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Issue No.17 Summer 2004
The last great voice
of English trade union radicalism and militancy, Scargill’s head
to head stance with Margaret Thatcher in the mid 1980s, gave him iconic
status in the H-Blocks. He was putting it up to the most trenchant right
wing prime minister in decades and republican prisoners loved him for
it. The organisation most of us belonged to had just tried to kill Thatcher
in Brighton in an action described at the time by Sinn Fein president
Gerry Adams as a blow for democracy. On the jail wings there was no dissenting
voices. Tommy Gorman and Kevin
McQuillan completing the company, the three of us made our way to Transport
House. We arrived early. It was as well we did. There proved to be standing
room only and those without seats were congregating tightly at the back
and along the sides of the hall. I scanned the audience in anticipation
that I might see some people who were in the H-Blocks alongside me when
Scargill led the miners against the Tories. It was a hopeless task. It
was the same when George Monbiot came to speak in Belfast, arousing a
suspicion in my mind that left wing politics were something to while away
the time in prison but had little mileage for most people once they were
released. Arthur Scargill is
one of the Left’s great orators. His voice boomed across the hall,
robust and direct. With words as his weapons, he made incisive thrust
after thrust into the ’systematic cleansing of socialism’ that
is taking place throughout the world. Despite having locked horns with
Thatcher in mortal combat for over a year, his real contempt was reserved
for of the current British Prime Minister Tony Blair, whom he said made
the former Tory leader look like a left winger. Of Blair’s Britain,
Scargill observed: ten million live below the official poverty line; one
million children do not have enough food to eat and are categorised as
going hungry; five million represents the true unemployment figures once
the statistics are de-rigged How, Scargill boomed,
could a leader such as Blair lecture Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan on
what is right and what is wrong? If the British or US governments really
wanted justice and human rights to prevail throughout the world they would
send in troops to occupied Palestine and end the Israeli occupation. Scargill literally
learned his politics at the coalface. Twenty years ago when he predicted
the destruction of the mining industry and launched a strike to save it,
he was called a nutcase and ridiculed. His reminiscences of the strike
were a blend of serious critique and black humour; 17 dead, 13,000 arrested,
11,000 injured. For the first time the state had faced a leadership not
prepared to bend or sell out the membership. And it was concerned. Uncompromisingly socialist,
he argued that all the industries privatised under Thatcher and Blair
should be taken back and placed under public ownership. Private medicine
should be abolished. The education system is a mess with the highest illiteracy
rate in 25 years. Faith schools would have to go. The thought crossed
my mind that they would let their hospitals go first in this part of the
world. The contributions
from the floor ranged from the rigorously reasoned to the incorrigibly
silly. One Socialist Worker’s Party member who seemed to want his
observations to take as long as Scargill’s address was heckled, the
audience losing patience with what was fast becoming a rant. Scargill
merely joked about it. At the end, after a standing ovation, myself, Tommy and Kevin stood alongside him to be photographed. Evidence for our offspring in years to come, when they find themselves paying for their health, education and water, that Belfast was not always a socialist free zone.
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