The Ministry Of Truth

The Minister’s Wife and I spent last evening enjoying the company of Dave Spikey.

The upshot of this was the following exchange shortly before we retired for the night:

Minister: Now what are you doing?
Minister’s Wife: I’m just looking for Elton John’s ring.

In my final word on the subject for the foreseeable future, today is the actual 25th anniversary of the start of the 1984-5 miners’ strike.  The thousands of words published in the newspapers and broadcast by the BBC in recent days has been a salutary reminder of just how cluelessly idiotic most of our media really is, stuck in its cosy middle class bubble down south, claiming that this strike was about one Loony Leftist’s colossal ego.

One of the mightiest books to deal with the strike was Seumas Milne’s The Enemy Within – still in print and still essential reading.  It is therefore fitting that he has in today’s Guardian ripped into the media’s representation of this anniversary with the most clear-minded exposition of the true heart of the conflict.

A generation later… debates about the strike can seem arcane. But its outcome could not matter more for the country we have inherited. It’s not just the wreckage of mining communities, but the entire political and economic direction has been shaped by the fallout from that convulsive dispute. The enfeeblement of unions, the explosion of inequality, social atomisation, the collapse of confidence in a political alternative and Britain’s harsh brand of neoliberalism all flow from its aftermath. Success for the miners would, by contrast, have at least seriously weakened Thatcher, reined in the government’s worst excesses and halted Labour’s headlong rush for the third way…

The strike was a fight for jobs, but it was also a challenge to the market-driven restructuring of economic and social life already under way. It raised the alternative of a different Britain from the greed and individualism of the Thatcher years, rooted in solidarity and collective action. As the neoliberal order that Thatcher helped to build crumbles before us, that is a message that speaks to our times.

The miners had already witnessed their industry shrink by a quarter in the decade to March 1984; they knew what would happen to their communities – and their children’s futures – if the further proposed contraction of the industry was not managed properly.

The overwhelming majority of those who stayed loyal to the cause and, crucially, their families knew what was at stake.  The support shown by the wives and children of those who stayed out for the duration is the most inspiring – and ultimately heartbreaking – display of solidarity I’ve ever witnessed.  Tens of thousands of men, women and children literally froze and starved to try to save their societies.

I live, and still struggle to deal, with the knowledge that the area in which I was born and raised was one of the areas that most readily broke the strike; the knowledge that we would not now be Posh Boy Dave’s “broken society” or stuck in the middle of the Clusterfuck had it not been for the crushing of the miners and – crucially – the manner in which their backs were broken.

The BBC and the government might be keen to show off how some former pits have now been turned into call centres and “energy parks” but there are many more former pit villages that remain half-derelict and half-deserted, where all that remains are large pockets of poverty, drug addiction and lawlessness.

Despite it being That Bloody Woman’s most misrepresented utterance, there really is now “no such thing as society“.  And that is largely because of the way in which free market capitalism assumed totemic importance above all else in the years after the state, the law and the media conspired to destroy an industry.

The week after the return to work the ever charming and self-effacing Chairman of the National Coal Board, Ian MacGregor, chuckled to a national newspaper reporter that the strikers would have to pay for their actions, “And, boy, will we make them pay.”

It wasn’t only the strikers who paid: it was all of us.  We’ve been paying for a generation.  And thanks to the Clusterfuck, we’re going to be paying for at least another generation to come.

If this didn’t matter, it would be funny.

EBay-style feedback for services

People in England will get more online powers to rate GPs, police, childcare and councils, Gordon Brown has said.

As it is, and given the mess in which we find ourselves, it’s just lamentable.

I have deliberately resisted the enormous temptation to bang on relentlessly over recent days about the Miners’ Strike, but this news is just heartbreaking.

The bitter miners’ strike – which split the nation 25 years ago – was nearly resolved twice during the last month before the dispute ended, a new book [Marching to the Fault Line: The 1984 Miners Strike and the Death of Industrial Britain, by Francis Beckett and David Hencke, published by Constable and Robinson] discloses today.

The second [failed attempt to settle] involved the near capitulation by Ian MacGregor, the coal board chief, to everything Scargill wanted three weeks before the dispute collapsed.

To get talks going, both sides agreed to scrap the long-standing disputed wording over future pit closures and replace it with a fresh set of proposals. Talks progressed until 12 February 1985, when both sides sat down to agree a new text that amounted to a “get-out-of-jail card for Scargill”. It effectively prevented pit closures until both sides agreed the pit reserves were exhausted.

News of the deal reached Peter Walker, the energy secretary, as both sides were sitting down in MacGregor’s flat. He despatched the coal minister, David Hunt, with a fresh set of papers.

According to Hunt there was a confrontation with MacGregor in the living room. Hunt told a pale MacGregor: “There is nothing for it but for you to gather up all those papers. Tell them you need to look at them again for a moment.” MacGregor – who had also received an angry telephone call from Thatcher – did as he was told, the papers were replaced and the offending phrase was removed.

The book recalls: “The government had been saved at the 59th minute of the 11th hour from a grossly embarrassing situation.”

Three fucking weeks…

That fucking Bloody Woman…

It may be enervating minutiae concerning ancient history to most, but the Minister will probably be spending most of 2014 and 2015 in Kew trawling the National Archives when the 30 Year Rule kicks in a propos the strike.

Banks are largely solvent – it’s regulation that threatens to bankrupt them

Eamonn Butler, The Times

1. Paul Heiney (and, by logical deduction, the lovely Libby Purves) takes The Times on a Saturday and returns to the newsagent’s until he finds a copy complete with all the magazines and supplements.

2. The application of custard (green or otherwise) to the right set of chops NEVER gets old or loses its capacity to amuse.

Guacamole, anyone?

3. The BBC still can’t report on the Miners’ Strike of 1984-5 with anything like accuracy, impartiality or credibility. (And today’s Guardian editorial is little better. No, I won’t link to it.)

4. Four-day migraines really fuck up 6½ day holidays.

5. The last remaining GP in the Minister’s surgery thinks ACE Inhibitors may help stop the Minister from getting further four-day migraines.  But they may also make him faint randomly a few times in the coming days.  The hilarity never ends.

Were this album actually to exist, I feel sure everyone would buy it and talk about it for about 6 weeks, whereupon anyone so much as mentioning it after that would be treated as if they suffered from herpes.