Neil Barnett says the miners’ union that took on Margaret Thatcher and lost is now talking surprisingly good sense about Britain’s future energy security
The National Union of Mineworkers’ headquarters in Barnsley has a splendid retro feel. In the assembly hall hang banners celebrating the struggles of the working class: from one of them, Arthur Scargill, Shredded Wheat comb-over to the fore, stares into the middle distance; another from Kellingley Colliery shows a miner wearing only trousers and a helmet, throttling a huge python labelled ‘Capitalism’. The script below declares ‘Only the strong survive’, while behind him an optimist has written ‘Socialism Leads to Prosperity’. The result is an original mixture of Stakhanovite propaganda, Wallace and Gromit and the Village People.
And yet one can’t help admire the tenacity of the NUM. Having come out much the worse from the ‘Great Miners’ Strike’ of 1984-85, its membership dramatically reduced, the union soldiers on, its ideology set in amber.
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