The subject was the year long miners' strike, and anyone old enough to have been aware of current affairs at that time would affirm that it was the defining political event of that year, or any other in decades, closing one era in British political, social and economic history (wherein trades union leaders were as wearily familiar as premiership footballers, and much more important) and opening another (wherein Britain ceased to plummet down economic league tables).
Predictably, the poem depicts southerners, and by implication anyone who supported the government of the day, as selfish, callous and wicked. There is, of course, no mention of, nor allusion to, the facts that:
- the mines were heavily subsidised to produce coal that was surplus to requirements
- the National Union of Mineworkers had shown no compunction in allowing the lights and everything else to go out during two strikes in the 1970s (compelling the government, which fell as a result, to restrict industry to a 3-day working week)
- the NUM leadership refused to hold a nationwide ballot of its members to approve strike action, as its own constitution demanded
- large numbers of miners refused to strike from the beginning (for example 20,000 out of 27,000 miners in Nottinghamshire voted against strike action in their own ballot)
- the Trades Union Congress (TUC) refused to sanction the strike
- the NUM organised phalanxes of 'flying pickets' to intimidate workers at plants using coal into not working.
Now O'Brien can write whatever poems he likes, and it's all the same to me. But in picking this poem, in 3 out of 60, and allowing it to pass without comment, the BBC has failed in its duty of impartiality to the public who are supposed to own it, preferring to build relentlessly on Guardianista mythology. Nobody under about 40 relying on the BBC would know any different. That's wrong, and it's scary.
