TUC betrayal paved way for Blair
Socialist Outlook1990sScanned print read by OCR, and not yet proofread: expect run-together words, dropped letters and, where a piece began partway down a page, a few lines of its neighbour. The printed page is the authority.
THE ISOLATION and eventual defeat of the miners' strike ten years ago starkly OUR HISTORY illustrated both the depths of treachery to which the leadership the TUC were prepared to sink, and the weakness of the British left.
From the outset the rightwing majority on the TUC preferred to see the miners defeated rather than the politics of class struggle to win out.
The "support" offered by the left of the trade union leadership was ineffectual at best. There was no real attemot to mobilise action and break the NUM's isolation.
On the far left criticism was far too often limited to calls upon the "rank and file", without putting demands upon the TUC and union leaders.
The left in general contributed to the problems insomuch as it failed to provide any serious political perspective on how the rank and file could pressurise their local leaderships. Scargill: asked too little of TUC Yet if the miners' strike teaches us anything about the British labour movement it must be that for the advancement of class struggle and the education of workers it is necessary to force open big divisions In the bureaucratic bodies.
Scargil! was the key factor. I in the survival of the strike on a number of occasions and the voice of the most militant and committed of the rank and file miners.
But while he fought tenaciously against the government, Scargill's mistake was not to ask too much of the TUC and the Labour leadership, but that he asked too little. He did not fight them hard enough.
His reservation meant not only that the union leaders were let off the hook at the time their political backing was needed most, but that after the event they were able to vindicate their sloth by saying that they'd done all that was asked of them. The problem remains: not enough was asked of them.
Kinnock
The same can be said of the Labour Party leadership. The failure to confront Kinnock's record on the strike sation" project.
With hindsight we can see how the right of the Labour Party were able to cynically use the defeat as "proof" of the redundancy of class struggle methods. This gave them a spring-board to launch the offensive against the left.
They directly benefited from the defeat and were not slow to exploit their advantage.
Although in Kinnock the spin doctors found a secondrate, and - in their terms -rather uncouth, mouthpiece, they were nevertheless able to use him to lay a firm foundation for their project.
Blair is the direct political beneficiary of the spade work done for him since the mid 1980s by the middle-class circles within the party who cut their anti-class struggle teeth on the miners' strike.
Seldom, if ever, has there been a national strike of such scope and importance, one so open to the left's input through the national network of support committees. Yet it failed to contribute much of use: it simply echoed Scargill's own tactics.
And this was a strike that was overtly political in a way most trades union disputes are not. It was fought on the basis of challenging the profit motive - the so-called "viability" argument.
In other words, both the miners and those who supported them had to be convinced that there was an alternative framework to the market on which to build an economy.
Ideological fight It was a sophisticated and explicitly ideological battle; one for which there was a significant support among working class people. One that should have been built upon far more than it was.
One of the clearest lessons from the strike therefore is the need for a political leadership in the workers' movement that rises above opportunist self interest and rigid "schema" politics to offer tactical and strategic initiatives geared to the actual needs of the struggle.
This leadership is still in need of being built today. s
Whose round is it anyway? TUC 's John Monks cultivates closer links with top bosses SOCIALIST OUTLOOK No. 79 March 11 1995, Page 13.