Book launch and commemoration of the end of the Miners Strike
7.30pm-9pm, Friday 23rd April
Dave Douglass of the National Union of Mineworkers talks about his first hand, front-line experience of the miners strikes, and launches his new book, Ghost Dancers.
Ghost Dancers the final book in Dave Douglass’s trilogy, will be launched to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the miners’ strike. A first person view of this last generation of the miners and their union, written by a participant at the sharp end of that struggle, the book explodes the prevailing myths around the strike. It also uniquely covers the post strike period. Inspired by the last stand of the native
Americans, Ghost Dancers records the last stand of the last generation of pitmen and their communities.
Dave Douglass, a coalminer for 40 years, in the Durham and Doncaster
coalfields, was an NUM official for 25 years and is still a full member
of the NUM, and the Industrial Workers of the World.
A worm pays no rent: the Earth while he lives is his portion, and he Riots in untaxed Luxuries. And if perchance a Crow or other creature, should pick him up, well then, that is only Death, which must come in some shape or other to us all as well as he. But in this respect he had the Advantage of us that while he lived he paid no Rent!
Thomas Spence was a radical around the end of the 18th century, which turns out to have been a pretty interesting time.
You could argue that anarchists are obsessed with the Spanish Revolution and the associated Civil War. You’d have a fair point but it was the closest that we came to a real workers’ revolution in the 20th century and it remains inspirational not only for the examples of collective organisation in Spain, but also for the grassroots international solidarity movement that supported it.
So no apologies for promoting this event tomorrow morning. Some of us from the local AFed group are likely to be there, come and say hi.
Dear all
Please join us for the second annual rededication of the memorial to those
who left Edinburgh and the Lothians to fight fascism in the Spanish Civil
War. This will take place on *Saturday, April 3rd, from 11am* at the
International Brigades memorial in Princes Street Gardens. We’re
encouraging people to bring flowers in the colours of the Spanish Republic:
red, yellow and purple.
The reason for holding the ceremony in early April is to coincide with the
anniversary of the end of the conflict with the message that the struggle
against fascism continues now just as it did on the day the civil war
ended.
Remember kids, just because it got rid of the least popular Prime Minister in living memory and lead to you not paying the more tax than your landlord, violence is never justified.
It may be the state broadcaster and utterly supine in the face of power, but the BBC has some very useful stuff on it. Among my favourites is In Our Time on Radio 4, where they take a Big Idea, something you may have heard of but not understood, and get experts to answer the question: what’s that all about then?
This week it was The Siege of Münster, which features in Luther Blissett‘s astonishing anti-authoritarian retelling of the Reformation, Q. IOT, available to download (but not for long), has sections about the Peasants’ Revolt, the surprisingly advanced democratic form in Munster and the Anabaptists’ reading of the New Testament leading them to demand all property to be held in common. (Not something you hear from modern Biblical literalists.) At the time of the birth of the merchant / capitalist class, this is early anti-capitalism (communism) expressed in the only language then available to the peasantry, that of the Bible
I can’t recommend Q highly enough, it’s both eye-opening and a rollicking good thriller. In my ideal world, more people read this than the Da Vinci Code.
In one of those happy coincidences, I discovered on the same day I heard this programme, that Luther Blissett (now writing as Wu Ming) have a new novel out in English translation. deals with the “discovery” of the New World and I’m hoping that it does for that period what Q did for the Reformation – reclaiming history from the bottom up, and giving us new myths to replace those of Empire and Christendom.
History may be written by the victors, but we can still read between the lines.
…that’s a headline you’ll see a lot in the next year. I don’t have any particular insight into the struggle, but I did come across this fantastic set of 4 Xmas Cards produced by a miners’ support group in South Wales. I have scanned them at the highest resolution I could and have uploaded the full set to the site (direct download link, ZIP, 2Mb).
As well as the haunting monochrome images, the cards have poems inside, written by striking miners and their families. If you find it hard to imagine just how strongly felt this dispute was, just read “Ode to a Scab”, or “Kids’ Questions”. Ever think that Margaret Thatcher deserves a bit of sympathy in her later years? Feel the despair caused by her deliberate policy to destroy the labour movement and this particular part of it.
And never forget that it wasn’t just her. She couldn’t've done it without MI5′s “counter subversion”, without the Metropolitan Police beating pickets for overtime, and without the willing lies of the media, including the saintly “impartial” BBC. (Was it them or ITN that re-edited their Orgreave footage to make it look like the miners charged first? Doesn’t matter I guess.)
Book launch and commemoration of the end of the Miners Strike
It may be the state broadcaster and utterly supine in the face of power, but the BBC has some very useful stuff on it. Among my favourites is 
