General secretary of the General Federation of Trade Unions GAWAIN LITTLE calls for support and participation in the national partnership organised to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the 1926 general strike
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State power weaponised against us
In the second extract from her new memoir, former NUM headquarters staffer HILARY CAVE recounts the bitter struggle to provide sustenance for strikers’ families, and the invidious role of David Willetts – now in the House of Lords
SOLIDARITY: Miners’ wives and their supporters arrive in London in 1984 for a rally and mass lobby of MPs. More than 8,000 miners from all over Britain were involved
After brutal police crackdowns on pensioners and the forced approval of secret IMF deals, trade unions are finally responding to grassroots pressure and fighting back against savage neoliberal reforms, reports BERT SCHOUWENBURG
Bizarrely, Trump’s latest attacks now include the National Zoo, but his real and racist agenda is to strip everything black from the country’s cultural institutions, writes LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
The transformation of a stable secular state into a fractured ruin largely ruled by Western-backed fundamentalists exposes the hollow nature of ‘multipolarity’ and the absence of principled anti-imperialism today, writes ZOLTAN ZIGEDY
Facing economic turmoil, Jim Callaghan’s government rejected Tony Benn’s alternative economic strategy in favour of cuts that paved the way for Thatcherism — and the cuts-loving Labour of the present era, writes KEITH FLETT
The economic value of disability benefits far outweighs their cost, argues Dr DYLAN MURPHY
As tensions rise in the Middle East, the role of Iran in the region’s political balance becomes ever more significant. STEVE BISHOP assesses the current situation
ONCE OUR strike began, single strikers found they were entitled to zero social security pay. The regulations falsely assumed that strikers would receive £15, later £16, weekly from their union in strike pay. Government was aware that this assumption was false, yet it fitted the Ridley Plan ethos of washing the state’s hands of responsibility for paying strikers.
The NUM had no history of giving strike pay to our huge membership, so in real life, families had to live on state benefits set at pittance level under the pretence that their usual breadwinner had ceased to exist. As these supposed ghosts still needed food and clothing, families had to stretch a paltry amount of money even further.
Forty years later the wife of a former miner still remembers bitterly that to provide for her family, including herself and her husband, a four-year-old child and a baby she received £11.75 each week. Another Derbyshire mining family still remembers receiving between £13 and £15 each week for a family with two children and a baby.
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In the third extract from her new memoir, former NUM headquarters staffer HILARY CAVE recounts how women throughout the striking coalfields showed their mettle when the going got tough
In the first of four extracts from her new memoir, former NUM headquarters staff HILARY CAVE recalls challenging police intimidation during the miners’ strike, exposing how the full machinery of state was deployed against the working class
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In the third extract from her new memoir, former NUM headquarters staffer HILARY CAVE recounts how women throughout the striking coalfields showed their mettle when the going got tough
In the first of four extracts from her new memoir, former NUM headquarters staff HILARY CAVE recalls challenging police intimidation during the miners’ strike, exposing how the full machinery of state was deployed against the working class
From repurposing a police van as the picket express to facing kidnap charges, former miner STEWART BROWN tells northern reporter Peter Lazenby tales of defiance from Bold Colliery during the 1984-85 strike
