The Importance of Class Traitors

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His stated belief that that unions and politics should be separated was at best naive, as of course the ownership class would never separate their own “unions” (corporations, owner associations etc.) from politics. The full power of the state had been brought to bear to crush the general strike and the miner’s union. It later became known that “Spencer’s union-busting activities were financed, in part, by [the right-wing head of the seaman’s union] and by donations from grateful colliery owners” (Chapter 1) and local right-wing businessmen. The division in the miner’s union, which lasted until the founding of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) in 1945, aided the owners in reducing mining employment by more than a third from the 1.2 million prior to the strike. Wages plummeted even further during the 1930s Great Depression, during which the Labour leader MacDonald (another class traitor) formed a National Government with the Conservative Party (the party of the ruling class). At the same time mine owners intensified working conditions, and pushed the already appalling safety levels even lower. One result was the Gresford Colliery disaster of 1934, when 265 miners were killed in an explosion.

After the end of WW2 the Labour Party won an unassailable majority but were lead by a Clement Attlee who was at best soft-left and moved rightwards in the post-war years. Churchill described him as “A sheep in sheep’s clothing”, negating the possibility of more fundamental change rather than a class compromise that allowed the ruling class to stave off more radical possibilities. Attlee was also as much an imperialist, comfortable with sucking wealth from the colonies, as any Conservative. In 1947 the mines were nationalized, with the owners generously compensated and many owners and managers employed and very well remunerated by the government National Coal Board (NCB).

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exposed as a ruling class collaborator, who worked with state security against his own membership, among up to 23 senior trade unionists in total. With leaders like this the union membership hardly needed enemies! Here is the BBC program exposing the union leaders.

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At the same time, the right-wing of the Labour Party quickly put an end to the industrial planning proposed by Tony Benn, with James Callaghan (Prime Minister) and Dennis Healey (Chancellor of the Exchequer) then utilizing an IMF loan as an excuse to implement austerity and the start of neoliberalism in the UK. This was totally unneeded as the flow of North Sea Oil revenues was only just starting. In addition, wage restraint policies were extended to keep inflation in check while management pay and profits increased. The end result was the 1979 Winter of Discontent that directly lead to the election of Margaret Thatcher and her Conservative government.

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It was the most productive and profitable coal field and its members considered their pits not at risk of being closed down. Their high pay also separated them from workers in other areas who could not afford their kind of “middle class” lifestyle. The government also understood that if they could keep the Nottinghamshire pits working they could win the strike, and that meant stopping pickets from others areas preventing the Nottinghamshire miners from going to work. The county was very rapidly transformed into a police state, with pickets being illegally turned back many, many miles from the pits they were travelling to (for example exits from the main M1 motorway near Nottinghamshire had police roadblocks). The police actions were also greatly aided by a collaborator at a senior level within the NUM who would inform them in advance of planned picketing actions. Enormous numbers of police were drafted in from around the country, and pit towns were placed under a police occupation. For example, at Clipstone colliery:

We had seen an invasion of our village by the police on an unbelievable scale. From dawn to dusk, two-man foot patrols were everywhere while Transit vans full of uniformed police officers cruised throughout the day. The extensive use of roadblocks throughout Nottinghamshire not only saw them encircle the county to keep out the Yorkshire and Derbyshire strikers, but also restrict movement within it - between pit and pit, and pit and home. We were sewn in tight. (Chapter 4)

At the same Neil Kinnock and the other leaders of the Labour Party were not supportive of the strike, and other union leaders did not step in to stop their members from going through picket lines to move coal from the depots to the power stations. Echoing the 1926 strike, a “Notts Working Miners’ Committee was established with monetary support coming from businessmen (including the Eton-educated David Hart who was on the extreme right of the Conservative Party and had linkages with the security services), Conservatives and others generally opposed to unions. Its leader “Silver Birch” hid his identity as he travelled the coalfields promoting strike-breaking and was fully supported by the national media. It later emerged that many of the leaders of these proliferating working miners’ committees were working directly with the security services, and Silver Birch himself was a state asset.

Where large pickets were able to form, what could be construed as “police riots” broke out with the police attacking the picketers. The media repeatedly tried to misrepresent this as the police responding to picketer violence as with the case with Orgreave where the BBC intentionally reversed the footage to make it appear that the picketers attacked the police rather than the opposite which was the truth.

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All of the strikers arrested at the Battle of Orgreave had the charges against them dismissed as police testimony and written statements were found to be highly unreliable, with scores of police from many different police forces being found to be using exactly the same phrases while much testimony was not supported from by video evidence made at the time.

Cabinet papers released in the 2010s revealed a Margaret Thatcher that was detail managing the response to the strike, in direct contrast to the many statements she made at the time. as Mike Simons states:

the Cabinet papers show the Tories were fighting a class war as a civil war. There are too many who claim to be on the left telling us today that class politics are old fashioned. They are not. The rich fight the class war every day and they are very conscious of what they are doing (Chapter 17).

Even with all the efforts of the state and the ruling class generally, the miners would have won the strike if Nottinghamshire had come out on strike. The ruling class still needed the high level informer within the NUM that greatly reduced the ability of picketers to shut down Nottinghamshire pits, and the Nottinghamshire miners themselves, to win. Without the class traitors the working people would have won the strike and quite possibly destroyed the Thatcher government. Instead, Thatcher destroyed the strongest trade union and went on to cow and reduce the rest as she created a thoroughly neoliberal UK. Her legacy was also the Conservative leaders of the Labour Party, Blair and now Starmer.

From the late 1980s through the 1990s more and more of the Nottinghamshire coal mines were closed, putting the lie to the belief that the county’s mines were safe from closure and showing the self-defeating nature of the Nottinghamshire miners traitorous behaviour. Once they were no longer useful they were quickly cast aside by the ruling class. By 1993 there were only 44,000 British coal miners, by 2015 2,000 with the last deep coal mine being closed in that year.

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The coal mining communities have still not recovered from the devastation of the closure of what was in many cases the only major employer. Still The Enemy Within is perhaps the best documentary on the UK Miners’ Strike.

The ruling class will always fight the class war, while telling the rest of society class is irrelevant, looking for leaders that can be co-opted and bribed to work against those they are supposed to represent. So many progressive and socialist governments fail due to such efforts.