Society
The north-east, like other Labour heartlands, has stopped voting. It is not apathy, it is anger and it is a strike
Published 24 July 2000
I first went to Murton, a Durham pit town, just before Christmas 1973. The National Union of Mineworkers had arranged that I spend a night in F32, a seam that was not on the visitor's run, and lay a third of a mile beneath the town. At two o'clock in the morning, I reached the coalface where the noise of the drills was incessant and the sting from the dust and water was relieved only when we lay on our bellies and crawled in the tunnel beside the coalface, which was three and a half feet high and not as wide as my shoulders.
The spirit of comradeship was a presence. Hauling hydraulic roof props, as heavy as cannons, the men were like troops bringing up artillery under fire. In every sense - the clipped commands of the deputy, the tense planned assault on a stubborn adversary and the watching out for each other - this was another kind of front line. I have returned to Murton every few years, including the unforgettable day in 1985 when the Great Strike ended and the people marched to the pithead through the mist, heads high, behind the band, with the women marching first. Defeated by the banks and finance companies, Margaret Thatcher's paramilitary force, the leaderships of the Labour Party and the TUC, they represented, for me, Britain at its best.
The other day, I was back in Murton, marching behind the band to the Miners' Gala in Durham. There is not a colliery left, yet 50,000 people filled the city as the bands and banners took most of a day to pass; young people, from mining families and all over the north-east, seemed to be the majority. If community is society's true, enduring strength, it is here in Durham. Much more than nostalgia, it was a celebration of decades of struggle, and a glimpse of its regeneration.
Tony Blair was invited to speak, but he did not come; this is not his fabled Middle England, and when his name was mentioned, the polite contempt in which he is held was evident. About 3,000 people, mostly young, listened to angry speeches against the Blair government. This is no bed of revolution; the Durham pits embraced the fight against Thatcher and were solid to the end, but the allegiance to the Labour Party, in spite of Neil Kinnock's betrayal of the strike, hardly faltered.
Blair has put an end to that. An effete Tory by another name, running a Thatcherite administra-tion, is how the most politically patient and tolerant of people see him now. The penny has finally dropped, they say; lesser-of-two-evilism is not democracy. New Labour's popularity was, like so much else, largely an invention of the metropolitan media; people voted for Blair in 1997 to get rid of the loathed Tories, and his true constituency was the tide of their anger. Now the anger is turning against him. In the past year, the north-east, like other heartlands, has stopped voting; turnouts for local and European elections, and by-elections, hover around 30 per cent and drop as low as 19 per cent. This is not indifference; it is a strike. The public's critical intelligence has never been more tuned to political duplicity and the attendant spinning of journalists; Michael Cockerell's News from Number 10, an incestuous and trivial documentary about what a nice man the Prime Minister's public relations manager really is, merely demonstrated the remoteness of the Blair Tories and their media courtiers.
In the north-east, the voting strike is against the new working poverty that has replaced the coal industry: call-centres, staffed by human battery hens, textile sweatshops, fast-food outlets. Blair's goal of "flexible working" is here, with the longest hours, smallest pay packets and highest poverty in western Europe. Unemployment on some estates reaches 70 per cent. In one former pit village, which never knew drugs, eight teenagers are receiving treatment for heroin addiction.
Nationally, during Blair's first two years, more than half a million people were pushed into poverty. That fact was missing from the government's "annual report", as was the Smith Institute's finding that class divisions were as great under Blair as in the l950s. "The average gap between the daughters of an educated professional father," it said, "and the daughters of an unskilled man who left school at the minimum age represents about three rungs of a six-rung ladder." David Blunkett, the increasingly petulant Secretary of State for Education and former municipal socialist turned privatiser, who has kept the 11-plus and out-Thatchered Thatcher by ending free higher education, recently sneered at the path-breaking work of Nick Davies, the journalist whose Guardian series has vividly revealed that poverty and class remain the cankers in the nation's schools. Davies's "poor journalism" was the truth, a quality missing from most governments - as Claud Cockburn never tired of pointing out ("never believe anything until it is officially denied") - but the omission of which from the Blair administration is almost cult-like.
For example, the figures that Gordon Brown uses in his public relations "crusades" - £40bn is the current favourite - are usually as mythical as the unemployment figures, as false as his third-world debt forgiveness announcements. The "extra £21bn" for the health service was revealed by Panorama to be a fraud. This is, however, an authentic government representing globalised business and global apartheid, promoting socialism for the rich (lowest corporate tax in Europe) and capitalism for the poor, and whose overriding concern is the retention of power. It may succeed next year, but thereafter lesser-of-two-evilism will be dead. Because across the world, people are stirring again, from Seattle to Santiago to Durham, and the brief, bitter age of absurdist claims that history has ended and there are no political choices any more will be over.
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