of those who have stood strong in a dispute that is not about pay but about the bosses’ attempts — backed by the Tory government — to rip up our hard-won terms and conditions to help subsidise their chums, the privateers, in the failed railway privatisation of Thatcher’s successor John Major.
 
Under Labour, we will see a nationalised railway. A railway brought back to the public sector, where it belongs, to be run as a public service, not for private profit.
 
We have taken heart from the successes of other workers –especially when our sister railway union, the RMT, defeated the government on the ill-conceived notion of closing ticket offices up and down this country.
 
This 40th anniversary of the miners’ strike is special to me as I joined the railway in 1984 and the first thing I was told was that we do not move coal! Maggie did not want the railways and the miners on strike at the same time and, after threatening our jobs, they backed off and the coal wagons rusted in the sidings.
 
The twinning of rail depots with mining pits from Kent to Scotland, and the raising of money every week for those on strike, and in need, helped form my attitude to what class meant and also what could be achieved if workers stood together, and with hindsight we should have done more.
 
Nobody, though, had dealt with a government declaring violent civil war on a section of their own population and we welcome the promised Orgreave inquiry and Hillsborough laws in the Labour manifesto.
 
I cannot thank enough the Durham miners, the NUM, and all the other unions who have offered us solidarity and support during the last two years. There has not been a household in this country that has not had someone in the public or other sectors in dispute. They thought worker would turn on worker and spat their politics-of-envy bile through their chums in the right-wing media.
 
But Maggie’s grandchildren didn’t understand solidarity or unity — and were surprised — so they sought, as they always do, to bring in more anti-worker legislation because they could not beat us. Minimum service levels! Well, they tried it and we beat it! And, under the new Labour government’s New Deal for Workers, it will go. So will zero-hours contracts, agency workers, fire and rehire, and other anti-trade union legislation.
 
We will have rights from day one, a rise in pay and conditions, public procurement pledges, an end to bogus self-employment, and fair pay agreements through sectoral bargaining so people doing the same job will receive the same pay regardless of age, and a real living wage.
 
The miners inspired me, and the whole movement, 40 years ago. The miners’ fight is our fight — and it continues.
 
Mick Whelan has spent 40 years on the railway, 40 years as an active trade unionist, and most of his adult life as a member of the Labour Party. He was elected general secretary of Aslef in 2011; became chair of the Trade Union and Labour Party Liaison Organisation, now Labour Unions, in 2016; and, in 2017, was elected to the Labour Party’s NEC.