STRIKE!

From Kate Sharpley Library

Talking to Dave Morris about the Miners Strike, Wapping and Poland : A transcript of a conversation [April 2024]

KSL: What can you tell me about your involvement in the miners strike?

DM: Well, can’t say I was heavily involved, but I did some bits and pieces. I suppose the background is that in the ’70s and early ’80s, I was involved with London Workers Group (I was a postman) which was a solidarity organisation in London, amongst workers. I tried to be amongst workers and supporting strikes and stuff. And then in the early ’80s, I got involved with London Greenpeace. I was less involved with London Workers Group, which kind of gradually fizzled out and, by the time the miners strike started, was more of a kind of publishing group with the newspaper Workers Playtime. I got involved with London Greenpeace in the early ’80s, and as a result of that, interesting enough, quite a few of us that were involved with Stop The City, which was an anti-capitalist series of protests in the city of London, quite a few of us in Haringey, formed Haringey Community Action, which was active, I think from about ’84 onwards, for a few years. It was a forerunner of Haringey Solidarity Group, which is still active today, and I’m still involved with it, which is interesting because, you know, that’s about 40 years of continuous coordinated radical anarchistic activity in Haringey.

And the other thing I was involved with was - I was no longer a postie in the ’80s, and I was unemployed, and I was involved with Tottenham Claimants’ Union, and the Federation of Claimants’ Unions, and we were a very active group in the 1980s in Tottenham. So that’s kind of where I’m coming from.

KSL: You said London Greenpeace supported people in Church Warsop?

DM: Yes, moving on to the actual miners strike stuff. So, in no particular order, I’ll just go through a few things. London Greenpeace have been involved with, well, initiated and was heavily involved with Stop The City anti-capitalist protests, which started in the first one, September ’83, 1983, and then we had maybe the largest one, about 3,000 people trying to blockade the City of London, and disrupt the workings of the City in March, on March 29th, 1984. Obviously, the miners strike had started at that time, but only just started. And as the year wore on, I suppose everybody in the country was thinking, ‘how do we orientate to this very important thing that’s going on, and how can we contribute in some way?’ London Greenpeace was quite a dynamic group at that time, but it was more like a network of people in London, and some of us, - I can’t say we were enthusiastic about the coal industry, but we were enthusiastic about the general principle of supporting workers on strike and communities. And so what we decide to do is to support, well, first of all, we went to visit, (myself and Helen Steel, we became the McLibel two, in the McLibel trial) but we hitchhiked up to Nottinghamshire. I’m not sure how we got contacts, and we went to visit the women’s group in Church Warsop. We thought that was a good - obviously, there were miners support groups, and there was a lot of collections and activity around the miners’ strike, but we thought twinning with the Women’s Action Group. They were very proud to call themselves Women’s Action Group, not women’s support group, in Church Warsop in Nottingham. And so we went to visit them and stayed with them for a few days, and brought some money that we had collected. We thought that not many people were collecting in the environmentalist movement for the miners, so that’s what we were encouraging people [to do], we were putting out leaflets. There was no email, of course, at the time. We used to write to a hell of a lot of people, London Greenpeace, in the ’80s, like maybe 60, 70, 80 a week, would write to us, and we’d send back a whole range of leaflets, and then we did a special appeal for support for the Church Warsop Women’s Action Group. And I think the leaflets that we put out, which I couldn’t find a copy of, were very much orientated to, you know, supporting the communities in their war - with the battle - with the government in particular.

I think I might have visited a couple of times, and then later on during the strike, I’ve visited with somebody else, Doncaster, Hatfield Main, because I vaguely knew Dave Douglas, who was obviously NUM activist there. I think he’s on the National Committee, and he was involved with the hit squads, picketing, mass picketing, from Yorkshire, around that region of the country. I remember visiting Doncaster and staying with him, on behalf of London Greenpeace, and I remember chatting with some of the miners, telling me how they used to go out during the night time, and dig up vegetables from the fields, because they were so hungry, and one of them said, ‘we’re more like farmers than miners these days’, which I thought was a good [point] - that stuck in my mind.

