Coal isn’t the climate enemy. It’s part of the solution

We must draw on existing resources as part of an integrated energy policy, not flirt with nuclear, the most dangerous option.

Link to this audio

Coal power is far safer, says former National Union of Mineworkers leader Arthur Scargill in reply to a pro-nuclear article by green campaigner George Monbiot .
Has George Monbiot sold out on his environmental credentials or is he suffering from amnesia? In his article on these pages last Tuesday he states that he has now reached the point where he no longer cares whether or not the answer to climate change is nuclear - let it happen, he says.

Has he not read the evidence presented by environmentalists such as Tony Benn and me at the Windscale, Sizewell and Hinckley Point public inquiries? Is he unaware that nuclear-power generated electricity is the most expensive form of energy - 400% more expensive than coal - or that it received £6bn in subsidies, with £70bn to be paid by taxpayers in decommissioning costs? Is he unaware that there is no known way of disposing of nuclear waste, which will contaminate the planet for thousands of years? Has he forgotten the nuclear disasters at Windscale, Three Mile Island and Chernobyl?

We are facing an economic and political crisis on a scale similar to the Wall Street crash in 1929, the mass unemployment which affected the UK and Europe in the 1930s and the energy crisis in the early 70s.

We are facing a monumental energy crisis, yet we live on an island with more than 1,000 years of coal reserves from which we can provide all the electricity, oil, gas and petrochemicals that people need, without causing harm to the environment. Britain - despite its massive indigenous deep-mine coal reserves - has never had an integrated energy policy based on coal and renewables, and as a consequence we are now facing the worst energy crisis in our history.

Since the end of the second world war, both Labour and Tory governments have sought to replace Britain’s vast coal reserves with a false promise of “cheap” imported oil, “cheap, safe” nuclear energy and “cheap” natural gas - policies that have not only cost the British people billions of pounds, but resulted in the near-extinction of Britain’s deep-mine coal industry, the virtual exhaustion of North Sea gas and oil, and massive economic costs and environmental problems associated with nuclear power.

After the closure of 192 pits since 1980, the loss of 170,000 jobs and the closure or non-operation of nearly 70% of coal-fired power stations on the false premise that they were uneconomic and the worst polluter of carbon dioxide, it is reasonable to expect that there would have been a dramatic fall in CO2 emissions. But in fact CO2 emissions have actually increased - not that surprising, since more than 80% of CO2 emissions are produced by oil and gas from power stations, road transport, industry, shipping and domestic use. That fact alone should cause Monbiot to rethink.
Britain needs an integrated energy policy that will produce 250m tonnes of indigenous deep-mine clean coal per year - from which could be extracted all the electricity, oil, gas and petrochemicals that our people need.
All existing and new coal-fired power stations should be fitted with clean coal technology - including carbon capture that would remove all CO2 - and at the same time we should be developing a massive renewable energy policy based on wind, wave, tide, barrage, hydro, geothermal, solar power, together with insulation, conservation and reforestation.

We must end the import of coal, (currently 43m tonnes a year) which is produced by subsidies, “slave labour” and child labour, and end the import of shale oil, tar sands and other so-called unconventional oils, which are the dirtiest fuels on the planet but are being used to produce electricity.
We still do not know - because of the security and secrecy laws - the full extent of the disaster at Windscale (Sellafield) in 1957 or Three Mile Island in the US in 1979, but we do know that the incidence of cancer and leukaemia - particularly among children - is 10% higher in or around nuclear power stations, and we know from experts such as Robert Gale - who treated the victims at Chernobyl in 1986 - that more than 100,000 will die over a 30-year period.

We need an end to all nuclear-powered electricity generation, the most dangerous and uneconomic method of producing electricity. We need an end to deforestation, which is the cause of 20% of CO2 emissions worldwide, and an end to biofuel development - which not only produces substantial CO2 emissions but is causing mass starvation and higher food prices throughout the world.
Only by the introduction of a real integrated energy policy based on clean coal technology and renewable energies, can we begin to meet the needs of people in the UK and throughout the world.

