DIE GROSSE WEIGERUNG

Geh! gehorche meinen Winken, Nutze deine jungen Tage, Lerne zeitig klüger sein: Auf des Glückes großer Wage Steht die Zunge selten ein; Du mußt steigen oder sinken, Du mußt herrschen und gewinnen, Oder dienen und verlieren, Leiden oder triumphieren, Amboß oder Hammer sein.

Today, injustice goes with a certain stride, The oppressors move in for ten thousand years. Force sounds certain: it will stay the way it is. No voice resounds except the voice of the rulers And on the markets, exploitation says it out loud: I am only just beginning.

But of the oppressed, many now say: What we want will never happen

Whoever is still alive must never say ‘never’! Certainty is never certain.

It will not stay the way it is. When the rulers have already spoken

Then the ruled will start to speak. Who dares say ‘never’?

Who’s to blame if oppression remains? We are. Who can break its thrall? We can.

The labour movement in Britain has a rich history, not always good, but it has its moments. One of the astonishing things to come out of the reaction over the past year to Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership has been the attempt by those seeking to undermine Corbyn to play with history, at times recuperating socialist, antifascist, anti-imperialist movements, at others completely twisting the historical record.

In recent months there has been an attempt by those on the right of the Labour Party to reposition themselves as socialist insurgents, in order to authenticate their challenge to Corbyn as anything other than a third-way/“moderate”/“centrist” coup. Most laughably, Luke Akehurst, he of “Blairite and proud” fame, made a strange invocation of Gramsci, Marx and Robert Owen to claim New Labour as a ‘social movement’ (and of course days later mocked Momentum activist James Schneider tweeting a Gramsci quote). Although Gramscian Eurocommunism somewhat fed into the Third Way ideology of Blairism, it takes some front to claim influence from a man whose main ideological works were written whilst imprisoned by the Fascist government, helped found the Italian Communist Party, and attended the congress of the Third International (or Comintern) when your own politics are unashamedly capitalist and imperialist.

Owen Smith also painted himself as some sort of neo-Bevanite firebrand, treating left-wing politics as some sort of cultural affectation that can be associated with the Welsh valleys merely by having a Welsh accent rather than being intrinsically rooted in working-class struggle. His shameless decision to hold one of his early press conferences at the site of the Battle of Orgreave came a cropper when ex-miner John Dunn approached him and rightly pointed out that Smith has never seemed interested in the struggle of the ex-miners, in particular their Justice for Orgreave campaign, at any other point in his political career. Dunn was later banned from voting in the Labour leadership campaign for comparing the MPs who launched the coup to the UDM, the strike-breaking miners’ union. Smith’s painful attempts to appear left-wing – citing his favourite biscuit as a Garibaldi because “you’ve got to like a biccy [sic] named after a revolutionary”, claiming that he’ll deliver a “revolution”, and going full-Fourth International by arguing that Corbyn only wants “socialism in one country” – are topped off by his apparent transformation from pharmaceutical company Pfizer’s PR guy to the reincarnation of the founder of the National Health Service.

Perhaps the most tragic case of the recuperation of the left by the right of the party was Hilary Benn’s speech last winter in the House of Commons urging MPs to vote in favour of aerial strikes on Syria. From the comforts of the Palace of Westminster, Benn likened his words and actions to the courage of the international brigades who left home in their thousands to fight a crucial war against a fascist dictator, heroes whose legacy remains a burning flame for the left all around the world today. Having supported the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, Benn has more to do with the spawning of ISIS than he does with any serious anti-fascist internationalist struggle. The paradoxical nature of his claims was pointed out by a group of British & Irish volunteers with the International Freedom Battalion currently fighting ISIS in Rojava. Owen Smith’s continual attempt to equate the conflict in Northern Ireland with the current state of the Middle East – claiming he was best placed to get all parties interested in peace talks – displayed a humiliating lack of gravitas from an aspiring statesman. Quite rightly, his call to get ISIS around the negotiating table, and Benn’s backing of Smith, showed the political opportunism on both parts as well as their historical illiteracy.