Sticking with London Greenpeace, I’ll come to Haringey in a minute. Stop The City - the March event had been a great success, which was a completely unique event, all day event, 12 hour long from six in the morning, to six at night, with all kinds of autonomous actions, and occupations, and leafleting, and street theatre, and marches, and slow bike rides, and all kinds of stuff.

And one of the things that I tried, but not very successfully, to get London Workers Group, to do, [was] actually systematically try and make links with city workers during Stop The City. But it was quite difficult to do, because they [in the LWG] couldn’t quite grasp the new form of mass protest that was being developed there [and the opportunities it presented]. But there was mass leafleting during the Stop The City events, I mean tens of thousands of leaflets to city workers were given out, so it wasn’t an event that was against the workers in the city, it was trying to get them on side to challenge capitalism. Later on, after that, we thought ‘we’ve got to get the miners, we’ve got to somehow link up with these anti-capitalist protests in the cities’, because part of Stop The City was to encourage similar anti-capitalist mobilizations in financial districts in other cities. And I remember there were some, I remember going to one in Leeds, I can’t remember exactly where else, there were these kind of attempted combination of protests and direct action.

Stop The City events were organised by open meetings, we were getting 50, 60, 70 people attending meetings to organise the Stop The City protests. And some people, I think, although I wasn’t involved with it, had a kind of, ‘what can we do to try and engage the miners and miners support groups?’ in the next big one, which was due for September, 1984, which was obviously right in the middle of the miners’ strike. Unfortunately, there was a Stop The City in May 1984 that wasn’t really properly planned, and it was a bit of a disaster, which was a bit of a setback in terms of the momentum that we’d been building up. However, there were mass arrests in the Stop The City, all the Stop The City’s involved the police arresting hundreds of people. So, there was still high hopes for the September Stop The City. Anyway, this group of people want to do a leaflet to hand out in coal fields, miners support groups and mass demonstrations that were happening in the cities in support of miners and so on. And I think this group occupied the CEGB headquarters in London. The Central Electricity Generating Board and they had a massive banner unfurled that said, I think it said ‘miners power not nuclear power.’ So there was actually quite a big anti-nuclear movement against nuclear power and nuclear energy, which really started in the late ’70s, which I was heavily involved with. And there’s also all the anti-cruise missile protests at Greenham and other military bases. So, there was a feeling that we should be linking up these kind of movements and seeing where there’s an overlap in agendas or aims or whatever. And so, yeah, ‘miners power not nuclear power’, really good occupation and we put that on the front of a leaflet calling on everybody to come to the city, but we were handing this out specifically in mining areas. Well, when I say we, you know, it was encouraged. I don’t know how much were given out all over the country. I mean, I certainly gave out some, I remember going to the coal fields in Kent and so on.

So, now what I heard, and you probably need to speak to Dave Douglass about this, was that there was a discussion. By September, the union had control of what was happening, not complete control, but they had control over the funds, what events that they, the NUM, would support because they were also paying people’s petrol money, miners to go off to different towns to collect. And so, to attend an event in London, in any kind of significant numbers, we would have had to have had NUM backing the idea. Now, Dave Douglass told me that there was a discussion at the national level about whether to support Stop The City, even if just to go along and collect money. And for whatever reason, it didn’t happen because they had to pick and choose, you know, what subsidies they gave for transport and so on. Also, of course, the political parties that were influential in the support groups and in the NUM, mainly the Communist Party, but other parties were more active in the support groups. You know, they weren’t interested in a major anti-capitalist protest, not run by themselves, basically. So, the long and short of it is, you know, it didn’t materialize, but it was an effort.

