Playing for the president

Bruce Springsteen long avoided commenting on White House politics after Ronald Reagan famously misappropriated ‘Born in the USA’ during his re-election campaign. The president ignored the song’s searing critique to claim it contained ‘a message of hope’ that he would make reality if re-elected. At the time Springsteen described it as a ‘manipulation’.
George W Bush and the Iraq War caused him to re-think. In 2004 he backed the Democrat candidate, John Kerry, playing 33 concerts as part of the ‘Vote for Change’ tour. He wrote that ‘for the last 25 years I have always stayed one step away from partisan politics. This year, however, for many of us the stakes have risen too high to sit this election out.’
After Bush’s re-election Springsteen became an increasingly outspoken critic. In response to Hurricane Katrina he adapted Blind Alfred Reed’s protest song about the Great Depression, ‘How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?’, transposing the original character of the song’s charlatan doctor onto Bush. He dedicated it to ‘President Bystander’.
Springsteen publicly backed Obama when the future president was still battling Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. He enthused: ‘After the terrible damage done over the past eight years, a great American reclamation project needs to be undertaken. I believe that Senator Obama is the best candidate to lead that project.’ Springsteen played at several election rallies – and the president’s inauguration concert.
To coincide with the inauguration he released the upbeat album Working on a Dream. The title track echoed that of Obama’s autobiography Dreams from My Father. But the album itself lacked direction. The new cheery Bruce had lost his distinctive voice.
Wrecking Ball has seen Springsteen reclaim old territory. As he acknowledged at a press conference in Paris, ‘You can never go wrong with pissed off and rock ’n’ roll,’ and these songs are angrier than anything he’s penned before. Some of that anger is clearly directed at Obama.
Springsteen was only cautiously critical of the president in Paris: ‘He kept General Motors alive, he got through healthcare – though not the public system I would have wanted . . . But big business still has too much say in government and there have not been as many middle or working class voices in the administration as I expected. I thought Guantanamo would have been closed by now.’ His music, however, offers a far more damning assessment. The single ‘We Take Care of Our Own’ tackles not only Obama’s America but also Springsteen’s involvement in party politics:
I been knocking on the door that holds the throne,
I been stumbling on good hearts turned to stone,
The road of good intentions has gone dry as a bone
Springsteen has said he’ll be staying on the sidelines during the 2012 election, commenting that ‘the artist is supposed to be the canary in the cage’. That hasn’t stopped the Obama campaign putting ‘We Take Care of Our Own’ on the official ‘campaign soundtrack’. It seems that Obama, like Reagan, recognises the power of Springsteen’s critical patriotism, even if he fails to recognise its critique.
Emma Hughes

Trade unions have a major role to play in this. Over the past decade they  have often been identifies as ‘special interest groups’ – groups that have to be faced down by government in defence of the general good. Many of their leaders have felt vulnerable to this change and reluctant to openly challenge a government elected by the people.

However there is another view and one that is gaining ground: that given the scale of the social crisis that beckons the trade unions are now the only institutions capable of preserving a democratic civil society, constraining the unbridled powers and capacities of the rich.

Legitimation crisis

A number of factors have contributed to the development of a legitimation crisis within the British political system. The breakdown of the two party system is one important development. Today no single party can  will  an election backed by the majority of those who voted, let alone a majority of the electorate.

This is exacerbated by the ongoing formation of a new political class dominating Westminster politics. This class is drawn largely from business and professional families and educated in the  major universities; mainly Oxbridge. Normally recruitment to the class requires no experience of employment beyond the political machine itself, where work in research and public relations is obtained often through patronage.

More broad spatial demographic changes also have an effect. Danny Dorling has identified the ways in which ‘mixed neighbourhoods’ have become far less prevalent as the property market has worked in a way that people increasingly live close to people like themselves. As a consequence (and for example) almost all the members of the current cabinet represent constituencies with unemployment rates far below the national average. This spatial effect is likely to continue and make it increasingly difficult for there to be the development of a coherent national strategy to deal with the complex of crises (economic, political, environmental) that will face the UK.

One consequence of this will be an increasing centrifugal force seeing Scotland becoming independent in all but name and greater powers devolved to Wales  and Northern Ireland. Another will be the increasing concentration of poor people in poor neighbourhoods, stigmatised and prone to crisis and subject to sporadic violent regulation.