I challenge George Monbiot to test out which is the most dangerous fuel - coal or nuclear power. I am prepared to go into a room full of CO2 for two minutes, if he is prepared to go into a room full of radiation for two minutes.

· Arthur Scargill is the leader of the Socialist Labour party. He was president of the National Union of Mineworkers 1982-2002.

· He is now lifelong Honorary President of the NUM.

Article is from the Guardian newspaper of 8/8/8

NEW LABOUR AND THE RISE OF FINANCE CAPITAL.

For background information, in view of the ‘credit crisis’ developments in the capitalist economy, we are reissuing an article from 2001 by Ian Johnson which traces the rise of finance capital in the 20th Century.


When we talk about finance capital we are talking about the banks, insurance companies, and other financial institutions and their representatives, in short, we are talking about ‘the City’.

This section of society does not manufacture anything, it does not build or create anything, yet it is now the most dominant sector in the U.K. Its chief objective is the movement of money in search of the biggest profit margin in the quickest possible time.

In the early part of the 20th century the financial sector was subjected to government controls and confined its activities to the sterling area of the Commonwealth, indeed, even through the latter part of the 1940s the stock market and merchant banking was at best static, and at worst transactions were actually in decline. In the 1950s the financial sector tried to break free from government controls but achieved only partial success. It was not until the late 1960s that the City really began to expand with the development of London as an off‑shore base for American money fleeing the low interest rates in the United States.

FINANCIAL INSTABILITY

This was followed in 1971 by the Tory Government removing controls on credit growth which meant that market forces, namely interest rates, would now control the growth of credit in the system. This led to an end to limits on lending and meant that banking would have greater control over British industry and the economy as a whole. This coincided with the ending of the post‑war Bretton Woods agreement which had backed paper money with real value by linking it to the gold standard at the rate of 35 dollars equalling an ounce of gold. Now however, paper money was being printed and was not backed by any real value whatsoever.

Between 1979 and 1982 Margaret Thatcher's Tory Government removed all remaining controls from the financial sector and left it virtually unregulated and unchallenged.

Thatcher abolished restrictions on bank lending and hire purchase transactions and lifted all controls over building society lending, thus starting them off on the road to becoming banks and creating the basis for the great credit explosion in the late 1980s.
The Tory Government crucially abolished all exchange controls with the immediate effect that capital previously invested in the U.K. began going abroad in search of greater and quicker profits. There has been hardly any investment in U.K. manufacturing since exchange controls were abolished.

The dominance of finance capital became obvious in the 1980s when manufacturing output fell by 25%, when house building plummeted and thousands slept on the street, yet the City boomed. The banks made so much money in the '80s that even the Tories eventually levied a national 'windfall tax', though this was compensated for by tax allowances on bad overseas loans.
The Tories and the financial sector were responsible for the squandering of North Sea oil revenue during this period, with not one penny invested in U.K. manufacturing. The City wanted to use it to recreate their earlier role of financiers of the world, and the Tories believed that North Sea oil had made sterling a petro‑currency which signalled the days of manufacturing were over and that Britain was on a path to becoming a post‑industrial service economy.

THE GREAT RIP OFF

The looting of the British economy for the benefit of the few reached its most obscene proportions with the privatisation process of state assets which was first elaborated in the Tory election manifesto of 1983 and which resulted in the following years with the privatisation of coal, steel, gas, electricity, water, railways, telecommunications, shipbuilding and also took part of the oil and road haulage industries. This is not to mention the devastation of council housing that took place in the same period.

The sell‑off of state assets was overseen by City merchant banks who acted as 'advisors' and received literally hundreds of millions of pounds in fees for this 'service'. This period will rightly go down in history as one of the great rip‑offs of all time.

Alongside this privatisation came the reform of the National Health Service, schools and universities, prisons, the police force and justice departments and their regulating authorities, with the plan being to remove them from the control of democratically elected local authorities and place them under the control of unelected quangos and Next Step Agencies. By such means the market mechanisms of compulsory competitive tendering, performance related and profit related pay and other such devices, were introduced into all public services.