Apart from that, before I go on, I suppose Haringey is relevant here because Haringey Community Action and Tottenham Claimants Union were both supporters of the Haringey Miners Support Group. Initially, in the early months of the strike, things were fairly fluid and spontaneous and sort of reasonably sensible, but then a certain point - I mean, I had miners staying in my house in Tottenham regularly, and then the Communist Party, I think, which was basically running the miners support group through the trades council, they controlled the trades council, which they did pretty much very effectively until the Soviet Union collapsed and then the Communist Party collapsed. And then the SWP’s now the main party influential in trades councils - still exists in Haringey, but traditionally the trades council would host those kind of support efforts. And so at a certain point, they obviously made a decision, ‘we’re not having miners staying with anybody outside of, our carefully chosen select party members or others - union activists or whatever’. So that stopped, although interesting enough, when the National Union of Seafarers strike in Dover was going on, I had seafarers staying in my house.

An interesting digression is that this was the first that I’d been aware of strike support, organised systematic strike support efforts in this country. And it became a model for future strikes, obviously had to be a substantial strike and ongoing one. And then the next year there was a Wapping [strike] support group set up in Haringey, which obviously we were part of, the Claimants Union in particular. And we started going to the Wapping print workers protests. In fact, me and Helen Steel used to go pretty much two or three days a week down to Wapping. And this is relevant because the Wapping print workers strike was highly influenced by the miners strike, both in terms of the tactics it employed, the mass picketing, mobile picketing, and large protests, and also the support groups.

But interesting enough, the Communist Party was [a highly influential political organisation among the union officials that were] overseeing the Wapping dispute, it wasn’t really a strike, it was a mass sacking. And the year-long battle to get the jobs back. But at the time, I was delegate from London Greenpeace at the Federation of London Anarchist Groups, which was a body that seemed to come and go in the ’70s and ’80s, lasted a couple of years in the late ’70s, and then it was revived in the ’80s. And I went to a meeting, so that would have been in ’85, I think when the Wapping print workers strike has just started. A print worker came along to the meeting, he was a guy called Arnie Mintz. He hadn’t been sacked, but he worked in the industry. And he had two or three other print workers, some of whom had been sacked, as a kind of small group, and they wanted to produce a bulletin, an independent bulletin, independent of the unions and the Communist Party. But basically run by the print workers themselves, which he did. And he came to that meeting before they set up the bulletin because he wanted support. And he knew he wouldn’t get it from the Communist Party or the other political left wing parties or the unions. Obviously don’t like independent stuff, which they can’t control.

KSL: So that was the bulletin Picket.

DM: Picket bulletin, absolutely sensational bulletin. At that meeting, the Federation of London Anarchist Groups meeting, he brought that up and I said, ‘I’ll have a chat with you afterwards’, and sat down and said, ‘look, we can support this’. And also from the London Workers Group, some of the London Workers Group were print workers. So, in the end, we fully supported the Picket bulletin. I think Sean who worked at Calverts, North Star Press, which was a kind of anarchist cooperative printing press, I think he printed a lot of the bulletins. And he was involved with London Workers Group and Workers Playtime, which I was no longer really involved with at that stage. So that was an absolutely sensational weekly, or more than weekly, bulletin, which I think 5,000 was the average print run every week or twice a week in some cases, handed out to all the mass pickets and protests, grabbed [eagerly] - everybody involved wanted to get copies of it every time. And, you know, that the rest is history, you can read the bulletins, they’re really amazing. Everything the London Workers Group had been arguing for, since the mid 70s, but unfortunately the group had kind of fizzled out. But we still had a network and the Workers Playtime was still coming out, but it wasn’t really the bulletin of the group any more. It was more like a theoretical bulletin by some people. And [Workers Playtime produced] a lot of information about the miners strike, but it was quite sectarian in its tone [so not sure if anyone outside of regular readers could relate to it much]. So, that was a bit ironic [that the LWG as a solidarity organisation had fizzled out.] The miners strike and the Wapping support efforts… it was hard to integrate [the lessons] into a kind of coherent, long-term strategy that anarchists - certainly in London, could build on.