The subject of Northern Ireland indeed has been a perennial one since Corbyn became leader. It’s clear that anyone on the right side of history who has been an adult since the 1960s will be accused by bleating liberal moralists of being both Stalinists and Trotskyists, terrorist sympathisers and pinkos, ineffectual and authoritarian, extra-parliamentary and entryists. The understanding in Britain about the conflict euphemistically known as the ‘Troubles’, and indeed more generally about British imperialism, is pitiful, so that smearing politicians as terrorist sympathisers is incredibly easy and harmful to their reputation. It is no surprise that the guns have been out for Corbyn on this one – as with the pathetic attempt to instrumentalise antisemitism against the left, the accusers have such disdain and disregard for any actual victims of oppression that there is a wholesale willingness to disregard historical accuracy and memory in order to attach guilt for atrocities to Jeremy Corbyn. This is especially craven coming from people who supported a British Prime Minister who unnecessarily wreaked war across the Middle East. Suffice to say that the labour movement in Britain hasn’t exactly covered itself in glory with regards to Ireland – the recently-published Hesitant Comrades portrays the tensions within the labour movement over Ireland that more often than not sided with the most conservative nationalist elements, when it took sides at all.

The latest example in trying to discredit Corbyn’s support for Irish republicanism is ex-Blair adviser and de facto yesterday man John McTernan’s interesting recollection of the Battle of the Bogside. “If you mean the fascist IRA,” he tweeted, “then we sent in troops to protect working class people from fascist violence.” This was slightly embarrassing, given that the IRA were basically inactive until well after the deployment of troops, when they were given the moniker “I Ran Away” after failing to protect the Catholic working-class from the pogroms and attacks from loyalists and RUC B-Specials. Indeed the out of control fascists in 1969 were the Royal Ulster Constabulary who killed two Catholic civilians shortly before troops were deployed, and colluded with loyalist militias who carried out a concerted bombing campaign throughout the early months of 1969. All this is forgotten, or shrugged away, because the political currency of conjuring up the balaclava-clad Provos is much more profitable.

All of this could appear moot or distant, were it not for an absolute continuity between this and the worldview that sets the market fundamentalists in the Labour Party apart from the socialist traditions of the labour movement both in Britain and internationally. For supporters of the Labour Party leader, it is clear that piecemeal reforms are not a sufficient curb on the excesses of capitalism. Forging the ‘third way’ has only emboldened the right-wing cause of there being no alternative, as erstwhile socialists happily sign up to the marketisation of public goods. The case in point here is J.K. Rowling and her extolling of the virtues of the New Labour government, to rapturous applause from the likes of Caitlin Moran, one Friday night on Twitter. On 2nd September, Rowling started listing all the achievements of the Blair government, apparently causing Luke Akehurst to cry on the bus home. These included the improvements to the NHS, children lifted out of poverty, increases in benefits, and so on. Of course framing these in certain ways occludes many of the downsides of that government’s attempted reforms – NHS improvement that was marred by the increasing use of PFI, increase of some benefits at the cost of others (single parents benefit for starters) but that’s not to argue that there were not very good and necessary policies that came out of the Blair government. The crucial point here is that many of these good reforms – NHS improvement, spending on education, welfare, Surestart, tackling poverty, and so on – have been reversed by the Tory/Lib Dem coalition government of 2010-2015, and by the subsequent Tory majority government, by simple acts of parliament. This is because the Blair government ameliorated the worst of the Thatcher years by putting sticking plasters over the wounds of the neoliberal experiment of Thatcher without fundamentally altering the structures of the economy, or shifting the political mainstream so that such a structural change could be realised. This is the great missed opportunity of that government. And it’s why, unlike the Attlee and Thatcher governments, there’s a very good chance the Blair government will be remembered by Iraq only, and not any economic reforms, as one by one they are simply repealed by the Conservatives. The current government, rather than making the labour movement pine for an “electable” (read Blairite, in the most descriptive way) leader, should be rousing it to the realisation that the Blairite experiment failed to structurally reform the economy in favour of the working-class, and instead empowered the same financial and political elites who were able to erode the social compact at the next available opportunity. It is for this reason, above all others, that Jeremy Corbyn will be re-elected as Labour leader today.