SOCIAL DEMOCRACY
Of course none of the above would have been possible without an attack on the traditional defensive organisations of the working class ‑ the trade unions. The destruction of the trade union movement was a clear objective of the Thatcher regime and resulted in confrontations with virtually all sections of workers. Indeed, the destruction of manufacturing and the move to a service based industry made it imperative for the ruling class to introduce anti‑trade union laws to shackle workers and reduce their ability to fight back.
That they were partially successful is a reflection not on the fighting capacity of the working class but on its social democratic leaders.

With a few honourable exceptions these politicians and trade union leaders functioned as policemen for the capitalist state against their own members. These careerists and opportunists are tied to capitalism, their status and significant salaries are dependent upon it, and forced into a situation where they have to choose, they will always come down on the side of the present system.

The introduction of new employment law effectively weakened the trade unions and created a more individualist labour market, moreover a labour market that would be open to the whims of a free market economy, modelled on the American labour market with its high levels of mobility, downward flexibility of wages and low employer costs.

As a result of these policies there has been an increase in part‑time and contract work and an ending of any traditional career with its accompanying security. Furthermore, many low‑skilled workers now earn less than the minimum needed to support a family, resulting in the diseases associated with poverty, TB, rickets and others, returning.
At the same time the restrictions on welfare entitlements, particularly with unemployment benefits such as the Job Seekers Allowance introduced in 1996, are designed to compel recipients to accept work at market‑driven rates.

NEW LABOUR

It was the finance sector that Blair's New Labour courted for over a year prior to the 1997 general election. They had to convince the financiers that they were the Party for them, and that they would continue to create the framework where they could operate freely. New Labour people threw so many banquets for these financial parasites that the City's nickname for the Labour Party is, 'the prawn cocktail party.'

Members of the then Shadow Cabinet began touring the dining rooms of the City of London assuring their hosts that Labour had no intention of bringing back exchange controls and had no intention of doing anything they would not approve of.

Stuart Bell MP went to New York on a trip paid for by Kleinwort Benson Securities to reassure Wall Street that the 'financial markets will be safe in the hands of a future Labour government.' (Sunday Telegraph 17th Dec. 1995). Consequently, by the beginning of 1996, the financial pages of the newspapers were full of articles in praise of Labour's policies. Thus the stage was set for New Labour to not only continue Tory policies but to take them farther than even the most right wing Tory dared to imagine.

The Labour Party had concluded that the only way to get elected was to accept the agenda of the Americans and the City, to be pro Nato, pro EEC and pro non regulation of the City.

Due to the massive exportation of British capital, which began during the Thatcher years, Britain now has the largest overseas investment after America, and this will dictate that they continue to support American political and military hegemony as the best way to protect those interests. Indeed, all the key Labour personnel are linked to the United States, with the intent to preserve the so‑called Anglo‑American special relationship, to compensate for British capitalism's long term decline.

Ian Johnson.

Reflections on the Economic Meltdown by an Ordinary Joe.

$700 Billion, possibly double that, of US public funds given over to bailing out corrupt, failed, usurial fat cats. Unimaginable sums, trillions of dollars! So runs the US regime’s plan to rescue the financial markets. It has been described as a financial lifeboat. However, as a salvage plan, it makes the Titanic safety procedures look positively trustworthy and sound.

I learned a new phrase recently – Credit Default Swaps (CDS). CDS trading is the epitome of parasitic capitalism and is an illustration of why the big international investment banks are up to their ears in the financial muck. A CDS is a credit derivative that whose value derives from the credit risk on an underlying bond, loan or other financial asset. A derivative is a “financial instrument” whose value changes in response to the changes in underlying variables such as inflation, exchange rates, stock/share prices, interest rates etc. The more one looks into the subject the more it becomes apparent that the management of financial trading is intentionally complex with a nefarious nature akin to a mafia run “numbers” game. CDS trading is the most widely traded credit derivative “product” and was valued by the Bank for International Settlements at $62.2 Trillion at the end of 2007 (up from $28.9 Trillion in December 2006). Other commentators have recently valued all derivative “worth” as high as $480 Trillion. This is said to be ten (10) times global GDP!

