Strike blogs

This is just a taste of the excellent blog by former miner Norman Strike chronicling his experiences of the Great Miners's Strike:

At lunchtime I was persuaded to attend a fringe meeting to be addressed by someone called Tony Cliff and to be about our strike. It was a small room but was packed, and to be honest, when I first saw and heard the guy I thought to myself,"who the bloody hell is this!" He was an old guy, short and stocky with wiry grey hair sticking out from either side of his head, and wearing glasses. He had a strong foreign accent which I found hard to understand at first. However, once I was tuned in I found myself agreeing with almost everything he said. He wasn’t like the other speakers I had heard because he openly criticised Scargill and the NUM leadership saying they were tactically naive! He drew comparisons between the ‘72 and ‘74 strikes and now, saying we couldn’t win this one just by closing down power stations, mainly because of the time of year but also because we would not get support from other trade unionists unless we began campaigning for support now amongst the rank and file. He warned that the other trade union leaders would do to us what they had done to the NGA at Warrington, and the people at GCHQ. They would stab us in the back and leave us to fight on our own. He said our only hope was to appeal to workers directly by going to their meetings and explain exactly what the strike was about. He got a tremendous round of applause and I for one thought what he had to say made sense, even if it did depress me a bit.