"I was law-abiding... if I saw teenagers messing about on the street, I'd call the police. Not anymore..." I will never forget those words from a Durham miner, sleeping on my floor in Leicester during the 1984-5 miners' strike... 1/ ...
2/ When we found the Kent miners outside Desford Colliery, they were sleeping in cars and ditches, many wearing their DPM camo uniforms from the Territorial Army...
3/ When she decided to destroy the NUM, and the mining communities of Britain, Thatcher wasn't at war with carbon: she was at war with social solidarity - even in its conservative forms...
4/ They didn't replace British coal with gas; they replaced it with imported coal. Johnson's chuckle over the suffering of the community I come from is not only callous but historically illiterate... 
5/ I can recall no environmental arguments advanced by the Tories during the strike: they advanced the logic of economic cruelty. They had marketised coal production... in order to privatise it later... but even that was secondary...
6/ What they wanted to smash was the attitude you see in these photographs... my Dad and my Grandad... it wasn't "militancy" - it was solidarity. Basic social solidarity...
7/ My Grandad went down Astley Green colliery for 2 days in the fire rescue of the Crombouke Mine disaster in 1939... he'd started aged 13; my dad started aged 18 during the war...
8/ I can tell you this @BorisJohnson they loved the kind of society that mining created in our community; but they loved the earth more. Both of them would rather spend any sunny day walking thru fields than mining...
9/ So 1984-5 wasn't about coal. It was about smashing a 200 year old tradition of self-organisation. But... eppur si muove, as the old miners might have said, self educated to a degree Johnson has yet to attain.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