These mind bending figures illustrate just how feeble and flimsy George W. Bush’s “lifeboat” is. His (?) gamble is that by nationalising the relatively very small bad housing/mortgage debt this will “free” up banks to release credit averting a much wider impact and crash in the wider economy. It’s very much a gamble and the odds are long. In fact it’s a rank outsider.You wouldn’t back it if it was a horse! One way or another we are moving into very difficult times where the working class will be expected to shoulder a burden unknown in modern times.

Arthur Scargill was first to point out the nature and depth of this economic crisis (you can see and hear him for yourself on a series of videos available on You Tube). As Arthur pointed out, we are heading for an economic disaster of a scale as bad as or worse than the 1930’s.

We are heading toward interesting and simultaneously dangerous and opportune times for revolutionary socialists. Capitalism, as we’ve known it for decades, is in a terminal state. Social Democratic parties have no answers and are in decline everywhere while the fascist right is a growing threat across Europe. Only a party with socialist solutions can offer working people a vision and a possibility of a better world. Here in this country Socialist Labour has the policies, and also the organisation able to take us forward to socialism.

There is much work to be done.

24th September 2008

FIGHTING ANTI-UNION LAWS - TRADE UNIONS HAVE A CHOICE

(This article is based on a speech made by Arthur Scargill to the National Executive Committee of the Prison Officers’ Association on 17 October, 2007)

In Britain, the trade union Movement has long struggled against a malaise that can only be described as a ‘collaborationist tendency’. This tendency is most obvious in the Movement’s failure to deal with Britain’s oppressive anti-trade union laws.

Despite the sharpening economic and political crisis within our society, collusion has now reached a point where the Trades Union Congress and many union leaderships, not seen as fighting heart and soul for workers’ rights, are increasingly considered irrelevant by the British people.

The oppressive nature of Britain’s anti-union laws depends on this collusion. Therefore, any serious discussion about challenging the legislation must also examine forms of serious resistance to it.

An analysis that places itself within the boundaries of these laws and does not consider a strategy for confronting them is futile.

Let’s start by looking at our own past. Contrast the British trade union Movement’s reactions today with the way organised workers confronted anti-union laws and anti-union employers in the 1970s and 80s.


Study the great campaign against the Tories’ Industrial Relations Act in 1971; the miners’ strike of 1972, followed by the dockers’ strike, the imprisonment and then the triumphant release, through workers’ direct action, of the Pentonville Five, and the building workers’ strike of the same period. In 1974 came another miners’ strike – which led to the defeat of a Tory Government.

The determination of workers that created conditions for opposing the 1971 Industrial Relations Act fuelled, in turn, the outburst of subsequent action. And, since we’re discussing the law, remember that in the summer of 1972, it was mass unofficial action which forced the State to free the Pentonville Five.

The miners’ strike earlier that year had been a turning point, sparking support from thousands of other workers. This terrified not only the Tory Government of the day but scared the living daylights out of right-wing leaders within the Labour Party, the TUC and a number of trade unions.

In 1972, just as today, leading figures in our Movement were warning: ‘Don’t break the law!’. It’s an old theme, used many times against workers in the past such as in the 1921 miners’ strike, the General Strike of 1926 and other major disputes.

I certainly heard that warning in the miners’ strike of 1972, when I was deeply involved in mass picketing, especially at Birmingham’s Saltley Gates, a historic battle which proved what workers’ solidarity could do.

It is often forgotten (perhaps no longer widely known) that national leaders of major trade unions, including the engineers’ AUEW and the transport workers’ TGWU, refused to sanction their members’ taking secondary action in support of the NUM at Saltley.

However, AUEW and TGWU members in the West Midlands – having listened to the miners’ plea for solidarity - did with the backing of regional leaderships take action. So did workers in other unions, and by supporting the NUM at Saltley achieved a victory that rocked the entire British Establishment.

Two years later, the 1974 miners’ strike led to the downfall of Edward Heath’s Tory Government, a victory for working people that should have seen Britain’s Labour Movement focussing firmly on Socialist aims.

