> As far a Arthur Scargill goes, I'm glad to
>hear his gimmick is he was a "young communist".
I wouldn't say 'gimmick'. The Communist Party was influential in the NUM in the fifties and sixties when Scargill was winning his spurs as a compensation agent for the Union. They organised the left minority in the Union. When Scargill won the presidency it was still the infrastructure that the CP had built up that was behind him (though later they stabbed him in the back because he was too close to the militants for their more bureaucratic tastes. CP members were the main sources for the anti-Scargill biography by New Labour hack Paul Routledge.).
>Do you know him personally?
No.
>How many members does the NUM have?
>
Between 1983 and 1990 the mining workforce was reduced from 181 000 to
65 000, a reduction of 64%, through the pit closure programme. Before
the strike, mining was a closed shop, so all of the 181 000 would have
been members. During the 1984/5 strike a scab union the 'Union of
Democratic Mineworkers' was set up, and British Coal was broken up and
most of it privatised. According to Paul Routledge, in 1986 the NUM was
58 700 (less than a third of the pre-strike figure).
In 1992 a further 30 000 miners were laid off, many of them UDM members. By my reckoning the maximum membership today could only be 35 000, but I would put the figure much, much lower. Routledge says that the union had by 1993 lost nearly ninety percent of its members.
>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.
No, he's just the last leader of the steelworkers important enough to be remembered. More than the mineworkers, the steelworkers have been decimated.
>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.
Wendy is right, but it is probably more a case of chinese whispers than getting your chain pulled. Sands was a catholic born in the Protestant area of Rathcoole, and hounded out during the anti-catholic pogroms of the sixties.
Sands was the leader of the Republican prisoners in the H-Blocks and started the second hunger strike in 1980 for the recognition of their status as political prisoners (a fact now acknowledged by the prisoner release scheme following the armistice). Fighting to free their country from British occupation - the source of the sectarian divide - the IRA were the only anti-sectarian force in Ireland at that time.
The issue of Britain's occupation of Ireland was one that was important to the British working class. Substantial sections of the British working class were recruited from Ireland, as that country was reduced to an exporter of men and beef under the Crown. More importantly, conniving in the repression of the Irish it was unlikely that the British working class would be in much of a position to resist attacks on itself. But while there was considerable identification with Sands, the British workers remained generally in the grip of that petty nationalism that persuaded them to put 'the country''s interests before their own. -- Jim heartfield