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from Dissent magazine:
The Peoples Flag is Palest Pink
Tim Barker ▪ Winter 2015
[font size="1"]From Still the Enemy Within, about miners strikes in 1984-85. Courtesy of John Sturrock.[/font]
Margaret Thatcher died of a stroke on April 8, 2013, at the age of eighty-seven. Her enemies, from the Irish republicans who blew up her hotel bathroom to the rock stars who sang about Margaret on the Guillotine and The Day That Thatcher Dies, could celebrate at last. But the legacy of her eleven years in powermeasured in inequality, decaying trade unions and public institutions, and the Labour Partys ceaseless retreat from its socialist originsis as strong as ever.
Today not even the National Health Service, famously unscathed by Thatcher, is safe from privatization. Scotlands recent near-secession was, at least in part, a desperate attempt to wrench its modest welfare state away from English austerity. Perhaps because we still live in the world Thatcher made, even her death has not completely extinguished the impulse to imagine Thatcher dying. Hilary Mantels latest collection is charmingly called The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, and the counterfactual title story imagines a sniper landing a shot to the Iron Ladys glittering helmet of hair.
Its now three decades since Thatchers protracted but ultimately successful conflict with one of the countrys largest unions, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), which ended in March 1985. In an American context, the miners defeat is almost always explained as the trans-Atlantic counterpart of the 1981 PATCO strike, Ronald Reagans opening shot in the battle against the countervailing power of organized labor. But in its scope, the British experience far exceeded the American. The longest strike in the nations history, the miners strike lasted just shy of a year and led to over 10,000 arrests. Through months of bitter material deprivation, the number of workers participating never fell below 100,000. The political edge was also sharper. PATCO had endorsed Reagan in 1980, but the NUM boasted a militant rank-and-file and strident left-wing leadership. In 1974, the union brought down Edward Heaths Conservative government by going out on strike and forcing new elections. And while PATCO had struck over wages and conditions, the miners fought for the preservation of a nationalized industry and the very existence of their pits, dozens of which Thatcher had proposed to shut down.
Given these existential stakes, the miners defeat appeared not just episodic but world-historical, the confirmation of historian Eric Hobsbawms 1978 warning: the forward march of labourwhich over a century before had inspired Capital and underwritten Britains welfarist and largely nationalized economyappears to have come to a halt in this country. If there was any hope for the left, many argued, it was through alliances with the diffuse cultural currentsfeminist, anti-racist, environmentalthat had emerged since the 1960s.
The popular 2014 film Pride neatly dramatizes this historical crossroads while suggesting that the contrast between labor and the new social movements is too neat a division. Pride tells the story of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, an English solidarity group that raised tens of thousands of pounds for hard-hit strikers in the Dulais Valley of South Wales. (Direct fundraising of this sort was crucial since the British government had sequestered the NUMs assets.) The film focuses on the time the gay activists spend visiting Wales, going beyond financial subsidy to connect personally with the miners. At first the two groups appear to share little but a list of common enemies: Thatcher, the police, the public, [and] the tabloid press. But through a mixture of Hollywood bonhomie (an extended dance sequence, numerous pints in the miners welfare hall) and brass tacks politics (advice on dealing with police harassment), most characters overcome their initial discomfort to build solidarity that outlives the strike itself. By the end, the Welsh miners take the lead in Londons Pride march to the tune of Billy Braggs There is Power in a Union. .....................(more)
The complete piece is at: http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-peoples-flag-is-palest-pink