Reports and Papers on Raymond Williams Weekends

We aim, from now on, to publish here copy of lectures and presentations and will welcome comment on these, (send to info@raymondwilliamsfoundation.org.uk).
Notes based on these papers may also be used as stimuli for discussion circles on the themes in pubs, bars, cafes and living rooms. Visit www.oddc.org.uk .

The 23rd annual Raymond Williams w/end at the Wedgwood Memorial College, Barlaston

Another great success for our annual residential weekend.   Feed-back from the 46 who attended the full weekend as students was most positive with a whole string of  'excellent' s  including this:  "...most stimulating and at times very hard - but that's good".

A report on the weekend will also follow soon...

For the lecture notes by Tristan Hunt click

The 22nd annual w/end at the Wedgwood Memorial College, Barlaston, again filled the College.
These quotes are from the many positive comments:

'Fascinating varied styles of presentation from very formal, even dramatic, to informal/interactive conversational... Excellent'.
'Exceptionally good - this is an annual commitment for my calendar'
'RW w/ends - always excellent'
'First time --- but I'll be back'
'When I say excellent I really mean EXCELLENT'
'Brilliant week-end'
'I would sleep on the floor ... for this w/end ... in a superb place of learning'

Keynote Lecture by Mike Rustin, Friday evening 7th May 2010 on

The General Election and the Present Crisis

I am grateful for the invitation to speak at this weekend event. I was fortunate to hear Raymond Williams speak on quite a few occasions, nearly always in political rather than in academic contexts. Having been greatly influenced in earlier years by writers like Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart, and Edward Thompson who had strong ties in their early years with the adult education movement, I am especially glad to taking part in an event sponsored by the WEA.

These are interesting times. Many of you will have stayed up for much of last night watching the results of the General Election come in. I varied my usual election night practice in two ways. I am usually deluded by misguided optimism about what the result of an election is going to be, and I therefore usually spend most of election nights being unhappily enlightened by reality. Yesterday, I expected the worst, but decided not to wait up for the results, instead choosing to have a good night’s sleep. I awoke to find that the worst had not happened, since a hung parliament, close run thing as it was, was the result I had wanted. I am also wide-awake to take part in this weekend event.

I am going to talk about three things. The first is the nature of the current economic and political crisis, which I am going to compare with the crisis of the 1970s. I will suggest that this crisis has a very different character from the earlier one. The second is to discuss the political implications of this crisis, for the period that lies ahead of us, but which indeed are already being felt, The third is to refer to the General Election itself and its possible outcomes for the formation and decisions of governments.

The Crises of the Seventies

In an article ‘Reflections on the Present’ published in Soundings 43, Winter 2010, I argued that these two crises have a completely different character. The crisis of the 1970s represented the collapse and expiry of the post-war welfare settlement, through pressure of its own emergent contradictions. I referred to the analysis of Stuart Hall et al.’s Policing the Crisis (1978) which charted the emerging disorder and tension in Britain and in other western societies from the late 1960s. This developed as class conflicts grew in their intensity, expressed both by the demands of trade unions in the production system, and by the pressure for increased welfare expenditures. Other pressures were added to these, in the emergence of generational conflict (the student revolts of 1968, and the emergence of a teenage culture subversive of adult authority), feminism, and ethnic claims and discontents, not least the Civil Rights movement in the United States. Many of these forces had come together in the mobilisation against the Vietnam War.

The effect of these pressures was to bring about exceptionally high levels of inflation and social unrest. (The inflation was partly the outcome of the rise in raw materials and petroleum prices following the ‘excessive’ demands brought about by the American commitments in Vietnam.). This was also a crisis of the ‘Fordist mode of production, in the United States and the UK in particular. That is to say, in conditions of full employment and welfare-minded governments, this system had led to real pressures on level of profit, and on the authority of capital to control the market system. Britain’s ‘governability’ was called in question, with the electorate’s negative answer to Heath’s question, after the first miners’ strike of 1973, ‘who governs Britain?’ Not you, Mr Heath, the electorate said.

 

The election victory of Thatcher in 1979, and then of Reagan in 1980, brought a radical end to this welfare and ‘Fordist’ settlement. Working class institutions were attacked, in trade union reforms. The ‘right to buy’ legislation dismantled the system of local authority housing which constituted one of the strongest ties between elected Labour authorities and its working class electorate. The privatisation of public utilities enforced a ‘profit’ imperative over norms of public service, and weakened the powers of co-determination by trade unions of an important sector of the economy. Large-scale unemployment, following the monetarist assault on inflation in the early 1980s, undermined the bargaining position and morale of labour, and wrecked entire industrial communities. ‘Rate-capping and the increased centralisation of government weakened democratic local government, and the power of the labour movement at a local level. The ‘big bang’ – the deregulation of the financial sector in 1983 - set free the financial sector to operate on a global basis, and to establish itself as the dominant growth sector of the British economy. The free movement of capital enabled producers to escape the bargaining power of wage-earners in Britain, by relocating their activities to lower-wage economies elsewhere. The consequences of this have been felt economically, in the relative and absolute weakening of the manufacturing sector following an over-valued pound sterling; regionally, in the ascendancy of London and the south-east over the rest of Britain; and morally, in the culture of greed and growing inequality which has followed the rise of the financial sector. The fall of European Communism in 1989 was the moment of triumph of this counter-revolutionary transformation. It seemed that now neo-liberalism ruled the world. The several wars waged by the Americans with British support in the Middle East, and in the Balkans, reflected this self-confidence. The Americans dreamed of ‘full spectrum dominance’.

This ‘conjuncture, in Gramscian terms, or ‘tipping point’ in the language of modern complexity theory, was drawn out over several years, as Policing the Crisis described. The resolution of the crisis did not even come in 1979, in the election won by Mrs Thatcher after the ’winter of discontent’. It was the 1983 election that firmly established the new neo-liberal order, and it was probably only the contingent event of the Falklands War and Thatcher’s victory that won the Tories their decisive victory. The most important radical steps of the Thatcher government were only taken after its second election victory. Indeed its agenda took time to emerge as the power of the government to shape its environment grow. The fact that the crisis of the 1970s had gone on for more than a decade before a clear resolution of it emerged is relevant to understanding our present crisis.

