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Class War issue 81: Coal Was Our Life Coal Is Our Life
by Royce Turner (£12.99, Sheffield University Press)
In the 1950s a book regarded as a Classic, Coal Is Our Life, studied a pit town in West Yorkshire - the people, their aspirations, their lives. Royce Turner has returned to the same locations and found a devastating contrast.
Turner is polemical, even confrontational. The book erupts from the suffocating swamp of PR sociology which has buried the decimated pit villages since the mass closures of 1992-3. The book challenges the self-congratulatory business schemes, job creation schemes, regeneration and reinvestment schemes who constantly tell us they are at work, which everywhere publish reports and surveys (they seem to be the biggest growth area themselves) yet still poverty, deprivation and loss remain. How can so many organisations awash with European and lottery money be running so fast and yet standing still?
On housing in Featherstone in 1996: "The families that lived in them were beset by social and economic problems. On top of that the residents were struggling to survive in the face of a poor local reputation. It is almost as if the houses are a physical representation of hopes dashed, of a vision for the future turned sour. People had secure employment, brand new modern houses, what were seen as good prospects for their kids. Now forty odd years later, the houses are crumbling, and the lives have crumbled too. Old battered cars sit on oil-soaked drives. If it is sunny people sit on the door step for half a day. There's nothing much else to do."
The book points to areas none of the incoming social missionaries can comprehend - as they've never understood what we had in pit communities in the first place, how the hell can they understand what we have lost?
It is more than the sum of many parts - roots, pride, class identity, community, culture, politics, vision that you choose to lump together. Certainly grim toil, death, injury, disease, conservatism are also words and concepts which battle with the former descriptions of pit life - no one here is looking for that. Instead we have poverty-strewn, heroin addicted, crime-ridden villages.
"The pop factory represented the only foreign investment in Featherstone. Yet foreign investment, we were told throughout the 1980s - as deindustrialisation savaged large parts of the economy - was going to be the salvation of local economies. Looking at a small town like this gets you away from the platitudes and generalisations of national politicians who would not even know where Featherstone was except when it was needed to provide a rock solid Labour seat for some anointed rising star...
Yet these were the two themes of the 1980s and much of the 1990s. A newly rejuvenated small business sector, and inward investment by multi-nationals were going to transform the economy. Neither has happened in Featherstone, and neither will."
The author gets sucked down too deep by the depression and despair he sees all around him. Yet class anger remains 13 years after the defeat of the miners' strike, when Ian MacGregor died, someone felt enough to go onto the site of a former Barnsley colliery and paint a tribute on the walls!
Attend the annual Durham Miners Gala seven years after the last Durham colliery closed and see the pride and class anger as the banners retake the streets carrying their old message of class struggle and socialism. 50,000 turned out in July 2000. At the time of writing the NUM is balloting again for strike action. Class politics still strike a chord in pit communities, but it would be a downright lie to suggest most eyes had their eyes fixed in that direction.
The antisocial spread of emptiness consumes everything around it and one needs real determination not to succumb to it. We need a national fight back linking these isolated pit villages to struggles and issues nationwide, we need a return of vision and hope.
This is a book that needs to be read - lying down and dying has never been our way of dealing with hardship.
Back to issue 81 contents
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