What underpins much of this has been the upward trend in income inequality which began with the intervention by the IMF in 1976 – when the bankers in New York decided that the UK had ‘run out of rope’ and has gone on apace since then. It is currently at a level not seen since before the first world war with the top 1 per cent receiving 20 per cent of the national income. This trend has produced over half a million millionaires while at the other end of the scale 13½ million people in the UK (around a fifth  of the population) live in poverty. This inequality is increasingly mirrored in health and mortality data with the very rich living longer while the poor have an early death.

Who can speak out against all of this? Who and which organisations can attempt to affect changes in these powerful tendencies?

Trade unions, class and equality

It is interesting to note that incomes were at their most  equal in the UK in 1976. This was also the year when people declared themselves to be happiest. It was also the year when trade union membership peaked. These things are not unrelated. As Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett conclude in their book The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone, institutional changes associated with right wing politics have been at the root of rising inequalities and of these changes trade union membership is the most important single factor.

Even at the height of the attack on trade union power when MORI polls found a majority of people agreeing that ‘trade unions had too much power’ and were ‘run by militants’, 73 per cent also agreed that ‘trade unions are essential to protect workers’ interests’.  MORI last polled on this issue in 1995 when only 24 per cent of its sample thought trade unions too powerful and 79 per cent thought them vital to the protection of workers’ interests. Interestingly, and after a gap of sixteen years MORI included the questions again this year. Today 35 per cent thought trade union too powerful but 76 per cent continued to believe them essential for workers’ protection. In all of these polls, the responses of trade union members were consistently more positive towards trade unionism; offering some support to the idea of trade unions as an ‘experience good’ – something that is valued more, once experienced directly.

And, of course thereby hangs a tale, for trade union membership has been falling since it reached the heights of 13 millions in the seventies.  While membership has been flat-lining since 2000, this is at the low level of  25 per cent of the labour force, some 7 million employees.  There are strong differences between the public (56 per cent) and private (15 per cent) sectors and between men and women, with women now and increasingly more prone to union membership than men.

This is an issue that has perplexed trade union leaders for some time, often to the exclusion of all else. Here they have received encouragement from the USA where – as recent events amongst New York’s hotel cleaning staff has shown – campaigning unions have been able to establish membership strength and support vulnerable workers in the least propitious of environments.

However there has been a game change, brought about by the policies of the current government with regard to the public sector. The cutbacks planned by conservative and liberal ministers will, in the view of the IMF, see the UK have the lowest level of public expenditure of all the OECD countries by 2014. In three years time, with these plans, the UK will have a smaller public sector than the US. Privatisation and job cuts together would see British trade union memberships dropping below 20 per cent of the labour force; perhaps well below and severely damaging the capacity of these organisations to affect major change. For them a struggle for a better society is also a struggle for their very existence, and in this they are fortunate is having in leadership positions people of real substance and experience.

Len McCluskey, general secretary of Unite, was brought up in Liverpool and (to borrow from Bill Shankly) didn’t do PPE at Oxford but learned about it on the Liverpool waterfront. Similarly with Mark Serwotka of PCS  who became active in the trade union though his work experience in benefit offices in Aberdare and Sheffield. Both of these men (articulate and intelligent) came out of the working class and are framed and marked by that experience. It distinguishes them from Cameron and Clegg but also from Miliband and Balls, and from the rest of the new political class. They represent increasingly a different locus of power and understanding within society.

We should remember that in the 1951 Census, manual workers made up 64.2 per cent of the labour force of 14.7 million people. While much is often made of the decline in these numbers these accounts almost always ignore the power of memory and of generational inheritance and transfer. In the UK , and often to the dismay of the media, people have regularly expressed an identity with being working class. As the Sunday Times noted fifteen years ago:

The majority of people regard themselves as working class even when they are (according to the people who decide these things) middle class……..Confused? Either they are or we are. (The Sunday Times, 22 September 1996)

So within the threat there lies an opportunity for trade unions in Britain to survive and also to reform society for the better.  But to succeed in this they need to revolutionise themselves.