When ‘New Labour’ was elected to government in 1997, not a great deal changed. The name ‘New Labour’ signified an accommodation to the new marketised era, and to the priority to be given to ‘Middle Britain’ – those sections of the population who felt they had most to gain from a more individualised system, over the ‘working class by hand and by brain’ which Labour had wished to represent. New Labour continued the public service reforms begun by the Conservatives under Kenneth Clarke and Kenneth Baker. The system of ‘new public management’ involved a combination of centralised control over the ‘targets’ which public agencies were required to achieve, audit and inspection regimes which would monitor compliance, and ‘internal markets’ whereby providing agencies could be obliged to compete with one another and behave more like businesses. Both trade unions and the influence of the professions - e.g. teachers – were weakened in this system. Whereas the state under Thatcher had been deployed to attack and weaken the collectivist alternatives to the market ethos, the state in the later years of the Tories, and under New Labour, took on a more positive and pro-active function, though still mainly in the service of the market system. Support for the Americans’ military interventions in the Middle East, and for the ‘war on terror’more generally, were consistent with Thatcherite attitudes, though in the different climate of the post-Cold War period. The authoritarianism of New Labour in regard to civil liberties was in part an outcome of its militaristic foreign policy, and ensuing fears of terrorism. But it is true also that Labour made efforts to advance the interests of the poor, and to enable a larger proportion of the population to benefit from the opportunities of prosperity. Stuart Hall (2003) described ‘New Labour’s ‘double shuffle’, where a government committed to enforcing the interests of capital sought to justify its activities as being to the benefit of the working class it sought to represent.

The Crisis of the Present

Whereas the crisis of the 1970s was the outcome of conflict between social classes, the explosion of a negotiated, consensual social settlement, the crisis of the 2000s is instead the implosion of a social order which appeared to have no active internal enemies. This crisis is the outcome of the contradictions of a regime in which capital has ruled with few ideological opponents internally, or, following the collapse of Communism, externally.. In this respect the crisis is reminiscent of the crisis of the 1920s and 1930s, having been triggered in the same way by a speculative boom and crash. Although the working class may continue to exist ‘objectively’ – as those dependent wholly on their labour – it has become much diminished as a ‘subjective’ entity - it has become a class, in Marx’s terms, ‘in’ but not ‘for’ itself.

This system has failed through the instabilities of unregulated markets, the result of what happens when the powers of property and capital are not sufficiently constrained by relations of interdependency and reciprocity with other social forces, or by governments which represent their interests. Speculation in rising money-values became dissociated from the real production of assets. (The housing market in Britain and the USA is the prime example of this). Because the banks and other financial institutions are deemed vital to the functioning of the economy as a whole, it has not been thought possible to require this sector to bear the losses incurred by the collapse of credit - instead these losses are being imposed on the rest of the economy, through declining output and investment, falling incomes and employment, and through promised public spending cuts to ‘reduce the deficit’.

The inequalities brought about the market regime, especially when governments do nothing to redress them through taxation, have also been a source of instability. The sub-prime crisis in the housing market, in the USA and in Britain, is the result of insufficient incomes by poorer households to sustain the burden of mortgages. The banks lent money to these households regardless, hoping that rising asset values would diminish the burden of household debt. The implication of the crash is that unless effective demand (which means average income levels) are sustained across the whole society, the property market cannot be sustained. This is a crisis of under-consumption of the kind which Keynes wrote about in the 1930s.

Although advocates of the free market attack regulation and redistribution, the fact is that there are severe economic costs to inequality, as well as the social costs so well described by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. (2008). President Obama has now succeeded in addressing some of these problems in regard to health provision in the United States, where 15% of the population has lacked any form of health insurance. Although much of the health industry has resisted the reforms, the fact is that a more inclusive system offers benefits to them too, since it will bring a larger demand for health services.

Other dysfunctions of unregulated markets have also emerged, notably in the environmental crisis, brought about by carbon and other emissions and their effects in global warming. It is evident that the free market left to itself can do nothing to restrict this damage, if everyone is allowed to ‘externalise’ the costs of their activities, so that they do not themselves have to take account of them.

The current crisis of the Eurozone, in the near bankruptcy of Greece and perhaps of other peripheral states in the EU, is also a consequence of some of the same structural contradictions. A single European market and single European currency cannot function effectively without the presence of systems to ensure a measure of equality of economic capability across the zone. A currency whose high value is established by the economic competitiveness of Germany, cannot serve the interests of less competitive economies like those of Greece, Spain and Portugal, unless the latter are enabled to compete, or compensated by transfer payments for their inability to do so. Germany recognised this situation in regard to East Germany after reunification. It took on the burden of investment in East Germany’s ‘modernisation’ (in quite vindictive ways so far as the previous regime was concerned) and required the rest of Europe to share this. If Germany and other states do not recognise that a comparable commitment to a measure of equality is required to make the Eurozone function effectively, the Eurozone and perhaps the larger European Union will fail. Merely demanding more budgetary discipline for Eurozone members, in return for bailout loans, is not going to meet this purpose. Without such assistance, as George Irvin has recently pointed out in The Guardian, it will come to be in the interests of economies like that of Greece to default on their debts, and return to the periodic devaluation of their own restored national currencies to maintain their competitiveness. One again, more egalitarian policies, which seemed threatening to capital in the 1970s, have become necessary to its stability in the 2010s.

Another problem to which the globalised market system is giving rise is the challenge to the supremacy of the ‘first world’ economies of North America, Europe and Japan , by the newly industrialising economies of China, India, Brazil and others. The instability of this situation is reflected in the remarkable fact of China sustaining US consumption by lending the USA part of its large export surplus, so that the US has in effect been living on Chinese credit.

The crisis of this neo-liberal order has of course had its political consequences. It seems certain that the Republicans in the United States were defeated in 2008 only because of the collapse of the financial system. (After all, McCain and Palin gained 47% of the popular vote even in those dire conditions). Similarly the Brown government in Britain suffered a huge initial blow when the credit crunch came, and seemed likely to be decimated in the anticipated elections.

The ‘discrediting of the political classes’ which has followed the Parliamentary expenses crisis reflects a much deeper disillusion with the capacities of the governing system. Indeed the attacks on MPs’ delinquency regarding expenses is probably in part a (possibly deliberate) displacement of popular resentment against from the new rich of the financial sector, with their shameless appetite for huge salaries and bonuses, on to MPs and public servants. Somehow it has seemed legitimate only to criticise greed when it occurs in the public sector (also in regard to BBC and other public agency salaries), as if the private sector need have no accountability for how it allocates resources.