During the election campaign, Corbyn’s opponent Owen Smith alluded to the Labour leader as a “lunatic”. This made me recall a section of the introduction to Christopher Hill’s masterpiece ‘The World Turned Upside Down’:

"Each generation, to put it another way, rescues a new area from what its predecessors arrogantly and snobbishly dismissed as 'the lunatic fringe'. [...] Historians, in fact, would be well-advised to avoid the loaded phrase 'lunatic fringe'. Lunacy, like beauty, may be in the eye of the beholder. There were lunatics in the seventeenth century, but modern psychiatry is helping us to understand that madness itself may be a form of protest against social norms, and that the 'lunatic' may in some sense be saner than the society which rejects him. ...... There was a convention that on certain set occasions - Shrove Tuesday, the Feasts of Fools, All Fools Day and others - the social hierarchy and the social decencies could be turned upside down. It was a safety-valve: social tensions were re-leased by the occasional bouleversement; the social order seemed perhaps that much more tolerable. What was new in the seventeenth century was the idea that the world might be permanently turned upside down: that the dream world of the Land of Cokayne or the kingdom of heaven might be attainable on earth now."

On 18 June 1984, hundreds of miners who had faced a 10 hour siege outside Orgreave coking plant returned home shaken and injured, sat down and switched on the television to watch the evening news. The news report of the events that day, during which lines of riot police from all over the country had intimidated picketers and then taken explicit instruction to allow mounted police to charge crowds, batons in hand, had been edited and reversed so that the horseback charge was preceded by the ensuing chaos that had actually followed the police provocations. Those watching the news report and had experienced the police repression that day were completely dismayed. The legal case against 95 picketers accused of rioting during the Orgreave confrontation was eventually dropped, but the trial exposed the nexus of the media, police and law working in conjunction to break the trade union movement in Britain.

As a result of this, the Battle of Orgreave has become a symbol of the British state’s attack on working-class communities and its intentional deployment of policing tactics, legal mechanisms and publicity to achieve its goals. It was a day of particular brutality during a two and a half week period of clashes between police and pickets outside Orgreave coking plant where a black-legging operation had been organised to transport coke on behalf of Scunthorpe steelworks. What happened at Orgreave turned out to be an outcome of a coherent and well-honed policy: the Thatcher government’s implementation of the 1978 Ridley report aimed at weakening the trade union movement. The successful miners’ strikes of 1972 and 1974 haunted the Conservatives. To prevent another defeat, the Thatcher administration stockpiled coal, introduced anti-union employment and social security legislation and approved the paramilitarisation of policing.

In March 1984 the National Coal Board announced plans to scrap 21,000 pit jobs. In the preceeding three years, 41,000 jobs had been axed, unemployment being a key plank of Thatcher’s industrial and monetarist policies. At the same time, following the Ridley report guidelines, coal stocks jumped from 42.25 to 57.96 million tonnes. This avoided the government facing a repeat of the 1981 miners’ strike which forced them to withdraw their closure plans. The 1971 Industrial Relations Bill, the 1980 and 1982 Employment Acts and 1980 Social Security Act chipped away at the ability of trade unions to strike effectively by making them liable for legal action, criminalising certain forms of picketing and disqualifying strikers from social security. The job of the police was to enforce this legislation. The NUM responded to the NCB plans by announcing strike action.