I remember the Picket bulletin, why this is particularly interesting is because they needed an address. So we said ‘Tottenham Claimants Union, you can use our address’ - by that time we were operating from an unemployed centre in Tottenham High Road, which was run by the trades council, but the claimants that were using that centre all kind of gravitated around the Claimants Union. And there was always this tension between those who were running it and those who were using it. We thought unemployed centres should be run by the unwaged themselves, whereas they thought it should be run by trades councils, basically the Communist Party. And this happened [in many places] around the whole country.

Anyway, we said, well, ‘you could use our address’ to the Picket people. Which they did, they printed our address [at the bottom of the bulletins]. And then there was a huge massive row in Tottenham, the Communist Party that was running the unemployed centre said, ‘we’re not having this scurrilous news bulletin that nobody reads’, (apart from everybody involved with the dispute!) And there was a big internal battle over this. They, the Communist Party, produced this absolutely shoddy, thinly veiled attack on the Claimants Union and circulated it to councillors and trade unions in Haringey saying that we were anti-work and [that] we were, you know, wild and stuff. It was like… it was bollocks basically, but led eventually to us setting up our own unwaged centre. And then the unemployed centre run by the trades council basically collapsed because the council eventually stopped funding it. Whereas we set up our own without any funding for a few years at the end of the ’80s. So there you go. These are legacies which you can trace elements back to the miners strike and so on.

KSL: One thing I did want to ask you about: you said you were involved in contacts with Polish miners?

DM: Oh, God, yeah, [I should talk] about that. So just before I go on to that, just one more thing about anarchists in London, [there seemed to be a new youth-orientated wave of people,] particularly those that [were] involved with Stop The City. People from Class War and others hadn’t really been involved with Stop The City, contrary to mythology. In fact, [Class War people] argued against it [as a low priority] when it was originally proposed in 1983. But that’s another long story. Anyway, the final Stop The City in September ’84 was pretty much crushed by police mass arrests. And it didn’t have the numbers to overcome that. I mean, there was maybe a thousand people, but I think there was 400 arrests or whatever.

Anyway, we still had this whole idea about the centre of cities being where the real power lies and then where people are. And we proposed, I remember handing out leaflets that November the 5th, which of course is bonfire night, I think it was ‘open a second front in the cities’ - in support of the miners. I don’t know what happened outside of Haringey. In Haringey, we had a bit of a [gathering and] run down the street. We tried to get people that were at the massive bonfire event in Alexandra Palace, [having] given out leaflets - ‘come to Wood Green and let’s take over Wood Green High Road’. We put some effort in, I don’t know - only about a hundred people, I think. And so the idea was that on November 5th, we called for action in the centres of cities around the country. Possibly not to great effect, but it was an effort.

Now, Poland, I’ll just quickly go through Poland. I had links with Poland because I went there in 1981 during the Solidarity, Solidarnosc, period - by the end of that year, they had 10 million members. And I was there in the summer and made links with some independent, young people involved with Solidarnosc. Actually, they were from a Catholic group, but they were very independent-minded. And then later, an anarchist group got set up called Freedom and Peace, Wolność i Pokój, based in Gdansk, which I visited, and, obviously, I was trying to spread anarchist ideas and also learn from what they were achieving in Poland, which was incredible. My main contacts were in Lublin in the east of Poland. That was ’81, and then I went back in ’85, to speak at an event as a member of London Greenpeace. There was some kind of environmental event that somehow or other, had got permission [to be held]. It was [under] military rule [at the time and virtually anything independent was banned]. The people that I’d met in the early ’80s in Poland were all interned. I mean, thousands of people were interned when the military took over at the end of that year. And the main people I knew, a woman called Eva, she got six months internment, and the guy Wojtek in Lublin, who was a union official in Solidarnosc, he got two years internment. So I went back in ’85, somehow we managed to get this right to speak at some meeting. Very, you know, wishy-washy environmental meeting. That was able to talk about, you know, McDonald’s and all kinds of stuff London Greenpeace were doing. I spoke, that was in Warsaw, but I went to Lublin. I spoke to Wojtek in particular, and saying, ‘I’d like to meet some Polish miners’, because there was miners near Lublin. So I went to this meeting of miners. I can’t remember how many, maybe 15, 20. Don’t forget, this was completely illegal, completely underground. They were taking a big risk. They had to be satisfied that I was genuine, and it was worth their while. But I was saying, you know, I was wanting to talk about the British miners strike. So going to back to Poland. Let me just go back a bit because I think it’s important to have context. When I was in Poland in ’81, basically I spent three weeks living with Solidarnosc activists in Lublin. And I was kind of keen to make links between what we were doing in London and Poland at that time.