The outcome of the election, in a ‘hung parliament’ which a majority of the voters said they actually wanted, reflects the uncertainties of the conjuncture brought about by the implosion of the neo-liberal regime. In situations like this, when one stable order as broken down, but a new resolution of forces has not yet been achieved, prediction is difficult. Gramsci pointed out that the ruling class, in such crises, tried its hardest to hold on to its power, making the minimum necessary adjustments to do so. In the resistance of the banks to regulation, and in the obdurate opposition by the right in the USA to any reforms whatever, we can see this process in action.

How will the present crisis be resolved?

I have argued that this is a crisis of under-regulated capitalism, the consequence not of subordinate class assertiveness and the tensions arising from it, as in the 1970s, but of the unconstrained power of property and capital. In another idiom, this is a crisis of market failure , not of non-market failure.

The solutions to this crisis which are called for therefore require a strengthening of the power and effectiveness of governments in regulating the financial system, and ensuring that it operates for the benefit of the entire economy, not as a gambling industry which is mainly parasitic on it. It must be very tempting for all governments, faced with large deficits, and aware of the huge flows of liquid funds across the globe, to find ways of taxing those flows to replenish their own coffers, through a ‘Tobin tax’ or similar measure, and to reassert a measure of control.

It follows also that greater regard again has to be paid to levels of inequality, both within nations and between them. This is not only for reasons of political legitimacy – governments are discredited by the spectacle of mega-bonuses being paid to bankers while citizens are impoverished, made unemployed, and have their homes repossessed – but also to maintain economic growth and stability through supporting demand in housing and other markets.

Internationally, there is much to be rearranged in the economic relations between the newly industrialising and ‘first world’ economies, to ensure an adjustment of their relative economic powers which will not produce another crisis of confidence in currencies for example, and an ensuing collapse. It is clear that the economic arrangements of the European Union are also now unsustainable without substantial reform, and a stronger role for intergovernmental institutions and transfers.

Climate change is another issue whose seriousness is now widely recognised (compared with even ten years ago) and for which some international as well as national remedies are urgently required.

The solution to all of these dimensions of the crisis of the neo-liberal order require a more active role for governments, and for intergovernmental action. Gordon Brown was correct in asserting, both directly and by implication of all he has been saying in the General Election campaign, that this is not an era for less active government, as Cameron seemed to be arguing, but for more.

The political parties in Britain have in fact been completely disoriented by the crisis. Each has sought to respond on the hop to the new situation. The government introduced the 50% tax on higher incomes, the bank bonus tax, the bank bailout and take-overs, and a new priority for manufacturing investment - all departures from their previous approach. Because of the problems of governmental legitimacy brought about the financial crisis, both the Lib Dems and the Tories have sought to respond to public feelings about inequality. The Lib Dems have proposed the removal of tax obligations from those earning less than £10,000 per annum, though middle income earners would benefit more than the poor from this. The Tories’ proposal to reverse Labour’s National Insurance increase seemed to undercut Labour’s tax policy from the left. Both Lib Dems and Tories felt free to attack the bankers more forcefully than the government, though no doubt this was largely because they were not at the time having to work with the City and the bond markets as the government.

But the main point is the evident disarray, as all the parties scramble to adapt to the new situation. My argument is that in the next period, a new consensus is likely to emerge in which the enhanced role of governments in all of the above dimensions will be acknowledged, by whoever is in power. Plainly some parties will find this adjustment more comfortable than others.

It must also be acknowledged that reactionary adaptations to crises do also take place, especially where a dominant order feels itself seriously threatened. It is this reaction from those who feel under threat which explains the rise of the nationalist and xenophobic far right in Europe, and of the Tea Party movement in the United States. (Members of the latter are horrified by the emergence of Afro-American and Latino Americans to positions which challenge the hegemony of ‘white America, as well as by the reassertion of the active role of government.) Reactions to the situation of this kind will also be found in the British Conservative Party, as well as in UKIP and the BNP.

Constitutional arrangements in Britain now also reflect this confused state. As two-party hegemony has weakened (the proportion of votes won for the two main parties steadily falling), the system which sanctioned their roles as Government and Opposition has also lost credibility. The ritualised contest of Government and Opposition (e.g in Prime Ministers’ Questions) has seemed to exclude rather than reflect public opinion, and to diminish rational debate. The subordination of Parliament to an authoritarian executive has reduced the effective diversity of voices which can be heard within the governmental system. Devolution of powers to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, though a democratic advance, has created anomalies for the governance of England. A better-informed and privately more freedom-loving citizenry is faced by a government committed to ever-increasing control.

It seems to follow that some changes in the constitutional arrangements to allow more plural forms of representation, and more deliberative forms of debate and decision-making, would help in the resolution of the crisis, and in the establishment of a newly stabilised order. This, it seems, is what the electorate have been asking for in their expressed (and enacted) preference for a ‘hung’, or as Alex Salmond puts it, a balanced Parliament.

After 1951 the Conservatives largely maintained the welfare settlement of the post-War Labour government, though steadily enhancing the role of markets within it. Similarly, New Labour maintained a large measure of continuity with the Thatcher governments, while slowly inflecting government in a different direction. The reason for this is that governments are as much shaped by their economic and social environment, as shape them. It may be important to recognise from this point of view that Cameron represents an intended adjustment of the Conservatives to post-Thatcher times, and is not merely to be seen as the new media-friendly face of the old Thatcherite regime.

The outcome of the General Election

At the time of writing (May 10) the shape of the government to be formed after the election is not yet known.

However, it seems that the Liberal Democrats have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to achieve the reform of the electoral system on which their persisting influence on British politics depends. Having lost seats even in this election, despite Nick Clegg’s extraordinary success in the TV debates, who can imagine that after this disappoint voters will support them in larger numbers in the next election, if the first past-the-post system remains? It does seem that voters have been canny in ensuring that their votes are made effective.

So it seems to the advantage of the Lib Dems to find some accord with Labour and other minority parties, above all to ensure that a vote on electoral reform is put to the people before the next General Election. How can they do this without losing in popularity through supporting a Labour government with a minority of seats vis-a-vis the Conservatives, what they might gain from electoral reform? Indeed there is a risk that if a coalition with Labour is too unpopular, they might lose the referendum on electoral reform.

The solution to this problem seems to lie in making a very specific and fixed-term arrangement with Labour and the minority parties. Its purposes would be two - constitutional reform, especially but not only electoral reform (the changes in Parliamentary procedures negotiated at the end of the last Parliament by Tony Wright should be made without delay), and getting through the immediate economic crisis, until resumed growth is achieved. It seems to me that Gordon Brown would everyone a service by acknowledging that the implication of the election result is that he cannot continue as a legitimate Prime Minister for much more than a year or so. It might well be wise to promise not only the election of a new Labour leader, but also a dissolution of Parliament, by May 2011 or 2012.