Nottinghamshire was a lynchpin. It had a history of conservatism – in 1926 they were the first miners to return to work – and it also had the largest working coalfields. In May, after a mass rally at Mansfield in support of the strike, police set upon a group of miners leaving a pub and charged them with riot offences. The trial collapsed, but it was a prelude of things to come.

The day that became known as the Battle of Orgreave was a bright sunny June day in South Yorkshire. Around 8,000 miners were there to picket the blacklegs transporting coke on behalf of Scunthorpe steelworks; 6,000 police officers were there, deployed from forces around the country. The National Reporting Centre had been set up by the Home Office at Scotland Yard following the 1972 Battle of Saltley Gate where striking miners prevented police keeping the coke depot open. It allowed for the coordination of mutual aid, provided for by the 1969 Police Act, between forces around the country to keep pits open. In the summer of 1981 the National Reporting Centre had organised the 39 different forces patrolling Toxteth during the riots.

The abortive trial exposed the existence of a secret document, the ACPO (Association of Chief Police Officers) training manual which had been implemented in 1983 and whose instructions were followed at Orgreave. It established conditions for riot control policing along paramilitary lines. Its mention during the trial was in response to an eyewitness describing the police banging on their shields and chanting as a form of psychological intimidation, shortly before senior officers ordered the police lines be opened up to allow for a mounted police charge. The existence of this manual signalled a growing paramilitarisation of the police – by 1985 almost 17% of British police officers had standard riot training.

The legal repercussions were wider than the 95 charges of riot. During the miners’ strike there were many cases of arbitrary arrest and harsh bail conditions that prevented individuals attending further pickets, a clear use of legal mechanisms as a form of curtailing the demonstration of political solidarity. The riot trials which attempted to scapegoat the miners reinforced the media framing of the events which blamed the miners for the violence at Orgreave. The BBC admitted their manipulation of video footage so that the stone throwing appeared to precede the mounted police charge when in reality the latter was completely unprovoked. What is now the defining image of Orgreave – a member of Women Against Pit Closures called Lesley Boulton shielding herself from a mounted police baton – was printed in just one of 17 national daily newspapers.

The role of the British media in Northern Ireland was instrumental in framing the conflict for the consumption of the British populace, defending the actions of the British state whilst pathologising those of the republican movement; similarly its role in the aftermath of the Hillsborough disaster and its pliability in its relationship with South Yorkshire Police has been exposed largely thanks to the incredible work of the JFT96 families and Professor Phil Scraton. Seumas Milne’s excellent book The Enemy Within forensically examines the role of the media, the Security Service (potentially a state agent in a very senior position in the NUM) and the Thatcher government in calculatedly attempting to destroy the NUM during and after the miners’ strike of 1984-5. There is a connection between the families of the victims and survivors of Bloody Sunday, the numerous acts of collusion in Ireland (Pat Finucane, Loughinisland, Dublin & Monaghan, the Glenanne gang to mention just a few), the mining communities across Britain, and the Hillsborough families. They were attacked by a compliant media which should have been interrogating the actions of the British state, be it the military, police or government. Before, during and after the miners’ strike, the law, the police, and the media colluded in eroding the power of the working class, delegitimising and criminalising its struggle and defending the repressive state apparatus aimed at crushing the militant, antagonistic but ultimately defensive battle it was waging. What happened at Orgreave is symptomatic of this.

With support from the Bloody Sunday and Justice for the 96 families, the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign are demanding a full inquiry into what happened on this day 32 years ago. Remember Orgreave, and support their struggle.

Bobby Sands died on this day 35 years ago after 66 days on hunger strike.

From his prison diary 9th March 1981, his 27th birthday: “I may die, but the Republic of 1916 will never die. Onward to the Republic and liberation of our people.”

Pádraig Pearse’s poem The Mother

Smash Trotskyism! Irish people demand to know the true facts about COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY Trotskyism

Derry workers chase paper tigers!