That didn’t happen. Instead we had the Social Contract, in which a Labour Government held down workers’ wages, with five years of unprincipled compromise by the TUC and union leaderships paving the way for the Tories’ return in 1979.

This betrayal didn’t come out of the blue. Even amidst the industrial victories of the early 70s there had been a shadow of things to come. In the aftermath of the historic building workers’ strike of 1972, our Movement had failed to prevent the jailing of the Shrewsbury Three on trumped-up charges of ‘conspiracy’.

Then, during the years of the Labour Government, the Grunwick workers, battling for basic rights and recognition in 1977/78, were also abandoned by their own union and by the TUC.

Shrewsbury and Grunwick taught many of us (and should have taught us all) two lessons. First, through their courage and class commitment, the workers in both struggles provided an example that inspires us still. Second, their fate offered clear evidence that workers in struggle can only be protected by a trade union fightback.


By abandoning the Shrewsbury Three and the Grunwick workers, elements within the British trade union movement were, alongside their collusion over the Social Contract, laying further track for Margaret Thatcher’s advance.

The struggles of the 70s alarmed the Tories to such an extent that well before they won the 1979 General Election they had planned a programme of draconian anti-union laws – specifically aimed at preventing another Saltley or any similar action taking place on a national scale.

Yet even after the Tories returned to power in 1979, events continued to prove that oppressive legislation – backed by the courts - isn’t enough on its own to keep workers down. Oppression depends to a very great extent on submission.

As anti-union legislation became more oppressive through the 80s and into the 90s, the TUC and trade union leaders increasingly refrained from giving, or refused to give, effective assistance to workers in struggle. Instead of spear-heading resistance to these vicious laws, the TUC argued that the only course of action was to wait and work for the election of a Labour Government which, it claimed, would repeal the legislation.

Of course, New Labour did nothing of the sort – and since 1997 the trade union Movement has continued to submit to even further legal measures brought in by the Tony Blair/Gordon Brown axis. Over the past decade, the TUC not only opposed calls from the NUM and Bakers’ Union to defy anti-union laws, but has actually advised unions on compliance.

Nevertheless, fairly recent history reveals that for trade unionists there is an alternative to this collusion.

FIGHTING BACK

In 1981, the NUM’s (then) Right-wing national leadership was forced to support unofficial strike action against pit closures – without a ballot – because our ferocious coalfield campaigning was too strong to resist. Faced with wildfire strike action, the Thatcher Government – taken unawares – had to make what the press labelled a ‘U-turn’ and, for the time being, stop its pit closure programme.

The key industrial disputes over the years since occurred because trade unionists were prepared to fight for basic rights against employers who had the full backing of the State and the courts. Had these disputes, in turn, had full and effective backing from the TUC and the trade union Movement, Britain today would be a better place in which to live.

Among these struggles, all of which are important, were the miners’ strike of 1984/85 and the two epic battles for trade union rights and recognition by Britain’s printworkers: in 1983 at Warrington against would-be newspaper magnate Eddie Shah, and, from January, 1986, the year-long fight against Rupert Murdoch at Wapping.

In the historic miners’ strike of 1984/85, one of the greatest clashes ever seen between workers and the State occurred at British Steel’s coke plant at Orgreave, South Yorkshire, in the Summer of 1984.

The police (together with members of the armed forces in police uniform) used paramilitary tactics; armed with shields, batons, dogs and horses, they fought to prevent a repetition of Saltley in 1972. Some 10,000 pickets faced 8,200 paramilitary-style police under orders that Orgreave should be open to produce and transport coke, no matter what the cost.

Yet in spite of this organised State force, the miners’ pickets, supported by trades councils and rank-and-file members of other unions, forced Orgreave’s management to suspend operations on 18 June, 1984 – just as they had done in Birmingham on 6 February, 1972, prior to finally closing Saltley four days later, on 10 February.

However (unlike the Tories), the Labour and trade union Movement including sadly elements within the NUM Area leaderships had not taken to heart the true lessons of Saltley.

Although Orgreave was closed by pickets on 18 June, those pickets were called off by NUM Area leaders the following day, thus allowing British Steel to recommence operations.

