Strike
Sarah Wimbush
Stairwell books £15

EVERYTHING the NUM predicted on its badges and posters during 1984-5 did come true.

There is no British coal industry left, not even in Nottingham. Youth unemployment in the former coalfields rocketed and has still not come down just as many former miners never worked again, spending their non-working years claiming dole not coal, which remained a cheap import from Poland.

What used to be called the working class are now the working poor and the absolutely skint.

Mrs Thatcher’s promised ”economic miracle” comprised spending the £14 billion bonanza from North Sea oil to fund the unemployment that her policies required to discipline the trade unions and so create the “two-thirds: one-third society” we still have today, only more so.

Child poverty statistics prove Thatcher and New Labour failure: 13 per cent in 1977 under old Labour governments rising to 22 per cent when Tony Blair left office in 2007.

Cameron-Osborne-Clegg’s austerity merely finished the job.

Sarah Wimbush’s brilliant collection Strike reveals the real-life figures behind such statistics. It comprises poems written on themes depicted in photographs captured in real-time by photo-journalists of real merit during the period, some iconic, and some never before published.

The texts of the poems combine wonderfully with the images to transport the reader back to what was seen and not seen, what exposed and not exposed to the average BBC viewer or listener or mainstream newspaper reader at the time, courtesy of the news monopoly held by Mrs Thatcher’s police state apparatus.

It was the same state news management that controlled TV and mainstream and red-top reporting of the Toxteth Riots in Liverpool in 1981, the Falklands War in 1982 and the Hillsborough Disaster in 1989. The working class died in all these events while Neil Kinnock laid not a glove on Mrs Thatcher, attacked elected Militant councillors and sold out to The Sun to no visible electoral effect.

The achievement of Strike is to show the breadth and vitality of not just the mining communities but the national support they evoked from the general public similar to that of the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders (UCS) Work-In on Clydebank in 1972 and the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp of 1981-2000.

The 1984-5 miner’s strike, like these particular popular broad-based movements, would not have survived or expanded without the active participation of women and the miners’ wives and Women’s Support Groups which took to the streets, halls and microphones during public demos as well as carrying out their traditional role of providing solidarity to the men and the soup-kitchens shockingly reminiscent of the General Strike in 1926, which was its true antecedent.

Thatcher deliberately provoked the miners and supported the government Coal Board in the same way as her hero, Winston Churchill, had provoked the 1926 Strike then supported the coal owners by facing down the TUC leaders. Just as Thatcher would hound Neil Kinnock into calling for an internal union ballot which the NUM’s own rule book (remember those?) did not require.

This is the political background of Strike, but what Wimbush’s collection foregrounds is not only the violence perpetrated by the state on ordinary workers and their families, but the true joy of the social and class solidarity these communities relied on all the time which simply came out during periods of struggle.

This struggle was broadened by new movements like the Women’s Support Group and the LGSM, Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, founded by the communist activist Mark Ashton and his comrades after the Lesbian and Gay Pride march in London in 1984.

The Thatcher government sequestered miners’ funds, so support groups were twinned with specific mining communities, organising benefit concerts like “Pits and Perverts” (an accolade given them by The Sun) which in London alone, a non-mining region, raised for the miners £22,500 (equivalent to £73,000 in 2021).

LGSM’s activities were dramatised in the film Pride in 2014, which captured brilliantly the mood of the Miners’ Strike though without mentioning Mark Ashton’s actual politics.

Wimbush’s collection captures much the same mood and inspiration, which also reminds me of the continuing salience of the CPGB’s 1978 Road to Socialism when it boldly asserted that “class” is not the only factor in making individuals aware of their exploitation under capitalism but also gender, ethnicity, peace, civil liberties and national liberation.

If readers want an insight into, or a reminder of, what broad socialist democratic politics can look like, then buy this collection.

Women Support Groups

They stand on picket lines
with wives from other countries

they stand in Welfare Halls
buying rags not fit for jumble

they stand at universities
they stand behind a mic,

they stand in police stations,
tube stations, the WI.

They stand outside No. 10
they stand out in the snow,

they stand up to the dark forces
and to those who break the code,

they stand beside their husbands
instead of one step behind,

and pull their daughters forward
and stand them in the light.

People who support the Miners

People nailed to a lathe.
People who grow onions.
People from Borehamwood and Rottingdean.
People from Welsh National Orchestra
playing Mozart’s flute quartet in a shopping centre.
Bus drivers and people who own Rottweilers.
People who greet you with bonjour, privyet, g’day.
People in vardos and people in tiaras.
People donating potatoes to soup kitchens
by the tonne every Tuesday.
Dockers, rockers and people on overtime.
People who are tagged.
People with gas fires.
Policemen.
Bevin Boys.
Greenham women.
The unemployed.
People who photograph people being battered
with truncheons.
Football clubs, bridge clubs, the funny handshake club.
Queer people, beer people, God people,
the Afro-Caribbean Centre, Springsteen,
The Sikh Society... Father Christmas.
People who are children of the people who lived
and died on the blunt end of a pick.
 

Sarah Wimsbush is a Yorkshire poet. Her first collection Shelling Peas with My Grandmother in the Gorgiolands was published by Bloodaxe in 2022, her celebratory Plath anthology After Sylvia by Nine Arches Press 2022.