Most of us would have been brought up to
respect the dead. But sometimes its difficult to respect people that have no
shame about drastically affecting the lives of hundreds of thousands of
ordinary families that ask very little except a living wage and a decent warm
home to bring up their children, and when these children grow up to have a good
chance of employment. Margaret Thatcher was an individual that perhaps give the
impression of caring for her fellow countrymen, but only for a certain section,
and it was not the working class. Her main crime’s against decent hardworking citizens
was instigating a culture of greed and selfishness that lead to the closing
down of industries, the decimation of communities, mass unemployment and the
obliteration of social housing to name but a few. If todays overindulgent
funeral was the end of what has become known as Thatcherism maybe we would have
something to celebrate but her shameful legacy lives on in the unfair policies
of David Cameron and his Cabinet of millionaires, the so called Con/Lib coalition, with its wicked attempts to
annihilate what’s left of the welfare state whilst giving tax breaks to the
rich. Poverty and homelessness are on the increase as will be crime and civil
disobedience already witnessed around this country in the summer of 2011.
To remind me of the terrible injustices that
Thatcher and her government inflicted on the country’s labour force I had a
look at a documentary that Ken Loach made in 1984 about the struggle the keep the
mines open and the industrial action that legally took place to further this
cause. Which Side Are You On (1984)
is a stunning documentary on the UK Miners strike where, it is alleged that
international capital used Thatcher’s Tory government to mount a vicious
campaign of violence, intimidation and pure hatred on the British working
class. The film features the experiences of the miners and their families told
through songs, poems and other art. Loach successfully highlights the fact that
the people involved and supporting this industrial action are ordinary, honest
working individuals, their not shirkers or lazy bastards just people who want
to work. The scariest part of this documentary is the action of the police;
they’re quite clearly shown to side against there own class. We see them
stopping legal pickets (how can you picket through three lines of Bobby’s?) and inciting the strikers by inflicting
sickening violence, appearing far to eager to crack sculls with there ‘sticks’.
Your also notice that many of them did not have the legally required
identification numbers on their uniforms! Five miners were killed on the picket
line during this struggle!
I have also included a piece from Ken Loach from
a recent interviewed he did regarding his views on Margaret Thatcher’s demise when
he spoke about this documentary. You can now see this as part of the extras on
the DVD release of The
Spirit of 45 a documentary that will hopefully be part of the next
programme at the Robert Burns Centre Film Theatre in Dumfries:
----I also had a South Bank Show film, Which Side Are You On?, about the
miners' strike, withdrawn for political reasons. I was desperate to make a
programme about the strike because the news presentation of it showed the
opposite of what was actually happening: the brutality of the police, the
subterfuge of the government, the power of the state, the fact that the other
trade union leaders were turning their backs on the miners. None of this kind
of thing was talked about at the time - it was a parallel universe.
But the strike was also a time of cultural explosion in the mining
areas. In almost every pit I went to there were creating writing groups. Women
were active - suddenly finding that they could stand on their feet and address
a couple of hundred people. It was a time when people stood tall. My film was
about the miners' songs and poems. I made it in a week, and cut it quickly.
Melvyn Bragg came to see it with Nick Elliott, who was a member of the LWT
hierarchy. There was the sound of breath being sucked in through teeth, and
heads were shaken, and I was told that they wouldn't show it. The film included
some amateur footage of police brutality, which hadn't been seen. They told me
that if I cut that, it could be shown.
It was screened at a documentary festival in Florence, where it was
given a prize, and was eventually shown on Channel 4, but the quid pro quo was
that immediately afterwards they screened a programme in which Jimmy Reid, the
shipbuilders' union leader, who had become a newspaper columnist, spoke
directly to camera, attacking Scargill and the miners' leadership.[1]
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