That this could happen was due to the NUM’s federal structure – ours was not and is not one Union but a federation of autonomous organisations - which helps to explain other events during that strike.

Afterwards, critics within and outside the Labour Movement argued that the battle of Orgreave highlighted the ‘failure’ of mass picketing. They were completely wrong.

What occurred at Orgreave was a failure to mass picket – calling people off after an initial breakthrough, instead of intensifying pressure until the plant’s operations were brought to a conclusive halt.

Responsibility for this also rests with leaderships in the wider trade union Movement which held back their own members from coming to the assistance of the miners as workers in Birmingham had done in February, 1972.

Lack of support from others can lead to a paralysing fear of isolation in the hearts of those in struggle, and can have profound consequences for any dispute.

THINKING BEHND THE LAW

Fear is a tool wielded against trade unions today by Britain’s Labour Government which like the Tories supports the Free Market and globalisation. Using the so-called ‘free’ movement of capital, company operations and human labour, while implementing further privatisation for maximum profit – all this depends on high unemployment and low wages. These conditions require submissive workers. The purpose of anti-union legislation is to sustain these conditions.

The ‘employment’ laws introduced since the advent of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 – and implemented by Tories and Labour ever since – are in part based on the Taft-Hartley Act introduced in the United States in 1948. This iniquitous Act was a key component in Cold War politics.

Its main elements were (1) the banning of mass picketing in industrial disputes; (2) the banning of secondary boycotts and sympathy strikes; (3) making trade unions legally liable for any strikes by their members not within the bounds of a written contract, and (4) giving the government the right to seek injunctions preventing strikes deemed to be against the ‘national interest’ – an all-embracing concept which effectively gave the government of the United States the right to ban strike action.

Even more stringent reforms were called for by a Right-wing pressure group known as ‘The Right to Work’. Its equivalent in Britain was ‘The Freedom Association’.

Many trade unionists will remember or be aware of the role played by the Freedom Association in the Grunwick dispute of 1977/78. It actively supported the owner of a North London film processing plant against his employees who sought decent working conditions and wanted their rights to trade union membership and recognition.

Without effective, practical support from the trade union Movement, the Grunwick workers could not prevail. There is a terrible irony in the fact that, at that time, giving effective solidarity would not have meant unions ‘breaking the law’.

Section 13 of the 1974 Trade Union and Labour Relations Act provided protection in line with the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. That protection was subsequently lost. Those who were already drafting anti-union laws for the next Tory Government took heart from the way the hierarchy of the trade union Movement abandoned the women and men at Grunwick.


Today, if a trade union ‘induces’ workers to take industrial action in breach of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act, 1992, those involved are immediately in breach of their contract of employment and in breach of the law.

NO RIGHT TO STRIKE IN BRITAIN

In Britain, there is no ‘right to strike’. Strike action can only be taken here provided members of a trade union accept and comply with the web of restrictions laid down by anti-union laws.

A strike can only be called provided a trade union holds a postal ballot, and that can only take place within constraints which resemble an obstacle course unparalleled in the Western world.

A union balloting its members must make clear on the ballot paper that if members vote in favour of strike action they may be in breach of their contract of employment – i.e., they do not have a right to strike.

In the event that workers do vote in favour of strike action, that action is only legally effective for eight weeks – the legislation then requires a union to hold a further ballot.

Alongside this, the legislation contains two important clauses which further undermine a trade union no matter how compliant it is prepared to be:

The law makes clear that any worker can refuse to belong to a trade union.


The law will protect from disciplinary action union members who continue to work during a strike – even though that strike has been called in full compliance with legislation.

A VIOLATION OF INTERNATIONAL LAW

The anti-union legislation introduced by the Tories after 1979, maintained and expanded since 1997 by the Labour Government, is in direct conflict with the United Nations Charter, and a clear violation of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) Conventions 87 and 98.

The UN Charter and ILO Conventions make clear that trade union rights are human rights and must not be subject to outside interference from government. Trade unions have the right to draw up their own constitutions and rule books, free from interference.

