Thanks for your prompt reply. In general what your saying is pretty much of what I've heard, only fainter. As far a Arthur Scargill goes, I'm glad to hear his gimmick is he was a "young communist". Do you know him personally? How many members does the NUM have?
I seem to remember seeing Bill Sirs name mentioned somewhere, maybe in Steelabor. What's his gimmick? Is he still in charge. How many members do the British steelworkers have.
I've heard the rap the municipal union guy gave you, only first hand from a pal of mine, without the dead Russian spin.
The whole deal in Ireland is beyond me. The Sand's business was ugly. I was told that Sands was a Protestant who wanted peace.
Fraternally, Tom L.
Jim heartfield wrote:
> In message <368CFAF1.93D44032 at lor.net>, Tom Lehman <TLEHMAN at lor.net>
> writes
> >
> >Now for what I do know. Arthur Scargill is the president of the British
> >mine workers union.
>
> True, but the National Union of Mineworkers is a shadow of its former
> self. Once a quarter of a million mineworkers were members of the NUM.
> But following the pit closure programme [another word we spell
> differently] the NUM was reduced to a few thousand. This historic
> destruction of the mining industry was the background to Scargill's rise
> to fame as the representative of the militant Yorkshire rank and file.
> But Scargill's activist campaign had its limits. First Scargill refused
> to acknowledge that the coal board's running down of the industry was
> indeed in the interests of British capitalism, and tried, vainly to
> convince the ruling class that, despite the figures, coal was
> profitable. Second, Scargill related well to the militants, but not to
> the rest of the Union. He was too fond of by-stepping the rank and file,
> and putting the strategy into the hands of the activist minority. This
> was the strategy that bounced the Union into the strike in 1984 without
> a national ballot, using flying pickets from the Yorkshire region to
> picket out the moderate pits. Though most NUM members respected a
> picket-line, enough didn't, especially in Nottinghamshire to leave the
> strike fatally divided (indeed that was the excuse that the rest of the
> Trade Union Congress used to scab on the strike).
>
> Scargill, after a brief spell in the Young Communist Party (where he
> learnt his politics, and established the miners group that elected him
> president in the early eighties) joined the Labour Party where he was
> the most left-wing of the Union representatives. The Labour party
> conference and leadership election had a 'block vote' exercised by the
> Union leaders in proportion to their memberships (though these were
> often exaggerated) meaning that Labour's policy was often sown up by the
> Union bosses (most of whom were to the right of Scargill). When Tony
> Blair sought to "modernise" the Labour Party by abolishing the block
> vote at a special conference, Scargill was the main opponent of the
> measure, but was roundly defeated. Scargill drew the lesson and left the
> Labour Party to form the Socialist Labour Party.
>
> It was not a propitious time to be launching a new party, since the spur
> was a succession of defeats for the British working class, first in the
> defeat of the 1984-5 strike and then in the modernisation of the Labour
> Party that followed it. But worse still the SLP was politically a re-
> hash of the Old Labour political programme that had lost its appeal for
> most working people - nationalisation and welfarism. Even when the SLP
> stood a candidate in the solidly mining constituency of Hemsworth,
> Scargill loyalist Ken Capstick failed to get more than a few hundred
> votes, leaving him in the marginal fringe. Today the SLP is a rump, that
> has had to beat off the rag-bag of far leftists that have gravitated
> towards it with the same kind of political witch-hunts that marred
> Labour's lurch to the right. Instead of transcending the left
> sectarianism, the SLP has just become one more of the far left groups
> alongside the Socialist Workers' Party and the Socialist Party (once the
> Militant, now expelled from the Labour Party).
>
> >
> >Ok, who is Tony Monk?
>
> I think you mean John Monk. He is head of the Trade Union Congress. He
> was responsible for turning the shell of the old TUC into a welfare and
> insurance company providing services for workers, but little
> representation. A friend of mine, Dave Hallsworth has particularly
> bitter memories of Monk. Dave was the chair of the Thameside Trades
> Council - a local association of union branches that is affiliated to
> the main TUC. Dave organised a conference in 1980 to support the Irish
> political prisoners in Britain's concentration camps, under the banner
> of the Thameside Trades Council, getting local trade union branches to
> commit to solidarity action with Sands and his fellow hunger strikers.
> this affront to the petty patriotism of the TUC was the excuse for a
> witch-hunt against Dave, in which Thameside Trades Council was
> disaffiliated, despite the sponsorship of other trades councils across
> the country. Monks was rewarded for his role in the witch-hunt with a
> fast-track promotion in the TUC, during which time he went on to abolish
> all the trades councils.
>
> > What are the British Steelworkers like. Are they all doing the
> >full monte?
>
> More or less. There isn't much of a steel industry left following the
> big shakeout in the early eighties. Then the special links between the
> miners, steelworkers and railworkers was called the triple alliance.
> After steel leader Bill Sirs (now Sir Bill Sirs, I think) rolled over
> before the redundancies, it was re-named the Cripple Alliance.
>
> Last night I was at a New Year's Eve party with an official in one of
> the larger unions Unison, which represents municipal workers. He was
> pretty sanguine about the state of the Union, saying that it was pretty
> much finished, reliant upon the good will of the employers to keep it on
> its last legs, since if they wanted to they could have Unison de-
> recognised all over the country, so low is their ratio members to
> workforce.
>
> He described a fairly similar political picture to one that is common in
> most public sector unions. The full time officers are mostly ex-
> communist party, now assimilated into the left-wing of the labour party.
> The delegates to the Annual General Meeting are mostly unpaid
> representatives, shop stewards, most of whom are members of the smaller
> Trotskyist parties, like the Socialist Workers Party or the Workers
> Revolutionary Party (or one of its off-shoots). The Officers are
> isolated from the shop stewards, who hate them for being sell-outs. The
> shop stewards in turn are isolated from the membership mostly holding
> the position of workplace representative only because nobody else will
> do it. The left wing parties have little sense of building up lasting
> relationships and organisation, but press for militant action without
> much behind them. The officers hope vainly that the Labour Government
> can be pushed to the left, but so far Blair has offered them nothing,
> carrying on with the cuts in public services and leaving all of the
> Conservative Party's anti-union legislation intact.
> --
> Jim heartfield