I remember, for example, [in 1981] there was a [general] print workers strike in the whole of Poland. [At that time] I was involved with London Workers Group. We had print workers in the group and so on. This is before the Wapping dispute, but this strike was total. No newspapers could be printed in the entire Poland. Printing was illegal and entirely underground, up to the solidarity period. And even photocopiers, you had to have permission to use a photocopier. And, you know, submit what you were photocopying. That was how bad it was. [And the communist government, Soviet style government controlled the media.]

Anyway, the print workers had this national strike. Basically, it was mainly about demands that newspapers printed the truth about what was going on in the country rather than just government propaganda. And the entire production of newspapers stopped in Lublin. The strike, it was an occupation. In Poland, they talk about strikes, traditionally, they mean occupations, which of course is much more powerful than just walking out the gate. And they produced, as I presume happened all over Poland, they produced their own media, their own newspapers, they were quite impressive. I remember, like A3, A2 size opened up, beautifully printed. And I remember all that the government could produce was gestetnered copies of propaganda from the local police station. You know, that’s all they had in Lublin. You had this kind of crappy government thing from the local police station. Or you had this amazing bulletin produced by the print workers themselves. So I was saying to them, remember saying to them, ‘well, you’ve done it. You are the media. You’ve stopped the propaganda and you’re generating real news yourselves’. You know, I always remember that. I visited the [main occupied] print factory in Lublin. You know, and I was talking to them. And I think I had some copies of the London Workers Group bulletin, which I’d taken with me. So that was good experience.

And I might as well throw in that I was trying to get the ABC of Anarchism - Berkman’s ABC of Anarchism printed in Polish, which would have been the first anarchist publication in Poland since the Second World War. It was quite interesting because I wrote a whole new updated introduction while I was there. This group that I was hanging around with, who were involved with Solidarnosc, but they were actually young Catholics. But they were very interested in, and they agreed to print it, they agreed to translate and print it. One of the reasons that they were interested is because there had been [ZZZ,] an anarcho-syndicalist movement in Poland before the Second World War.

During the Second World War, [ZZZ was part of the underground] resistance movement against the German occupation of Poland. It was well known part of Polish history. So, the Solidarnosc movement, union, had elements of that anarcho-syndicalist kind of organisational processes in terms of local and industrial organisation. And, at one time in Poland, I think it was just after I was there in 1981, there was quite a lot of internal debate about what kind of union Solidarnosc should be, whether it be a political [one seeking Government power], should it be pro-capitalist, [or an independent grass roots union, or] whatever. And there was a particular region that issued this kind of manifesto calling for some form of workers control[, I think also calling for Solidarnosc to take over the distribution of food as the Government were trying to starve people into submission. The manifesto seemed to me to employ some] anarcho-syndicalist terminology [and ideas]. So there was an interest in, people were quite open-minded, [about] ‘what [are we] trying to achieve, how we’re going to achieve it’. And there was debate and discussion. That was the background. I wanted to get the ABC of Anarchism produced - as it happens before they were able to print it, the military took over in December, and that put a stop to that. Although, interestingly enough, we were able to make contacts with the new anarchist, very young group. And I think there was two or three groups called Freedom and Peace later on in the ’80s. So, anarchist ideas eventually did find a platform one way or another in Poland. When I was there in ’85 I visited the Freedom and Peace people in Gdansk. [After that we in London Greenpeace agreed to ‘twin’ with them, and had a joint campaign ‘Against State Borders’.]

