Bryn Griffiths introduces the latest Labour Left podcast- an interview with Mike Jackson of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners.

It is hard for the veteran socialists amongst us to believe that March brings us to the fortieth anniversary of the start of the miners’ strike when Thatcher sought to close Cortonwood.  What followed was the Great Strike which defined and framed the political development of so many of us. You can watch the Labour Left Podcast on the anniversary of the strike with Mike Jackson of Lesbian and Gays Support the Miners here.

The mainstream media has already started a deluge of coverage.  Channel 4 had a go with the  Miners’ Strike 1984: The Battle for Britain and then the BBC entered the fray with The Miners’ Strike: A Frontline Story.  I urge you to watch them both,  but do it with the idea that the winners seek to write history, in the forefront of your mind. 

The piece that irritated me the most was inevitably the comfortable centrist piece by Tim Adams in, you guessed it, the Observer.  Tim’s article has the merit that if you read it on the internet, it is full of links to other valuable historical sources that are well worth exploring and allow you to exit the article productively. Tim’s point of emotional reference is that he visited Tony Blair’s former constituency of Sedgefield and popped into the Fishburn Working Men’s Club during the 2019 election.  He told us that the only time the party room has been packed recently was to hear Nigel Farage speak, which begs the big question: why?

Tim approvingly cites Kinnock of all people. Miners’ leader Arthur Scargill, he suggested, preyed on the strength of self-sacrifice in the community to “feed himself the political illusion that as long as the miners were united, they had the right to destabilise and overthrow the democratically elected government. The miners did not deserve him, they deserved much, much better. My view is Margaret Thatcher and Arthur Scargill deserved each other. But no one else did.”

My view and the view of the millions who supported the strike was that the miners deserved a better Labour Party leadership but they got no such thing: they got Neil Kinnock.  Here’s Brighton Labour Briefing’s assessment in October 1984 of his performance.

In contrast to Tim Adams’s version of history, the role of Labour Hub and its spin-off, the Labour Left Podcast, is to turn up the volume and amplify the voices of the strike’s supporters.  Elsa van Helfteren, an art historian, pointed out that during the strike the mainstream media’s photographers usually stood on pickets behind the police lines to take their photographs from what was literally the vantage point of the police.  Our job is to tell history from another vantage point: the perspective of those involved in the strike.

In that spirit the Labour Left Podcast is marking the strike anniversary with Mike Jackson, the co-founder and secretary of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners.  Mike Jackson is an excellent guest to take us through the political, cultural and industrial legacy of the strike. Join us for a long-form interview with Mike in which we explore Mark Ashton’s legacy, compare Kinnock and Starmer, re-examine the awful Clause 28, consider the importance of the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign today and share our deep-seated loathing of Margaret Thatcher.

Many readers will recall how Mike Jackson was portrayed so well by Joe Gilgun in the iconic film Pride.  Back in 2014, I attended the film with one of my daughters and a gang of their teenage friends.  As we left the film it became clear that the consensus was that the film was fantastic but then one of them turned to me and asked pointedly: “But did it really happen?”  Now ten years later, I have interviewed Mike Jackson because his Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners story is part of our labour movement history and the story needs to be remembered and told again and again to new generations so they know it really happened.  Not only did it happen but if we fight together, we can make big change happen again. 

Click here to watch it on You Tube here. You can also listen to it on all your favourite podcast platforms such as Amazon, Audible, Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Spotify, etc.

Bryn Griffiths is the host of Labour Hubs spin-off the Labour Left podcast which he produces with Luke Robinson, the podcast editor.  They are both activists in the labour movement, Momentum and The World Transformed in North Essex. Bryn writes regularly for Labour Hub. You can find all the episodes of the Labour left Podcast here  Bryn Griffiths will be speaking at a University of Sussex, UNITE and Sussex UCU event on Wednesday 20 March  to consider How Sussex Supported the Miners.  

Main image: Mike Jackson with Kate Flannery, the Secretary of the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign, at an RMT Rally at Kings Cross, on 13 July 2023. Photo: Simon Lamrock.