The British Government is indeed a signatory to both the UN Charter and ILO Conventions, yet, like the Tories, Labour ignores international law – just as it did when invading Iraq.

The British Government is determined to prevent workers from organising, taking industrial action in support of their own wages and conditions or taking solidarity action to support other workers.

AN EMPLOYER’S CHARTER

On the other hand, a British employer – or employer with a British base — is free to close down a plant, factory, or office, as we’ve seen increasingly over recent years with a widespread transfer of operations to Poland, Burma, India or China. Thousands of workers in Britain have thus lost their jobs, yet no action can be taken against bosses whose hunger for greater profit robs workers, their families, communities and regional economies.

I’ve already described the forces deployed to keep open the Orgreave plant in South Yorkshire during the miners’ strike of 1984/85. A few years after the strike, British Steel announced that Orgreave was to be closed. Upon hearing the news, I immediately telephoned the police, asking them to come straightaway and stop those who were forcing the plant to shut. To my surprise, I was told it had nothing to do with the forces of law and order.

I reminded South Yorkshire Police that this reaction contrasted sharply with the deployment of over 8,000 riot police in the summer of 1984 when the NUM was seeking to only temporarily close the plant. Now that British Steel intended to shut it for good, there was not one single police officer to be seen.

Employers’ impunity is clearly very different from the consequences facing a trade union which takes action to prevent closures and job losses.

As I know from personal experience, such a union and its officials can be taken to court; its assets can be frozen by an order of sequestration – and, as happened without precedent to the National Union of Mineworkers in 1984, its entire operation can be put into the hands of a Receiver.


The NUM was taken to court through a variety of legal routes, when the legislation was not as comprehensive as it later became. The State set out to destroy us if possible; the NUM’s response should have been used by the entire trade union Movement as a template for industrial relations strategy.


SEQUESTRATION

The threat of sequestration has become a handy tool for courts in ruling that a trade union is acting contrary to ‘employment’ legislation. The possible appointment of a sequestrator terrifies most trade union leaders, primarily because sequestration means that a union’s assets will be frozen, no expenses will be available, officials’ cars will be taken away and any accommodation including a union’s offices can be occupied by the sequestrator.

However, I can tell you from experience that provided a trade union is prepared to confront the law while dealing with the consequences of so doing, sequestration can be rendered ineffectual.

There is nothing, for example, to prevent third parties paying all the bills of a trade union during a period of sequestration. And at the end of a dispute, when a sequestrator has been discharged, there is nothing to prevent that trade union making donations to all organisations, including other unions, which have paid bills on its behalf.

It has been done.


RECEIVERSHIP

Receivership is something else – far more vicious than sequestration. Ironically, the appointment of a receiver to take over an independent trade union was not possible prior to 1974, when lawyers drawing up employment legislation for the newly-elected Labour Government omitted, in error, provision for immunity from receivership for trade unions.

Only once have the courts appointed a receiver to take over a trade union: in November, 1984, in the miners’ strike. The NUM had already been put in sequestration, but for the British State that wasn’t enough.

Receivership is about more than freezing assets. It is about taking control of an organisation. It is a replacement. In the case of the NUM, the Receiver’s purpose was to become to all intents and purposes ‘the union’.

PRINCIPLES OF RESISTANCE

The principles behind the NUM’s strategies in 1984/85 were articulated in a paper written (in December, 1988) by leading trade union barrister John Hendy QC, who referred to this quote from the great lawyer and human rights campaigner, D. N. Pritt QC:

‘The state of the law in a capitalist society is a reflection of the ability of the working class to organise against it. The law reflects the balance, at any moment of time, between the power of capitalism and the organised power of labour’.

John Hendy QC went on to write (and it is worth quoting him at some length): ‘It follows therefore that only resistance can hold the line against further depredations and only pressure can advance and improve the position. Concessions and capitulation will only encourage further legal and ideological attack. Indeed, mere lack of resistance encourages further attack’.