The challenges

We live in threatening times, but also a time of opportunity which trade unions need to grasp. The new government has fragile support across the country. There are few signs that the Labour Party is keen to lead a broad based opposition to the cuts and to policies of privatisation. Yet there are signs that opposition is developing – often in unexpected places. Only the trade unions – with the national organisations and experience of struggle and dispute – have the capacity to coordinate and develop this into a coherent resistance movement. But to achieve this the trade union leadership will need to act with a sense of urgency. They will need to develop new ideas, new ways of organising and work with new, more open alliances. In this, and though the direct experiences of their members they will need to develop a full defence of ‘the public’ as opposed to the assumed supremacy of ‘the market’.

In this there are many challenges; some of ideology others of organisation and practice. At the moment it is clear that a majority of the people in the UK have become convinced that cuts are necessary if we are to come out of the crisis and, in the phrase of the Tories ‘penalise our children’. The Labour Party hasn’t helped to dispel this account and most of the people think that a Labour government would have embarked on similar policies, albeit slightly slower.

However, and in spite of some anticipatory adjustments, the cuts have not yet begun. There is reason to expect that they will be seen by many as shocking. Already 57 per cent of people polled have expressed dissatisfaction with the way the coalition is governing the country. In this context the trade unions needs to be in a position to speak, not only for their members, but for the population as a whole and especially the poorest and the most vulnerable. Len McCluskey was adroit in speaking of ‘the people against the cuts’, placing the trade unions with the majority and for the country. This however needs to be backed with a strong and credible account of alternatives and of the threat to democracy posed by the enormous power of the banks.

The second challenge is one of organisation. If the trade unions are to help lead us out of this mess they will need to develop modes of organisation that have almost been forgotten. They will need to empower their local branches and organisations and encourage involvement with a wide range of social movements and protest groups. Again, in his open approach to the students and his defence of them as they faced police harassment, McCluskey hit the right note. This link also needs to be taken forward though local committees, and through a devolution of powers, that will be difficult to achieve but nonetheless essential.

To this there is another problem and one that the trade unions have struggled with over the last thirty years and it relates to the problem of striking over the delivery of public services often to the vulnerable. Aside form the publicity this gives to the Daily Mail, trade unions need to be seen to stand for a better kind of society and a better way of doing things. While striking against the employer deep consideration needs to be given to ways of ameliorating distress and harnessing this into a campaign for a better society.

On that day the Tower banner joined many others representing villages whose mines had closed down in the recent and more distant past. Many of these banners were newly made replicas commissioned by local people and various ‘banner groups’, often with the assistance of the Lottery Heritage Fund. The Handen Hold mine, for example, closed along with many others in Durham in 1968. Its last banner was made in 1961, and its replica, with a portrait of the Welsh socialist Aneurin Bevan on the front, was a further recognition of the way in which the two coalfields of Durham and south Wales share a common history and heritage.

Two coalfields, one strike

A delegation from Tower had also marched through Durham in 1983, as part of the centenary-year gala. On that occasion, the air was filled with a strong sense of solidarity, coupled with anticipation of the struggle that lay ahead. In the previous year, as part of the NUM’s Campaign for Coal, twinning between lodges (union branches) and the establishment of jointly attended weekend schools had seen the beginnings of a common approach built on shared understandings and close contact.

These two coalfields were similar in many ways and both had seen more than their share of tragedy. Mostly this was though mine explosions, the last at Easington in 1951. But tragedy had also extended beyond the mine, as in Aberfan in 1966 when the waste from the Merthyr Vale colliery slid down the valley side and killed a whole generation of schoolchildren. United through their past, the talk in 1983 was of having ‘backs against the wall’ and the fear of a world without the mine. It was this that fuelled their determination in 1984-85 to stay out on strike for a year in the longest and most bitter national dispute of the 20th century.

Colliery closures

In 1985, immediately after the strike ended, it became clear that the closure programme envisaged by the National Coal Board (NCB, later British Coal) was now far more extensive than that announced in 1984 and admitted to during the strike. Fifty mines were to go – and with them 50,000 jobs.

During the strike the deputies’ (supervisors’) union NACODS balloted its members and 82 per cent voted in favour of strike action to support the miners striking to keep collieries open. Rather than strike, though, the union negotiated the setting up of a fresh, independent, element to the existing colliery review procedure. When the 1984-85 strike ended, this new procedure came into effect.

In Durham, the men at the Horden colliery voted against closure, as did those at Bold in Northumberland and St John’s in south Wales. The review of Horden supported the decision to close the mine. Bates was next and although the review concluded that the mine should be kept open, the government supported the NCB in its decision to continue with the closure. By this time St John’s had closed along with a swathe of collieries across south Wales.

