product of isolation and betrayal

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tback in mining delayed the miners' pay talks PRESS THE decision of the National Union of Mineworkers to accept the 9.3% offered to them by the National Coal Board is a setback both for the miners and the working class as a whole.

To see it in any other light would be dishonest. It is now time for a calm reflection on yet another grossly inadequate wage settlement in the mining industry.

Only two areas-Yorkshire and Scotland-voted yes to give the Executive a mandate to take industrial action if necessary in pursuit of the union's claim of a minimum wage for surtace workers of £100 a week.

Instead of squarely insisting that workers should not pay for the bosses crisis.

GA WATERLOO station manag*er John Macey was approached by Sun reporters who asked him to help them talk to ASLEF and NUR members .. blacking their paper.

The station manager's reaction was unexpected -he threw the reporter off the platform. They are out because of the headline in your paper, he said. I'm not going to help you meet them. We have a bloody railway we are trying to run, and your presence doesn't help' An ASLEF official was sent to see the reporters with a blunter message. 'You'd better keep out of where the drivers are waiting.

There could be a lynching.

One train driver approached the reporters with the simple question, Whose head do I have to kick in?' Even the Sun was beginning to get the message. Its story on January 22 headlined Taken For A Ride' recounted unspecific tales of railmen dancing, drinking and sleeping while they were supposed to be driving trains.

The purpose of the story was transparent - to discredit. the drivers on strike, stating they were liars and cheats who put the lives of rail users at risk.

It fits with a long line of similar attacks on other workers in dispute - notably the BL carworkers and the lorry drivers in their 1979 strike.

But the attack has surely rebounded. The blacking of deliveries of all News Group newspapers (including the Times, Sunday Times, and News of the World) has proved a powerful right of reply.

The decision by Kings Cross railworkers to continue the blacking despite the High Court intervention has demanding automatic inflation-proofing of wages, and thus laying the basis for a united. struggle, the union leaders all argued that workers could only hope to scrape a few per cent.

Thus the miners' nine per cent deal could be sold as the best offer of this pay round - even though it is 3% below inflation.

The total 'yes" vote was 91,477. The total vote opposing industrial action and therefore in effect accepting the offer was 113,144. 55% voted no and 45% voted yes.

Many of the left leaders, particularly Arthur Scargill and Mick McGahey, the threatened to make nonsense out of the law. (Incidentally, while we are not talking about martial law in Poland, how liberating it is to have a law which permits a judge to tell union branch officers what positions they must argue at branch meetings).

Inside the Sun, a team of reporters collected the various threats that had been made against them. But a funny thing began to emerge from the pages of 'Britain's no.1 paper' Somehow the swagger had gone out of it. There was a smell of fear arising from the pages.

Naturally the reporters were frightened because their physical safety was at risk. The proprietors were frightened because their profits were at risk.

It was inevitable that the paper would run to the courts. So far, this has proved completely ineffectual.

There still remains the prospect of a judge directing the majority of branch members how to vote at a meeting. Presumably, the official solicitor will have to attend to see who voted which way and to make sure that the artificial majority wins the day.

Until that stage is reached, there remains the enjoyable site of watching branch official solemniy going to their members and giving them advice ordered NUM vice-president, have raised a hue-and-cry over an article in the Daily Express by retiring President Joe Gormley, in which Gormless urged members to accept the NCB's paltry offer.

Yet this looks very much like a face-saving exercise. The article appeared in a paper little read by miners at a time when most of them would already have made up their mind.

What almost certainly did affect the vote-probably decisively -was campaigning. Where the area leaderships organised meetings and distributed literature, as in Yorkshire and Scotland, then a 'yes vote was secured.

The se cannot be separated from developments elsewhere. Many people still think that miners are a different breed to other mortals. That is certainly no longer true, if it ever was. The pressures of living in a crisis-ridden society, with all the insecurity that entails, means that miners are now more wary than in 1972 of going out on the streets.

The defeat at British Leyland and the Ford settlement also had their effect on the miners. The miners' settlement date was November 1, the same as BL and earlier than Ford. Yet Joe Gormley deliberately until after the BL struggle. And then there was no outcry from Scargill and McGahey.

BL and Ford were both isolated. Both were sold out. So then the NUM was isolated too...

Also, despite a lot of hot air, there is no triple alliance between the NUR, the ISTC and the NUM.

The railworkers now face BR's productivity attacks. Steelworkers face zero pay rises and over 15,000 job cuts.

If there was a real triple alliance, a commitment to take action together, then the situation might now be very different. A major job for the future is to stop talking about the triple alliance and start doing something about it.

In the coalfields, the productivity scheme has split the union down the middle. Areas where the bonus is paying out voted to reject the strike call which, coupled with the votes of the white collar section of the union, COSA, gave the decisive majority.

Progress in the industry is going to be difficult as long as the bonus system divides not only area from area but also pit from pit.

Any long term strategy by the left in the union must of necessity have as a central point the defeat of the bonus system and the return to the basic wage.

ALAN CLINTON weekend's inaugura Socialist Society.

EDITORIAL

In 1912 when the South Wales Miners Federation was faced with similar problems groups of militants formed themselves into the Unofficial Reform Committee to work out a strategy for the Federation.

The result of their discussions was the famous pamphiet The Miners' Nexi Step'. There is a crying need for a similar develop ment at this time.

And not only in the mines. In today's crisis, isolation means defeat: and the present leadership of the labour movement is working to isolate and delay struggles. That is the lesson of the miners' vote. ports on las neeting of th