Such an outcome might offer some implicit concession to David Cameron too, in that it would enable him to say that he has contributed to removing the Prime Minister, albeit not immediately as he had hoped. It would give him the opportunity fight another election again quite soon, and thereby make it more difficult for more right wing forces in the Tory party to unseat him.

If one holds the view that what is now called for is an adjustment of all parties to a new economic order, which needs to be more consensual, egalitarian and democratic than its Thatcherite and New Labour predecessor, then avoiding the regression of the Conservatives back to their old positions may be important. The capture of the Republican Party by the right in the United States does not benefit the progressive cause, even if it may provide the Democrats with some tactical opportunities.

It follows from commitment to an election within two years or so, under new rules, that a Lib Dem – Conservative coalition could be the outcome of it. Such a risk can in any case not be avoided, when Labour lacks a majority in Parliament by a considerable margin. But this might also be less than a disaster, since under more democratic electoral arrangements it would be more likely that a consensual adjustment to the imperatives of the new order would continue to be made.

I believe therefore that there are reasons being cautiously optimistic, since the unregulated market has demonstrated itself to be so unsustainable in its operation. To use Raymond Williams’s term in Towards 2000, we see find ‘resources for hope’, in an analysis of why a move towards more democratic and egalitarian arrangements might now be recognised to be to the benefit of the great majority of people.

References

Brittan, S. (2010) ‘A credo for a revived capitalism’,. Financial Times May 6. Can be retrieved at www.samuelbrittan.co.uk

Hall,. S.(2003) ‘New Labour’s Double Shuffle’. Soundings 24. Autumn. http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/articles/nov03.html

Hall. S., Critcher C., Jefferson T., Clarke, J. and Roberts B. (1978) Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order. Macmillan.

Irvin, G. , (2010) Greece still has a choice. Guardian Comments is Free, 2nd May 2010. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/may/02/greece-default-debt-choice

Irvin, G. et al, (2010) ‘In Place of Tax Cuts: Tax reform to build a fairer society.’ Published by Compass. http://www.compassonline.org.uk/publications/

Rustin, M.J. (2009) ‘Reflections on the Present’. Soundings 43, Winter.
http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/ReadingRoom/public/creditcrunchRustin.html

Wilkinson,R., and Pickett, K. (2008) The Spirit Level.

 

 

Note on Author

Michael Rustin is Professor of Sociology at the University of East London, and a Visiting Professor at the Tavistock Clinic. His books include For a Pluralist Socialism (1985) The Good Society and the Inner World (1991) Reason and Unreason (2001) and, with Margaret Rustin, Narratives of Love and Loss: Studies in Modern Children’s Fiction, (1987/2003) and Mirror to Nature: Drama, Psychoanalysis and Society (2002). He is a founding editor of Soundings: a journal of politics and culture.

09-30am Sat 8th May Forum contribution by Malcolm Pittock,
retired academic, adult educationalist; unretired veteran peace activist;
author of book on Ernst Toller and numerous articles on literary and
political issues.

