Preconference Debate Booking
The miners' strike and politics today
Tony Benn, Lee Hall *, John Nichols, Marc Vallée and Paul Lewis plus Ken Loach's 'Which side are you on?'
Event chaired by Frances O'Grady (deputy General Secretary of the TUC)
7pm Friday 30th October
£5 online or pay at the door
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* Read Lee Hall's 'The Vanished World of Billy Elliot' in the Times Online
Picture of police photographing anti-BNP demonstrators, (c) Marc Vallée
The defeat of the epic year-long miners' strike meant that a political agenda of privatisation, deregulation and attacks on the trade union movement could move ahead virtually unimpeded.
Thatcherism ushered in the age of excess, and New Labour continued to support the same policies of flexible labour markets and the deregulation of financial services. We witnessed the neglect of industry, so that with the exception of a few tiny pockets, the UK economy, as the political economist F. William Engdahl points out, is 'a hollowed out wreck. Itís really a service economy now'.
Now the consequences of those policies are for all to see. We have the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, caused by the rush for easy profits by banks, hedge funds, insurance companies, private equity firms and other financial institutions. Governments give massive bailouts for banks, whilst recession, mass unemployment and poverty loom ever larger for working people.
What a contrast with the way the miners were treated. The Thatcher and Major governments rigged the energy market through the dash for gas and nuclear energy and spent billions of pounds destroying the mining industry in an act of political revenge. The consequences for mining communities, in terms of long-term unemployment, ill-health, poverty and crime, have been devastating. But to cap it all we are now near the end of North Sea oil and gas and face the prospect of insecure energy supplies.
Twenty-five years on we can re-assess what the strike was about, and the role of the media in it. More importantly, we need alternative policies to the discredited ones which got us into this mess.