HUNDREDS packed the historic council chamber of the Yorkshire Area of the National Union of Mineworkers in Barnsley on Saturday for its annual memorial lecture.
The strength of feeling in former mining communities 40 years after the epic 1984-5 miners’ strike against pit closures revealed itself at the event to commemorate the deaths of David Jones and Joe Green: Yorkshire miners killed on the picket lines during the strike.
No-one was ever prosecuted over the deaths.
Speaker Unite union general secretary Sharon Graham called for workers to build on the example of the shop stewards’ movements that took action at power and engineering plants in the 1970s.
Ms Graham said that workers organising together in the workplace “is always going to be our instrument of power,” adding: “That is the real threat. That is what they fear.
“This is how to remember those who have fallen: by doing and by action; by committing to the long, hard drive to organise.
“We need to build an army. We are not just replicating the past, we are building on it. We have to do the same job and fight these battles in our communities.
“The real project is to develop power. We will build a movement for the working class, a movement of the working class.”
Ms Graham said that the aim was to make a “better world” and that “the rebirth of the trade union movement has begun.”
Also on Saturday, former miners’ leader Arthur Scargill praised the thousands of women who mobilised across Britain’s coalfields at a packed rally marking the strike’s 40th anniversary.
And he paid tribute to the hundreds of thousands of trade unionists worldwide who sent aid and blocked the importation of scab coal, including sabotaging coal-carrying ships in France.
Mr Scargill was speaking after 1,500 ex-miners, families and friends marched through former coalmining communities around Hatfield main colliery outside Doncaster, where the pithead winding gear still stands in tribute to the men who worked there.
He said that when Woman Against Pit Closures was founded on May 12 1984, about 500 women had been expected to gather in Barnsley: instead, 10,000 turned up.
“There were women who had never left a little village,” he said. “Here they were exercising, for the first time, their right to be equal to men, more importantly, to support men who were on strike. They were magnificent.”
Mr Scargill praised the international solidarity from trade unionists in France, Spain, Italy, Hungary, East Germany, Ireland, the Soviet Union and beyond.
“The miners’ strike of 1984-5 brought our union unprecedented support from workers and countries all over the world,” he said.
He said that at Christmas in 1984, 40 juggernauts arrived from Europe carrying food, medical supplies and a Christmas present for every child in every striking miner’s family giving him — and them — the best Christmas they had ever had.
Mr Scargill also called for international action to halt Israel’s war on Gaza.