The Long Revolution and Towards 2000

Perhaps the most potent symbol in Western culture is that of the New Jerusalem of Revelation : paradise on earth as an attainable ideal :a society “where all who would might enter and no one was denied”. Williams, like Blake, thought that Jerusalem or something resembling it could be made a reality. And the name of his New Jerusalem was Socialism : a society not based on private profit, but on the welfare of all. The transition to such a society he called the Long Revolution. What is so impressive about his many-sided work is the unity of its aim. That aim informs not only works like The Long Revolution and Towards 2000, but his novels and his literary and dramatic criticism. Even his suggestions as to reforms that could be made in the organisation of the media, which may appear piecemeal and pragmatic, are still steps to that end.
In an early work like The Long Revolution he thought that the guarantor of that revolution would be the state : twenty years later in Towards 2000, he was beginning to realise his mistake.  The New Jerusalem, where all who would might enter and no one was denied, is incompatible with the state and cannot be built in England’s Green and Pleasant Land unless it is also built everywhere else. An anarcho- syndicalist like Chomsky and a Christian Pacifist anarchist like Tolstoy always knew this and Chomsky’s quietly ferocious and superbly researched polemics are directed at the state of which he is a citizen. For Tolstoy, the state was simply evil. Williams’s concept of Plan X shows that he was beginning to be aware of what the anarchists had always known. For it is derived from the ideology of the state in its dominant aspect. Williams’s journey from The Long Revolution to Towards 2000 is the journey from the belief that Revolution could take place in one country to the realisation that it couldn’t.
At best, we must realise that the state is Janus faced. We know, of course, that states controlled by an oligarchy or ruled over by a dictator are quite capable of tyrannising the majority of their own people. But we may believe that a state which is democratic and has in place a system of law based notionally at least on the equality of its citizens is potentially beneficent. After all 200 years ago there was no National Health Service, no old age or occupational pensions: no system of universal education and people could be executed not only for murder but even for small thefts. And all these changes for the better we owe to the state : why then should not the state be able to introduce the most far-reaching changes? But however beneficent the state can be to its own citizens, in its relation to other states and the citizens of those states a different ethic  prevails. Here there is an endless struggle for power and advantage in a Hobbesian world : in this world there is no significant difference between democratic and oligarchic states. In this struggle there is no moral rule that cannot be broken : no wholesale massacre of the people of other states which cannot be contemplated or acted upon. When a state uses a moral argument it does so not because it believes in it, but because it is to its advantage to appear to do so. When the US and the UK wanted to remove Saddam Hussein from power much was made of his cruelty. When they wanted to keep the Shah of Iran in power they kept quiet about his cruelties though he was reputed to fry his opponents. The US and the UK claim to have a fervent belief in democracy and claim to be bringing it to Afghanistan at the barrel of a gun, but when the Palestinians of Gaza and the Occupied Territories in a free and fair democratic election chose to elect Hamas as their government, that democratic choice was not recognised  since the US and the UK do not regard it as being in their interests for an Islamic government to be installed.
I first read The Long Revolution over forty-five years ago and was asked by FW Bateson the editor, to review it for Essays in Criticism. He entitled my review “The Optimistic Revolution” With a few changes, I quote from the text of that review :
“Mr Williams’s argument appears to me to be this . There are three main agencies of change in Britain today : they are not new but their recent rapid expansion has brought their development to a critical stage : the growth of industry and technology which provide us with the means of mastering the environment : the expansion in communications which can ensure the general availability of social and individual experience; and the growth of democracy, which offers the opportunity for each one of us to participate in the development of society. None of these agencies of change is isolable from the others : it is the expansion of industry which has made the development of communications and the growth of democracy possible. It is the growth of democracy which will enable us to control industry and communications in the interests of society as a whole. When we have taken the opportunity ad learned the control in those areas where they are most needed, the first stage of the Long Revolution will be complete. The major part of the book develops a theory of the nature and potentialities of human beings as individuals and social beings , which will justify a belief in the success of the long revolution;  and to pointing out some of the ways in which, through a failure of understanding and through defects in social organisation, this progress is being thwarted and how, consequently it can be advanced”
The Long Revolution, like Culture and Society appears to me to have been influenced by the illusion that after the war there could be a completely new beginning : Nazism, regarded as the incarnation of absolute evil, had been defeated : a Labour government had introduced sweeping reforms, and the United Nations had been established whose aim was “to free mankind from the scourge of war” by bringing it under strict international control. It took a long time for that dream to fade, and for the bloodiest war in human history, waged on both sides with inconceivable brutality, to reveal how long a shadow it would cast. The sign of this post war naivete in both Culture and Society and The Long Revolution is the way they are almost studiously non-political : Williams scarcely mentions Socialism and assures his readers that he is not a Marxist. His idea seems to have been that it was possible, if he made the argument sufficiently general and even inoffensive, he would be able to carry all people of goodwill along with him.
That his argument was unbelievably insular is shown in his concluding chapter “Britain in the Sixties”. A Martian reading it would get no idea of what had been going on on planet earth and a very selective idea of what had been going on in Britain. There is no mention of British involvement in the Korean war, in which as General Curtis Le May said “We –that is the US with whom we were allied- killed over a million civilian Koreans and drove several million from their homes” : no mention of the dirty colonial wars that Britain fought in Kenya and Malaya : no indication that the much lauded Labour government had secretly insisted on building its own weapons of mass destruction; nor that Britain was part of a pro-capitalist military alliance headed by the US which threatened mass nuclear slaughter and which had established its own military bases on the British landmass. And if Britain had tried to bring in the Long Revolution or anything like it single-handed, the US would have brought it to heel by encouraging capital flight.
When Williams wrote Towards 2000, he was a sadder and a wiser man. He entitles the last chapter of that book :”Resources for a Journey of Hope”, but the hope is rather to seek :” I suppose the real chances of making a different kind of future are fifty/fifty”. He is aware now of an interlocking destructive capitalist system, which controls the freedom of action of this and any country. He has a chapter on “War the Last Enemy”, which sees that at the highest technical level it has become mere massacre. And of course in his concept of Plan X he shows that the traditional struggle for advantage between states has become the model of a more general system , which as its name Plan X implies, is destroying the very concept of human reason and value and dissolving then in a world of appearances.
“[Plan X]... is the deliberate choice of a very different path : not towards sharing the information and the problems, or towards the development of general capacities to resolve them. What is chosen instead, intellectually and politically, is a new line on the future : a new politics of strategic advantage ...its objective is.. X: a willed and deliberate unknown, in which the only defining factor is advantage... [W]hat is new in ‘Plan X’ politics is that it has genuinely incorporated a reading of the future, and one which is quite as deeply pessimistic, in general terms,  as the most extreme readings of those who campaign against the nuclear arms race or the extending damage of the ecological crisis.
The difference of ‘Plan X’ people is that they do not believe that any of these dangerous developments can be halted or turned back. Even when there are technical ways they do not believe there are possible political ways. Thus while as a matter of public relations they still talk of solutions, or of possible stabilities, the real politics and planning are not centred on these but on an acceptance of the indefinite continuation of extreme crisis and extreme danger. Within this harsh perspective, all their plans are for phased advantage, an effective temporary edge, which will always keep them at least one step ahead in what is called ,accurately enough, the game plan...
‘Plan X’ people resemble the hardest kinds of revolutionary, who drive through at any cost to their perceived objectives, but the difference of Plan X from revolution is that no transformed society, no new order, no lasting liberation seriously enters these new calculations, though their rhetoric may be retained.”
This is Williams at his very  best. We are facing a situation of extreme crisis as immensely powerful but humanly irrational forces are gambling with our future. These forces create a world of appearances which sugars for public relations purposes an attack not only on the moral but on the rational by a protective rhetoric.
Plan X as a concept has great explanatory power. There is now a contempt for informed argument when addressed to power. No government department will ever consider an argument however well informed and logically cogent against a particular policy. All you will get is a personalised computer generated reply which takes no notice of what you have said but which merely repeats the current government position. How far this could go was shown in the government’s refusal even to consider the argument that the attack on Iraq was illegal in terms of current international law, though this was the position held by all the international lawyers at the Foreign Office, the vast majority of academic international lawyers and the recently retired Lord Chief Justice. They didn’t care a button whether it was illegal or not or how many Iraqis they had killed : they thought that it was to Britain’s advantage to join with the United States and that was all that mattered. Indeed the Chilcot enquiry is an excellent example of the working of Plan X : the ostensible objective was to get to the bottom of why we went to war : but that was merely public relations rhetoric of the kind that Wlliams mentions. The true Plan X objective of the enquiry was not to do this a but to bury the issue once and for all by trying to ensure that the public thought that the Enquiry would be thoroughly fair and objective while steps were taken to make sure it would be  none of those things. To that end five members of the Establishment all with titles, three of whom were known to have supported the war, were chosen to form the panel and a decision was obviously taken that there should be no international lawyer on the panel such as Professor Philippe Sands QC  because he or she might interfere with the success of Plan X by asking really probing questions . And so Gordon Brown was enabled to boast to the panel that “it was the right war at the right time” without fear of demur
Williams did not live to see the collapse of the Soviet Union, 9/11; the bombing of Serbia, the two invasions of Iraq and the invasion of Afghanistan, and the banking collapse, which could only have deepened his analysis and might  have made him wonder whether there were any resources left for a Journey of Hope. For the bankers’ very own Plan X had actually come to grief. He might have seen in it the shape of things to come.

Sustainability, Ecology and Williams' Prescience.
By Tony Dennis, teacher with the WEA, Bedfordshire University and the OU.