The pit closures that followed the 1984-85 strike were followed by a second, similarly devastating phase in the early 1990s, just when it seemed that the industry had stabilised at a lower level of production. In Durham, the 1985 closures ended deep mining in the west of the county but left a string of highly mechanised mines operating along the eastern coast. In south Wales, however, mines continued to close every year throughout the 1980s. By the time Blaenant closed in 1990, 22 collieries had closed, with four closing in 1989, including the powerful Oakdale mine.

By 1991 mining employment in south Wales had been virtually wiped out. Durham followed as its super-pits along the coast closed down, denuding the whole of the Easington district of manual work for men. At that time Betws and Tower remained open in Wales, but they too faced the axe with Betws reopening under a management buy-out. After an enormous struggle, the Tower colliery at Hirwaun was taken over by the workforce and kept in production until 2008.

Holding on at Tower

The story of Tower colliery in Hirwaun is well known. It has been celebrated as an opera and in the French cinema. Stuck out on the northern most escarpment on the South Wales coalfield, its fame gave it a kind of celebrity status. It was also seen by many as a beacon of hope; the survival of an idea, of what could be done. It lasted for 14 years until, finally exhausted, it closed in 2008.

In explaining its success, and the commitment of the workforce to the idea of owning and running the colliery themselves, the workers at Tower identified several critical factors. These included a fierce desire to continue to work in mining, with all the traditions of solidarity and camaraderie that this entailed. As pit after pit closed across the south Wales coalfield, the men who refused to leave the industry were moved on to other pits. Tower was the last. As one Tower miner put it: ‘There were hardcore people in Tower who wanted to stay in the mining industry no matter what. Even at their own expense – putting money in themselves. There was a lot of things they could do, they could have let the colliery go and it would have been bought by somebody else like they did in Yorkshire … but you had a hardcore of people here, the most awkward bastards in the British coalfields – us stuck up here in Tower!’

The period when the mine was due to be closed remains highly charged in the memory of these men. The leadership cadre at Tower remember the details of the events, the drama of the decision and the evocative sense of achievement that surrounded the successful purchase of the mine. Glyn Rogers remembers how: ‘The first year under [the workers'] ownership everybody was walking on air because at least one third of the men had been outside in the big bad world, on the dole, and the other two thirds had actually been working in low-paid jobs in a factory on the production line and they had to put their hand up to go to the toilet and various other things, so they didn’t like the outside world and they realised that … it is a lot easier to work in a colliery without somebody standing over you.’

This sort of account of factory work, the quality of alternative employment, the low level of wages and associated levels of tedium and regulation crops up repeatedly in the account that the men at Tower gave of their reasons for ‘taking a chance’ in 1994. It was often linked to ideas of mutual support and solidarity. As another Tower miner put it:

‘You stood together. But if you go outside and what have you, you’ll see men struggling on their own. Underground you wouldn’t see a man struggle, you wouldn’t have to ask anybody to give you hand, they would see you struggling and they come and automatically give you a hand.’

The problem of mining communities

The review report on the closure of Durham’s Horden colliery in 1985 noted that: ‘Serious consequences will result in the local community if (the colliery) is closed, not only on adult employment and youth employment but on the economy generally.’ This proved to be the case and the state of the coal districts became an important issue leading up to the 1997 election. Labour in opposition had not fought the closure of mines but rather argued for the economic regeneration of the mining areas. As such one of the first acts of John Prescott’s new Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR) was to set up a task force to enquire into the conditions of life in the coalfields. Its conclusions on the scale of ‘deprivation and decline’ in these areas, as well as their ‘unique combination of concentrated joblessness, physical isolation, poor infrastructure and severe health problems’, were widely reported.

The findings of the task force built upon research conducted by the Coalfields Communities Campaign, which had charted the impact of the post-1992 closures of specific coal mines. Generally a pattern emerged of ‘pensioning off’ through various kinds of benefits, along with – for the economically active ex-miners – an average reduction in wages of £100 per week. Furthermore, it became clear that in these former mining areas exceptionally high proportions of the labour force were on disability benefit. A statistical analysis of mining wards in England published by the DETR in 2003 demonstrated that the ‘coal district’ impact was discernible 20 years after the closure of a mine and concluded that alongside other basic measures of socio-economic well-being ‘health suffered a systematic causal relationship with an area’s past history in mining’.