He wrote: ‘The law itself may be difficult to understand but the fact of its unfairness and injustice is not so difficult to explain and understand….It is necessary to draw on our own rich history of resistance to unjust laws. The Cambridge tailors in 1725; the Tolpuddle Martyrs in 1824; the freeing of the Betteshanger miners’ leaders imprisoned after the prosecution of 1,000 for going on strike in 1941; the freeing of the Pentonville Dockers in 1972; the struggle against the Industrial Relations Act from 1970 – 1974 and the ability of the National Union of Mineworkers to continue their strike unabated for one year in 1984-5, in spite of being sequestrated, being in receivership, having some 40 injunctions against them and over 10,000 of their members prosecuted – all those are powerful examples without even looking overseas.

‘….Unquestioning acceptance of the “rule of law” and the subject of compliance with unjust laws need to be debated within the Movement and for this debate, history and jurisprudence must play their part.

‘…Sir Thomas More was executed for refusing to accept the Act of Supremacy…[while] the Nuremburg Trials accepted that there were higher principles which men are under a duty to conform to than the law.’

PRINCIPLES IN ACTION

In October 1984, the NUM was found guilty of contempt of court, as was its President. The only way to purge ones contempt is to beg the court to accept an apology, throw oneself upon the court’s mercy – and pay the fine.

As NUM President, I refused to apologise, nor would I pay any court-imposed fine, although some mystery figure paid it without my authority on my behalf. No mystery figure, though, could by proxy purge my ‘contempt’, and I remain in contempt to this day.

More important, the National Union of Mineworkers managed to endure the imposition of a receiver from November 1984 until July 1986.

Today, over 20 years later, I have nothing but contempt for all who construct and seek to enforce anti-trade union legislation; I have nothing but contempt for court orders that seek to impose unjust laws upon trade unions.

I am one trade union leader who defied the law and continued to defy it until the day I retired as President of the NUM.

STRUGGLE DEMANDS SOLIDARITY

I must stress that, under attack from sequestration and receivership, the NUM had vital support from a number of trade unions. However, I believe that our struggle, waged on behalf of not only the miners but all workers, demanded that support.


We should have had it from the TUC. Imagine what would have happened in our great strike or in any other key trade union battle of the past 25 years if all trade unions together with the TUC had been prepared first to adopt policies of non-compliance with unjust laws – and then to defy those laws if the State threatened to use them.

Any British trade union leader taking such a stance would be following in the footsteps of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the Suffragettes, Mahatma Ghandi, Nelson Mandela and all the brave men and women whose courage in the face of oppressive legislation should inspire us to act.

The State and its laws can indeed sequester your car, your office, your home – but they cannot sequestrate your mind or your faith: that is your power and their weakness.

Such power, however, is inter-dependent on collective action. And what are trade unionists and their unions to do today, given that the TUC complies with laws that prohibit effective action?


AN ALTERNATIVE ORGANISATION

In order to challenge the ongoing destruction of jobs, basic and manufacturing industry; in order to challenge low wages and poor conditions; in order to establish or re-establish decent standards of health and safety – and for many other reasons, I suggest that we need to establish an alternative to the TUC.

We need a national trade union centre capable of defiance and willing to defy unjust laws that have been crafted to cripple trade unions; a centre prepared to give assistance – including industrial action - when necessary to workers in dispute.

To be effective, such an alternative centre would have to be firmly committed to Socialist policies, calling unequivocally for the abolition of capitalism which oppresses workers around the world and here at home.

Exploitation, poverty and ignorance can only be eradicated through common and social ownership and control of the means of production, distribution and exchange.

Of course, serious discussion about such an alternative requires a fundamental shift within Britain’s trade unions. One way to begin this shift is for unions to affiliate to the Socialist Labour Party: unequivocally Socialist, unequivocally committed to fighting against anti-union laws.

Refusal to comply with repressive, unjust anti-union laws that violate the UN Charter is in the best traditions of the British trade union Movement. On the other hand, compliance with and submission to these laws inevitably lead to defeat and despair.

Trade unionism was built out of workers’ demands for decent wages and conditions, and out of an anger against exploitation that springs from the needs of the human spirit. I, for one, would rather defy oppression and be proud, than comply with it and be ashamed. Trade unions have a choice.

Ends