As Mike Rustin has said, the context for the publication of Williams’ Towards 2000 in 1983 was the economic and cultural crisis which developed in the 1970’s, when the post-1945 social democratic settlement came to be questioned from both Left and Right. Although the two crises are different (the first ‘sociological’, arising from working class challenges to capitalist stability and profitability and the second ‘economic’ and coming from under-demand within the system), Williams’ points (particularly those raised in the chapter Resources for a Journey of Hope) remain highly relevant.

The first of these points which I want to address here is Williams’ early sensitivity to the ecological implications of capitalist production. Some discussions of the current crisis make it sound as through a return to a ‘Fordist’ model of high economic growth rates and high levels of production and consumption is all that is needed to revive economic (and social) well being. In fact, most mainstream discussions tend to take these points for granted, no matter how sophisticated the subsequent argument then becomes. My contention is that Williams back in 1983 was aware of the logical inconsistencies of this approach, and that his insights have been given a special point by our developing awareness over the last thirty years of the likelihood of ecological crisis. The relationships between over-consumption and environmental degradation still do not seem to have registered with the mainstream media, though - a TV programme on environmental degradation will be followed by a news item where disappointing sales are deplored, without any hint that the two might be related.

A characterising feature of modern capitalism in the western world is that it has moved well beyond the satisfaction of needs – however defined – and into a realm of stimulated wants, in which frantic efforts are made to develop new categories of good which we are then encouraged to buy. This is not a new process – Vance Packard’s Hidden Persuaders from the ‘50’s come to mind, and even within rich societies significant numbers of people – some of the elderly, minorities and migrants, workers in precarious and low-paid jobs or in economically depressed areas – are largely outside the process. It also coexists with absolute poverty and deprivation for maybe a third of the world’s population, and it in fact seems unlikely that the two processes – poverty for some, over-consumption by others – are unrelated.

The environmental implications of attempts at super-consumption by even a large minority of the world’s population are pretty obvious. At the same time, there are plenty of reasons – moral, political, economic – to wish for the poverty of excluded groups to be addressed. It is unlikely that at the present state of knowledge and scientific achievement that anyone, anywhere in the world, needs to suffer from serious poverty, but that implies a move away from mega-consumption by the rest of us.

It is here that Williams’ idea of a steady state economy and a rejection of simple measures of ‘growth’ are relevant. Rhetoric about ‘wealth creation’ tends not to specify just what wealth might involve; is it purely a matter of (ever more) material goods, or should it also include a range of non-material services, some of which will be unquantifiable? A recent Question Time exchange between the historian David Starkey and Caroline Lucas of the Green Party illustrates this point: Starkey’s accusation that Lucas and the Green are uninterested in wealth creation seemed to imply that the activities of a doctor, teacher, firefighter etc do not create wealth whereas those of a pornographer or the publisher of the Daily Express apparently do. This point illustrates some recent debates within economics which have focused on the need for qualitative as well as quantitative measurements of output and GDP which would acknowledge the value of non tangible as well as material goods, and Williams’ anticipation of these debates is further evidence of his prescience.

The second theme suggested by Towards 2000 which I wish to look at is that of democracy. Williams thirty years ago was adamant that purely representative democracy was insufficient, because at its worst it can result in a passive citizenry who may or may not bother to vote, but are unlikely to have any greater involvement in the business of government. Since then, we have seen rampant and growing cynicism about both politicians and the political process generally, and a diminishing belief that orthodox politics at least have much to offer to the world. This is both an old and a new process; old in that it is a reaffirmation of ancient beliefs that governance is a matter for elites, and new as an expression of the privatising tendencies of modern capitalism, where self-interest and a purely individualistic lifestyle are promoted as the ‘normal’ way to live and public commitment and involvement is seen as quaint, perverse or ‘extremist’. It may alsoof course be a realistic assessment of the present state of things as power has drained from elected institutions and into oligarchical ones like business and big government.

It may also be the case that the political party system which developed towards the end of the nineteenth century has reached its logical end, as the traditional parties have operated on assumptions about activist leaderships and loyal but passive members. It does however mean that new ways of popular involvement have to be considered if a commitment to democracy is to be anything more than rhetorical, and Williams’ ideas of democracy as a participatory and self-actualizing process is particularly relevant here.

There seems to be a current recognition of this from unexpected areas of the political spectrum, from ‘active citizen’ exhortations in the recent past to rediscoveries of mutualism by writers like Philip Bland with his ‘red toryism’. This has been reflected in some of the debates in the recent election campaign, with calls for co-operative management of workplaces by groups like public sector employees and more general claims that we are entering a ‘post bureaucratic’ age. There are many questions to be asked about such claims – is encouragement of employee takeovers simply a cynical cost-cutting exercise in which responsibility for bankruptcy and closure will be transferred from government to workers? As such, may it be a further instalment in a process where, under a verbal smokescreen of empowerment, responsibility is diversified while power is centralised – think of examples of that process from education and healthcare. It is nevertheless true that politicians – including some on the Right – evidently feel that they are addressing a public exasperation at a lack of power. It needs to be asked whether, and to what extent, claims for autonomy and self-management are compatible with structural inequalities in power which come from private property ownership – ie, the central question of a capitalist society – and it is certain that Williams’ answer would have been that they are not, but it is surely significant that such questions are being asked at all. The fact that they are, and that they echo the preoccupations of Towards 2000, helps to underline the abiding relevance of Williams’ work.


 

Sat 8 May 11.30 session. Notes, from Chad Goodwin (Chair, The Thomas Paine
Society) and Derek Tatton (Administrator, RWF) for group discussion on
Democracy Old and New

    
1.  In his essay “Democracy Old and New”(in Towards 2000, 1983) Raymond Williams questions the British form of democracy, calling it “parliamentary democracy as we know it”; he argues that a new system of co-operative “self-management” needs to develop out of popular sovereignty replacing centralised power:

2.  In his The Life and Death of Democracy (2009), John Keane argues that representative democracy has, perhaps, run its course; democracy needs to continue evolving, and he advocates the further democratisation of democracy – into a form he calls “monitory democracy” wherein a range of citizens’ organisations keep “democracy” in check.

3. In Towards 2000 RW wrote about ‘many losing faith in or rejecting democracy…. The market and old style democracy has led us into these major problems…

4.  He goes on to present these figures.

 4% in 1831;   16% in 1868;  30% in 1914;  74% in 1921 and 97% in 1931.   Why and what do these figures tell us?

        ii)   % of popular vote for the Labour Party:   1900  1.8%;   1910  7%;  1929 & 1935  37%;  1945  47.8%;  1951  48.8 %;    1964  44%;  1974  37%  1983  27%   2010   29%?
Again, why does RW present this summary and how do we interpret them?