But in Lublin, I wanted to speak to, arrange a meeting with the miners. So, I attended this meeting that was arranged by Wojtek. Wojtek was a very, very influential Solidarnosc activist, I think he’d been in prison before 1980, and he was interned for two years, at the end of ’81. So, he was very well respected, and I got to know him pretty well. So, I was invited to go to this meeting, and I talked about the British miners strike, and I had a video. I can’t remember if it was a BBC program about Orgreave. It was some kind of Orgreave video, and they were - listen, this is, the important point now. They were very anti-communist, the union as a whole, because the government was seen as communist, and the union and these miners were very anti-communist. And the government of Poland was putting out propaganda in the media about the wonderful British miners strike, because of course the British miners strike, the dominant controlling force was the Communist Party, which Arthur Scargill was a member [of]. So, they were hailed as heroes by the government media in Poland, but of course if there’s anybody, anything equivalent in Poland, they would have been jailed immediately. And so, they were saying, ‘yeah, but isn’t it just a communist propaganda thing?’ And I was saying, ‘no, look, [the] Communist Party is influential, but it’s the miners themselves that started this strike and they’re fighting for their jobs and their communities’ and all this kind of stuff. They were [hesitant], because I was saying that wouldn’t it be good to send the message of [solidarity] from Polish miners, to British miners, particularly in the light that Polish coal had been imported into Britain to undermine the strike, during the strike, which of course the government of Poland was in control of that export, while claiming to support the British miners. I thought this would be very good, but now the miners strike had finished by this time, by the time I was in Poland, it was some months afterwards. But I said, look, it was still kind of live in terms of what might happen next. But then I showed the video of Orgreave and they were really shocked, they’re really shocked because they didn’t believe that in Britain people will get their heads cracked open and strikes would be attacked by the police. And so it was the actual violence of the police that won them over because they could relate to it. Beyond the ideology, ideologies, you know, these are workers getting attacked by police, which of course, it happens the world over.

So, they basically wrote a letter after the meeting, I was still in Poland and I would bring it back. You know, it was more - discussion, I can’t [remember] exactly what the letter said, I think it was to the effect of ‘we should communicate with each other’. Sort of twin, almost like a twinning proposal because I said, ‘well, I’ve got contacts in Hatfield Main’, which of course was a very significant site during this miners strike in Britain, because of the strength and the mass picketing, mobile picketing that they organised. I either came back with a letter and I don’t know if I did, I think Wojtek had to get it discussed at some higher level.

Anyway, in the end, this letter was written and I said, ‘well, why don’t you come to England, because it’d be much more powerful if you’re there?’ So, he came to England and stayed with me in London and we went up to Hatfield and spoke to Dave Douglass and said what it was all about. And he said, ‘come on up’. So, we turned up at Hatfield Main and I think he timed it because they had a[n NUM] branch meeting or some major meeting [of miners] in Hatfield. And we were in the room next to the meeting or maybe a hundred metres down the street, in a nearby pub, or whatever it was. And we were saying, ‘look, we’ve got this letter, you should put this to the meeting and then people can vote, do they want to twin with Lublin?’

So, we waited. Off he went because he was probably chairing the meeting, Dave Douglas was a major player in the meeting. Although he’s had strong anarchist, anarcho-syndicalist sympathies, he was saying, ‘I don’t support Solidarnosc’, because it’s anti-communist, pro-capitalist. Exactly what the Lublin miners were saying about why they couldn’t support [his] union, but we’d won them round because they’ve seen this video and we talked - but you’d have thought from Dave Douglas, he would have been a bit more, ‘this is really interesting’. [There] could be an interesting debate and solidarity and communication here, because they were still under military rule in Poland.

