ANDY HEDGECOCK picks out his cultural highlights of 2025
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What the miners’ strike was really like in Wales
STEVE ANDREW hails a moving and insightful collection of photographs and accounts that document the response of communities in Wales both as class and nation
Protestors outside the Grand Pavilion in Porthcawl, where Margaret Thatcher was addressing the Welsh Tory Party Conference, June 1984
[© Richard Williams Photography]
Star cartoonist MALC MCGOOKIN finds lessons for today in the punch, and the economy of line, of an extraordinary generation of illustrators
LEO BOIX, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MARIA DUARTE review Dreamers, It Was Just An Accident, Folktales, and Eternity
JENNY MITCHELL, poetry co-editor for the Morning Star, introduces her priorities, and her first selection
HENRY BELL is sceptical of the notion that ‘progress’ is an ideology that the ruling class uses exclusively to camouflage appropriation
In search of political understanding, MATTHEW HAWKINS welcomes a critique of anti-semitism as codified by the Israeli state
BEN CHACKO welcomes a masterful analysis that puts class struggle back at the heart of our understanding of China’s revolution
Coal and Community in Wales
Images of the Miners Strike: Before, During and After
by Richard Williams and Amanda Powell, YLolfa, £14.99
FORTY years after British miners began a relentless fight in defence of pits, jobs and communities, it is fair to say that the literature examining their struggle is now huge and continues to grow.
The quality of it, however, remains varied. Although there has been a shift away from portraying miners as “the enemy within,” now that is effectively safe to do so, many accounts remain either narrowly sectarian or overly romantic and sentimental in their approach.
Fortunately, Coal and Community in Wales is neither of these and, to my mind, is a real people’s history that uses image and text skilfully to capture the strike as a lived experience.
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