ON Thursday night, I was among the speakers at the Govan and South West Morning Star Readers and Supporters Group’s meeting to discuss how we “Defend what we’ve won against the right and extreme right.”
 
All three of us speaking — former MP Chris Stephens, community activist Danny O’Neill and myself — spoke of the concerns of a rising far-right narrative in our society.

We identified Tony Blair’s bizarre policy of encouraging immigration while claiming to “crack down” on it, the rhetoric and actions of the last Tory government, and, of course, Keir Starmer’s apparent determination to repeat the mistakes of both as key moments in the present cycle.
 
As the meeting went on, a certain John Foster gently admonished us for not referring to the struggles against and the eventual defeat of the Blackshirts of the 1930s or the battles against the National Front in the ’70s and ’80s in which he himself was engaged in Govan.

As usual, he had a point.
 
It’s easily done, as we look at the present, myriad forces marshalled against a united working class, sometimes our horizons can get a little cluttered, but a great future needs a solid foundation.
 
I’ve led a remarkably privileged existence so far, maybe not in financial terms, but in the stories that swirled around me growing up. I knew my great grandfather, a man who went down the pit at 12 in 1920 and stayed there through a general strike, a world war and nationalisation, and lived long enough to see the great strike of 1984-85.
 
He used to damp down the tobacco into his pipe with a stump of a thumb that was an endless fascination to the kids. “I bit it off eating ma’ fish supper,” he’d tell us, but the truth was that it had been cut off by one of the new cutting machines that came to the pit when the people took ownership.

Some university-educated engineer had popped down the pit to show them how it worked, and almost killed my great grandpa in the process, apparently.
 
Being naturally left-handed, he was, like many of his generation, beaten into writing with his right, a learned ambidexterity that came in useful afterwards.
 
Having worked at Auchegeich before he moved to the Bedlay colliery, he was called back to join the rescue team when the pit caught fire in 1959, a disaster which cost the lives of 47 men in the fire itself and the water pumped down to douse the flames.
 
He never talked of it to me, but my granny told us that when he eventually came home, it was the only time she saw her father cry.
 
When he died just a few months after the great strike ended, he was cremated — having been buried alive three times, he had made clear that he wanted no chance of a repeat.
 
He spent his life taking coal out of the earth, living in the miners’ rows owned by the private pit owners in Annathill, and ending his days in Glenboig’s 1970s electric scheme built by the council, a life tracking the rise and fall of Scotland’s heavy industry.
 
Even these snippets shaped my understanding of history, equipping me to challenge the narrative too often rammed down our throats in school that history is merely a procession of kings and queens or “great men” who did great things apparently in a vacuum.
 
I remember hearing in school that Queen Victoria was apparently a great reformer when, of course, she was nothing of the sort. The world was changing around her; unions grew, the demand for universal suffrage grew, with each baby step forward only whetting the appetite for greater progress among working people.
 
Just as the line of monarchical succession is no history at all, neither is the sense that progress is and was linear, a lesson we are in the midst of learning once more.
 
Battles, as they say, need to be fought and re-fought, but history doesn’t quite repeat itself. The patterns are there, though, if we know where to look.
 
A miner back then faced losing their job and home for daring to say no, for daring to fight for better, while many call centre workers today face the threat of shifts being pulled at a moment’s notice, trapped paying exorbitant rents to rapacious landlords.
 
Different, and the same, and that’s why history matters — the real history.
 
Across our land, great, beautiful and vast stately homes continue to survive, often propped up by the National Trust, or the National Trust for Scotland. I’ll confess to having visited a few and rather enjoyed it. We read guides that tell us that some duke, king, queen, or other built this or that.
 
They, of course, built nothing.

Workers built these grand palaces, decorated them, and dug the coal to heat them, and now their descendants get to pay to come along to gaze at the results of their outstanding talents and attribute it to a long-dead someone with a gold hat.
 
Often, state cash, either in real terms or through tax reliefs, keeps this fairy story on the road. There’s even the odd dollop of lottery money for good measure as workers trade hope for being robbed of their story.
 
Any of these places, when struck by difficulties, can rely on the sympathy and the coverage of most of our media, as we’re urged to feel pity for the odd aristocrat who has the taxman take all his dough and leave him in his stately home, as the Kinks once wryly sang.
 
What then of the history of the many, the people who built everything we enjoy today, who fought for the right to work, to fair pay, to fair rents, to decent housing, to vote, and without whom not a single wheel of change would have turned?
 
In Glasgow, we had the People’s Palace. It’s still there, still open, but I say “had” because, over time, it has lost what radical edge it might have had in its heyday.

Denuded of the class politics which made it special over the years, it stands — despite the best efforts of its own workers — hitched to a beloved winter garden closed to the people and left to rot, more a reminder today of what it was and what it could have been than what it is.
 
At the other end of the M8, in Edinburgh, the National Gallery of Scotland last year reopened after a £38.6 million facelift, co-funded by the National Lottery and the Scottish government, while the People’s Story Museum, located within spitting distance of the Scottish Parliament, now lies closed by the city council which aims to save a paltry £260,000.
 
Quite a contrast, isn’t it?
 
While I do not grudge the National Gallery its funding, we really do need to ask ourselves why such a place can be deemed worthy of public funding while a museum dedicated to working people can be allowed to wither for years and then die.
 
A council committee chose by six votes to five on Thursday to make the museum’s closure official, but not before community activist Jim Slaven told councillors the truth:
 
“The doors were shut before this committee even met, it’s an absolute disgrace and it says everything about how working-class people are treated — as an afterthought, disrespect, and people internalise that.
 
“What do you think you are doing to the soul of the city, to the culture, to the fabric of it? You are destroying it.
 
“Somebody has written a report who I can guarantee you is not working-class and didn’t grow up in Edinburgh, because they have no feeling for the museum, no connection to it the way people in Edinburgh do have.”
 
Not everyone is as lucky as I have been to have the stories of our class handed on; communities and families have been fractured and lines broken over the last generation or two under relentless attack.
 
But if we are to turn that tide, we cannot allow our history to be taken from us.
 
Those who would see it stolen, would see our collective future stolen too.
 
The fight for the People’s Story Museum isn’t over, and the campaign will grow. Let’s hope it writes some history of its own.

Matt Kerr is Morning Star Scotland reporter.