By the mid to late 1990s the fact that there was a problem in the old coalfield districts was incontestable. The indices of deprivation published by the DETR indicated that two thirds of coalfield wards could be counted among the 20 per cent most deprived in England. The Welsh data revealed a similar pattern, with the majority of the country’s most deprived wards being located in the old coalfield districts. Repeatedly, as examples of poverty or neglect were sought by the media, it was towards south Wales and the north east of England that they turned – most commonly to Merthyr, Blaenau Gwent and Easington.

At the turn of the century in south Wales and Durham, the old mining areas stood out as having very low proportions of the labour force in work, low levels of wages, high incidences of limiting long term illness, poor housing and poor patterns of education attainment. These features combined to produce high levels of household poverty. All this was compounded in particular places by a high incidence of crime and drug abuse and by a pattern of young men and women leaving to find work elsewhere.

Getting the jobs back

The closure of the coal mines, and the removal of almost half a million high-wage jobs associated with mining, was bound to have a devastating effect. But at the time of the strike, free marketeers talked of releasing labour and other resources that were locked into ‘unproductive’ jobs by state support. Once freed, it was argued, a swathe of productive economic activity would emerge throughout the coalfields. British Coal’s enterprise scheme talked of replacing all of the lost jobs with new high-waged employment.
Twenty years after the 1984-85 strike ended, research from Sheffield Hallam University indicated that no more than 47 per cent of these jobs had been replaced in coalfield districts (Christine Beatty, Stephen Fothergill, and Ryan Powell, ‘Twenty Years On: Has the Economy of the Coalfields Recovered?’ paper presented at Regional Studies Association Conference, Aalborg, 2005). Employment did come to the coalfield districts during Gordon Brown’s boom years but this was not achieved by the guiding hand of the market. Rather it was due to the level of public funds devoted to coalfield regeneration.

This involved the enormous efforts of local authorities, various European Union-funded schemes (including ‘Objective One’ funding for the whole of the south Wales coalfield and most of Yorkshire), the British Government (single regeneration budget, selective area status, enterprise zones etc), the Welsh Assembly (Communities First), English Heritage, the Lottery and latterly the Coalfield Regeneration Trust and Save the Children. The total amount of public funding that has been used in an attempt to compensate for the loss of mining employment has been enormous. In 2004, Dave Feickert, writing in the Guardian, estimated the figure was ‘at least £28 billion. This is nearly half of the North Sea tax revenues of £60 billion collected since 1985.’

What has become clear is that the coalfields were forced to compete for a limited flow of new manufacturing and service projects with urban centres and other more favoured sites. Equally clear is the fact that some coalfields are better placed than others to attract such investment, and that each in turn is affected by the local as well as the national context. As a result, the central coalfield areas of England have been better placed than those in the north east and south Wales to benefit from economic growth.

In Durham, moreover, while there has been significant success in attracting jobs for men to the eastern corridor along the A19, many of these jobs have been taken by people commuting from outside the old coal districts. In south Wales new employment has tended to grow along the corridor of the M4 motorway with limited job opportunities along the northern rim of the old coalfield. And as the financial crisis has bitten, unemployment rates in Durham and South Wales have been among the first to show steep rises. Across both areas more than one in ten men of working age remain on disability benefit; in some places it is as high as one in two.

History fights back

Talking at Durham in 2008, Tyrone O’Sullivan, one of the miners’ leaders at Tower colliery, reflected with sadness on the closure of Tower but with pride over their achievement and the demonstration of ‘the way ordinary people can stand up for themselves and change the world’. Increasingly ideas like these are harder to hold on to. Incrementally, in Durham and south Wales, there has been a shift in political perceptions. As mining became seen as a thing of the past, a change of emphasis has developed into a real forgetting.
But in these places history has a way of fighting back. The Durham miners’ gala continues and is much more than the tourist spectacle some envisaged. In south Wales the global demand for coking coal has led Tata, the owners of Corus, to contemplate a new drift mine employing up to 700 miners, linked to the Port Talbot steel works. A quarter of a century after the great miners’ strike of 1984-85, the next chapter in the history of British miners is still being written.