ONE hundred and thirty years ago today, on September 7 1893, a harrowing chapter in our history unfolded.

It’s a date etched into the memory of Featherstone, in my constituency. 

The story of the Featherstone Massacre has resonated through the years and sheds light on the relentless battle of working-class people for their rights and for equality.

In June that year, the coal bosses imposed a 25 per cent pay cut on the miners. Coal prices were 35 per cent lower than three years earlier and the colliery owners were determined to restore their profits by slashing wages.

Their action sparked the largest industrial dispute the country had seen, with hundreds of thousands of miners stopping work, united against the injustice.

​​The colliers of West Riding had played a leading role in the formation of the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain, and did the same in standing up to the bosses against their greed, peacefully at first. 

“No reduction will be submitted to… We got it by conquest and it will have to be taken away from us by conquest,” Benjamin Pickard, leader of the Yorkshire Miners’ Association, had declared at a demonstration in Wakefield when the employers first threatened wage cuts the previous year. 

So when some 80,000 miners from the Yorkshire pits were locked out in response to their resistance and blackleg labour was brought in, the protests turned tumultuous, with chaos engulfing the coalfields as civil disorder against the injustice spread.

As miners and their families suffered increasing hardship and desperation, a breaking point was clearly coming. Rumours about coal being loaded onto wagons sparked a confrontation with a pit manager and that’s when the call for soldiers went out. 

The troops were sent in by Liberal Party home secretary Herbert Asquith, ostensibly at the request of the local authorities due to the absence of the local police, who were mostly on duty down at Doncaster races. This was not the first time Asquith had sent in the army to break up trade union protests, including striking dockers in Bristol in 1892, though he initially claimed the government had no choice but to agree to the demand from the council.

He later admitted, after being attacked in Parliament by Keir Hardie and even some of his own Liberal MPs, that the request came first from the pit owner himself.

Shots were fired into the crowd, killing James Gibbs and James Duggan, innocent bystanders, and injuring six others. The sacrifice of Gibbs and Duggan would not be forgotten.

Shockingly, a Wakefield inquest concluded that Duggan’s death was “justifiable homicide.” The inquest into Gibbs’s death took place in Featherstone and here the jury blamed the police and the overreaction of the pit manager. 

The difference in the verdicts, and the subsequent outrage at them, forced Asquith to agree to the setting up of a parliamentary inquiry into the events of September 7, though he packed it with his own supporters. 

As a result of a speech by Hardie, the families of Gibbs and Duggan received £100 compensation, but nothing was awarded to the injured miners and the government never accepted responsibility for the deaths.

There is little doubt that the Featherstone Massacre contributed to the Liberal government losing much of its working-class support, and the subsequent creation of the ILP and Labour Party.

So how are these echoes of our history resurfacing today, as the world grapples with challenges old and new? Hardie spoke to a mass rally of miners in Featherstone shortly after the shootings, saying that if the pit owners could not make profits, then the government should deal with the royalties issue — the amount paid by the mining bosses to the state — not send soldiers in to shoot working people.

During the Covid pandemic, employers exploited the lockdowns as an excuse to cut wages. And now we see the obscene profits of today’s greedy bosses, stoking grotesque inequality while blaming workers for inflation and demanding wage restraint. They only know one way — to squeeze the spending power of working people while lining their own pockets. 

And they’re empowered by a government determined to prevent working people’s peaceful protests through increasingly draconian and anti-democratic, anti-union legislation, not to deal with the cause of dissent by acting on profiteering.

I recently called for price controls. Now, as in 1893, we need to stop squeezing the spending power of working people and remedy the whole broken and failing economic system.

Jon Trickett is Labour MP for Hemsworth. Follow him on Twitter  @Jon_Trickett.