5.    In Britain we still tend to talk of “electoral reform” as being the answer to most of our
political problems. “Reform” has always tended to be the British answer; that’s how we got the vote – through a series of Reform Acts. 
BUT –  what will electoral reform achieve?

7.   What about the internet?  Could that act as a catalyst for genuine change?  There are now scores sites

       www.theyworkforyou.com;   www.congrelate.org

       www.yournextmp.com   /   www.thestraightchoice.org   /   www.democracyclub.org.uk

       www.moveon.org       founded in US 2000, now has 4.2 million members
www.getup.org.au        the Australian version!    351,000 members
www.avaaz.org/en       worldwide campaign est. Jan 2007    now has 4.5m members
www.38degrees.org.uk        est. May 2009       now has 120,000 members
www.power2010.org.uk       out of the Open Democracy website – produced a popularly selected list of   5 issues that every candidate was then asked to address 
www.giveyourvote.org        you could nominate someone in Afghanistan, Bangladesh or Ghana to tell you 
how to vote, in our general election, on their behalf        

  8.    There are 2 issues developing at the moment:

9.  Take the quote in RWF leaflet about ‘one of the major benefits of the new technologies:   
from this,  develop more ‘direct democracy’…

 

10.  For example,  Billy Connolly on the SBS recently said to a bemused but consenting  Lord

Melvyn Bragg  ‘We should fill the House of Lords with everybody – ordinary people, doing the equivalent of Jury duty,  making decisions on political issues for 3 months.’     Experiment in similar way with a People’s Parliament jury system…

Notes for afternoon session, Sat 8th May, by Granville Williams - long-standing member of the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom (CBPF) and on its national Council; currently, Director of the CPBF's Media Ownership in the Age of Convergence research project.

The Manufacture of Consent

I want to start with a question. Undeniably the two major events of the first decade of the 21st century were the war with Iraq and the financial collapse of 2008.

Why was it that, with a few honourable exceptions, the mass media did not play a critical, watchdog role, questioning dubious intelligence about weapons of mass destruction, or warning about reckless speculation by banks?

The title of this session immediately suggests the book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman published in 1988. I think the book goes a long way towards helping us answer that question.

What I want to do is spend part of my talk discussing the key elements of what Chomsky and Herman describe as the ‘propaganda model’. Then I want to discuss its applicability and relevance to contemporary media in relation to the question I posed at the beginning.

The propaganda model ‘traces the routes by which money and power are able to filter out the news fit to print, marginalise dissent, and allow the government and dominant private interests to get their messages across to the public’.

Five news filters:

(1)The size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth, and profit orientation of the dominant mass-media firms

(2) Advertising as the primary income source of the mass media

(3) The reliance of the media on information provided by the government, business, and ‘experts’ funded and approved by the primary sources and agents of power

(4) ‘Flak’ as a means of disciplining the media
(5) ‘Anti-communism’ as a national religion and control mechanism

‘These elements interact and reinforce one another. The raw material of news must pass through successive filters, leaving only the cleansed residue fit to print. They fix the premises of discourse and interpretation, and the definition of what is newsworthy in the first place’.

Criticisms.

Propaganda model a ‘conspiracy theory’
Response. ‘our treatment is much closer to a ‘free market’ analysis, with the results largely an outcome of the working of market forces’.

Propaganda model too mechanical or functionalist.
Reponse. ‘The model does describe a system in which the media serve the elite, but by complex processes ...wherebye the powerful protect their interests naturally and without overt conspiracy’.

Taking the two examples of the war with Iraq and the financial crisis how does the propaganda model help explain these events?

Filter 1 Size and power of mass media

Rupert Murdoch proclaimed that the outcome of the Iraq war would be oil at $20 dollars. All of his 144 papers globally supported the war. He also strongly supported Tony Blair’s stance as the US ally

In the USA in 2002 the big media corporations knew that major changes in media ownership rules were due. It made business sense to support Bush when the Democrats were in a political wilderness.

In the UK one tabloid paper, the Mirror, and one broadsheet, The Independent, were unequivocally against the war. The Guardian was also critical.

Johann Hari on ownership of UK press. The Independent (23/04/10) ‘The forces blocking British democracy’.

Filter 2 Advertising
Advertising primary income source for mass media (the obvious exception is the BBC)
Hyper-commercialism increases as global media groups absorb what were different distinct media activities eg News Corporation’s Avatar

Encroachment of product placement from film to TV standard in USA: now in Europe and UK

Advertising and recession: ITV and local newspapers

Filter 3 Reliance on experts and official sources
New York Times and WMD Role of journalist Judith Miller
Financial crisis and media
Banner Theatre Embedded With The Bankers: The Media & the Financial Crisis
Role of PR Nick Davies Flat Earth News

Filter 4 Flak
Complaints, threats and punitive action
Eg Think tanks monitoring the media
Attacks in US on ‘liberal media’
Andrew Gilligan, Alastair Campbell and the BBC

The Manufactured Doubt Industry and the hacked email controversy

Filter 5 Anti-communism
‘ a cultural milieu in which anti-Communism is the dominant religion’ which helps to fragment the left and labour movement and serves as a political-control mechanism’.
Still relevant eg Tea Party movement conjures up Obama the socialist/communist
But since 1989, the end of the Soviet Union and 9/11 displaced by War on Terror

Conclusions
Authors have never claimed the propaganda model explains everything or that it shows media omnipotence and complete effectiveness in manufacturing consent. Its focus is on the mainstream media.

They point to alternative media, grass roots information sources, public scepticism about media veracity and have always been active in supporting the more effective use of these alternatives.

Sat 8th May,   evening session.    Notes for  The 1980s Miners' Strike

                             by Granville Williams

Raymond Williams ‘Mining The Meaning: Keywords in the Mining Strike’ in Resources of Hope

I want to focus on the role of the media during the strike but first two general points about the miners’ strike.
It was the key struggle of the 1980s and its defeat opened the floodgates for Thatcherism.Tim Bell (Thatcher’s & Ian MacGregor’s media adviser) was clear about their aim:

“We wanted the strikers to drag themselves back to work, their tails behind their legs. That was what it was all about at the end.”

The key features of Thatcherism were the assault on the trade union movement and trade union rights, massive deindustrialisation and the reshaping of the economic order.

Neo-liberalism meant in the UK context privatisation of our public utilities and services, and deregulation of the financial sector and broadcasting.