So, he came back and he says, ‘we’re not going to discuss it at the meeting, I can’t invite you into the meeting,’ which I thought was absolutely unbelievable, because Wojtek was there bringing solidarity and goodwill from Poland. Maybe, maybe the Communist Party was very strong in Hatfield Main and maybe there’s some power politics going on and he couldn’t stick his neck out. Or maybe - I don’t know, I never really got the full details, but that was, that was quite educational for me. How ideology is in itself extremely - ideology, you know, separated from reality is extremely damaging in our society. That’s something I learned from that, yes, okay, being anarchist or, you know, have ideas, but you’ve also got to work with people and listen and find common ground and all that kind of stuff. We shouldn’t be like Jehovah’s Witnesses. So, unfortunately, it didn’t have a good outcome.

Actually, another time, just while [I’ve] got the floor, the woman I met in Lublin, when I was there in ’81, and I saw her again in ’85, she had been interned. She was a solididarosc activist, but she had been interned for six months - she came to London. And another thing we did is we went to Northern Ireland. As far as anyone’s concerned, it was all about the IRA, and Catholics and Protestants, but everyone in Poland is a Catholic.

So, what is really going on there, beyond the propaganda? So, we said, ‘oh, let’s meet somebody who’s been interned in Northern Ireland, you’ve been interned, you can talk about it together’. And so we met someone actually who’d been interned, as a member of the Irish Republican Socialist Party. And I think he’d been interned for a number of years in Northern Ireland. Now, they had this interesting discussion, because, you know, the politics was so different, but there was a sort of communication. I mean, it didn’t lead to a long term [outcome], and I didn’t really have any long term idea, which I did with the miners, but for this, it was more just a person to person discussion. But it’s interesting that they had a useful and interesting discussion, which should have happened in Hatfield Main.

If I can draw my conclusion, the basic challenge for anarchists in Britain is, as it’s always been, since the movement started in the 1880s. Or whatever it was, first became an active movement in communities - Is to have any kind of influence in society, you’ve got to be well organised, you’ve got to be well organised everywhere, and you’ve got to know what you’re doing, and have a strategy. Therefore, as things come up, it might be, Black Lives Matter movement, or it’s the miners strike or it’s student occupations or whatever it is. And the ongoing issues in local communities and defending public services and supporting self organisation in the community, you have to have a strategy. And the only way to have any realistic influence as a movement is to be organised in every locality in the country.

Now, in Haringey, we’ve had 40 years of continuous local organisation, which means actually we can achieve a huge amount, we’re only small numbers, but we can achieve a huge amount in Haringey and also by networking with others beyond Haringey. And it’s something that the anarchist movement doesn’t seem to have been capable of achieving on a significant scale for 140 years.

So if we’re going to be influential during strikes and protest movements and grassroots community self organisation, all of the things that’s going on all the time, we have to be organised and we have to do it systematically, everywhere, indefinitely, rather than just jumping from one thing to another because it just happens to be happening.

So, yeah, the real lesson of history, as far as the anarchist movement’s concerned, is that we’ve got to be much better organised in the future.

Notes [KSL]

This transcript has been edited for clarity. Edits are in square brackets.
Other articles about the 1984-85 miners strike are on the KSL site at https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/93207x
Issues of Workers’ Playtime are at: https://libcom.org/article/workers-playtime-journal
Issues of Picket are at https://libcom.org/article/picket-bulletin-wapping-printers-dispute-198…
The attempt to ‘open up the second front’ is mentioned in Ian Bone’s Bash The Rich (p205 on)
Some of Dave Douglass’ writings can be found at https://libcom.org/tags/dave-douglass

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