There was also a calculated and well-prepared mobilisation by all the forces of the state to defeat the miners.

The cover of Shafted is the North Selby NUM banner, the last banner created for the NUM, in 1992. It vividly conveys what the miners were up against.

Move on to the media.

An exhibition of photos of former miners from Littleton Colliery in the Staffordshire Coalfield at Mining Museum near Wakefield

In a film sequence Sean Farrell, an NUM activist on strike for the year reflects on his experiences and pays tribute to the endurance of the miners who stood out against what he described as ‘the greatest propaganda effort since the second world war’.

In the Second World War films and hundreds of posters urged people to join the forces, work in the factories or on the land to boost production in the war against Fascism.

In 1984 Mrs T turned the state propaganda effort on to what she described, in her utterly repugnant phrase, as ‘the enemy within’.

In 1984 “the enemy within” was at the coalface, or on the picket line, rather than in the boardroom.

And far from subsidising or bailing them out the miners felt the full force of the State.

Billions of pounds were used not to save an industry but to ensure its destruction.

In the book I write about the coordinated efforts by the National Coal Board and the government to use the media to attack striking miners.

Cabinet papers obtained under the FoI Act for August 1984 reveal the extent to which the Prime Minister’s press secretary Bernard Ingham was working behind the scenes on media co-ordination.

The agreed line on Arthur Scargill was to pose the question: “What more does he want? A blank cheque from the taxpayer?”

Strange how we saw blank cheques written routinely to bail out the banks. (Most recently£39 billion on 3rd November 2009 for Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds Banking Group) And we, especially the younger people in this room, will be picking up the tab for the lax regulation which enabled city speculators and bankers to enrich themselves whilst the economy collapsed.

Towards the end of the strike every effort was made to mask the true cost of the strike and a secret Treasury minute advised ministers to avoid giving any figures.

Instead it was suggested the cost should not be disclosed until “the budget next year or at some other time when it might be drowned out by other news”.

So well before Jo Moore, the New Labour spin doctor, suggested the attack on the World Trade Center was a good day to bury bad news the Conservative government was up to the same tricks.

So what was the real cost? Five years Dave Feikert put the figure at between £28.5-£33 billion five years ago. Lee Hall cites a new figure to date of £58 billion to dismantle the industry and the subsequent social and economic devastation in mining communities.

Reflecting on another bitter conflict, the Spanish Civil War from July 1936 to April 1939, the French writer Albert Camus wrote that people learned ‘…one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can defeat spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own reward.’

We are reminded on this 25th anniversary when we see the film footage taken during the strike that the miners had grit and courage by the bucket full as, dressed in T shirts and jeans, they faced mounted police charges and stood against the lines of police equipped with helmets, visors, riot shields and thick black truncheons.

As we demonstrate in the book, miners and their communities were ill-served by the bulk of the mainstream media reporting of the strike (I would however make an important exception to much of the local media in mining areas).

The media were co-opted to reinforce the government/NCB propaganda offensive for the return to work.

Quote Nick Jones from Free Press

The Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom published Shafted for the 25th anniversary of the strike. At the time of the strike we published Media Hits The Pits)

We wanted to remind people about the epic struggle and also to let a new generation know about the important issues which were at the heart of the great strike.

So what are the lessons for today?

Thatcherism ushered in the age of excess, and New Labour continued to support the same policies of flexible labour markets and deregulation of financial services. It was Peter Mandelson, after all, who assured us he was ‘intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich’.

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. It’s 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 of commercial and investment banks, hedge funds, insurance companies, private equity firms and other financial institutions. Governments give massive bailouts for banks, whilst recession and unemployment loom hit 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.

Eg The Economist 8 August 2009 ‘How Long Till The Light s Go Out/’

I certainly don’t consider the miners’ strike as part of history.

Just consider the behaviour of the Territorial Support Group officers in the death of Ian Tomlinson at the time of the G20 demonstration in London, and think back to police violence and the states of siege in mining villages during the strike.

A strike ended on Tuesday morning 24 November at 5.30am at the Superdrug depot in South Elmsall near where I live.

For just over three weeks the strike leaders drew on key experiences from the miners’ strike. About twenty of the strikers, including the senior steward, are former miners.

Community support, a lively 24/7 picket of the depot, active involvement of those on strike activity rather than moping at home, mass meetings and each day cars with over 100 of the strikers involved in going out all over the country leafleting 150 Superdrug shops and distributing 110,000 leaflets. Support from the wider trade union movement built solidarity, and brought the management to the negotiating table very quickly.

The way the strike ended was a poignant reminder of the way the 1984-85 strike ended. The miners marched back, with the women’s support groups, behind their banners. And the victorious Superdrug strikers did the same.

So today we should pay tribute to the courage and endurance of the miners 25 years ago but also support the struggles of workers today against attacks on their pay and working conditions.

Selby though a shiny youngster was old staffed just in time to join the great strike. In one such battle at Gascoigne Wood, some of the pickets, clearly brought up on a strategy learned from the Westerns on telly deployed their skills in freeing up all the cattle from the fields and herding them in a stampede toward the cops with their riot shields. Whooping and yelling behind a hundred or so snorting beats in a great cloud of dust it looked like a scene from Bonanza.

Throughout the 84/85 strike we had complained of press lies not simply bias. Gasgoine Wood was to provide one of the most famous and blatant examples. Friday 17 Aug. 1984 both ITV and BBC 1 News at 5.40 covered the pickets at Gasgoine Wood who had arrived to stop a solitary miner going to work. When the convoy of police vehicles were seen coming down the pit lane the men assumed it to be the scab coming in. They surged forward and feeling in buoyant and confident mood swept the police right off the road and consequently blocked it. The atmosphere had been jovial, the pickets confident of their personal strength against the equally numbered police, as the pickets non-violently but relentlessly pushed forward they were singing.

A sergeant after trying to hold back the swell but finally inched off the road conceded good naturedly "I think that's one to you !". Next the police drew back a few paces, a moment passed, then they drew truncheons and charged, swinging and smashing into the packed ranks of pickets. At this moment the pickets fell back into a ploughed field, and having nothing else to hand volleyed the police with lumps of clay and earth. The sky for a few minutes was black with flying mud. Both channels cut and reversed the film to show the clods of earth being thrown and THEN the baton charge, at the same time the pundits announcing:- "Police were forced to draw batons to protect themselves against stone throwing pickets!"

Dave Douglass Miner’s Advice