Another voice

Outsize teddy bear mystery

Au beron Waugh

On the point of departure for On

it begins to looks as if the civil war is about to get off the ground. Just my luck. But I imagine that like everything in Britain it will take about a decade before anybody realises what is happening.

The death of Mr David Jones, one of 300 Yorkshire miners who invaded the Not- tinghamshire village of 011erton to prevent miners there from working, is, of course, deeply to be regretted. Rotten luck on his widow. But his head is unlikely to be the last one broken in the course of the con- frontation between the north of England and the rest of the world. Perhaps, rather than spend too much time blubbing about him, we might make sure that we, too, are ready and able to beat the hell out of any Yorkshire miners who come to impose their ghastly habits and half-witted attitude to life on the rest of us.

At this early stage the rights and wrongs of the 011erton dispute are not hard to disentangle. The Nottingham miners did not want to strike. There had been no ballot on a strike, as the constitution of the Na- tional Union of Miners requires; the Not- tingham miners proposed to hold a vote of their own. Until it was held, they were going to go on working.

Dissatisfied with this, the Yorkshire area of the NUM sent down several thousand illegal flying pickets — or mobile lobbyists, or itinerant labour relations officers —despite a High Court injunction expressly forbidding it, to close down the Not- tingham pits. They invaded many collieries and, in many cases, succeeded in closing them down. The village of 011erton found itself invaded by 300 hostile strangers from another part of the country who were illegally trying to prevent them from doing something they had a perfect right to do.

It is at this point that the infinitely subtle northern mind comes into its own. Just as Miss Joan Maynard, the Sheffield Brightside MP who is affectionately known in the House as Stalin's Granny, recently invited us to think of 'freedom fighters' rather than 'terrorists' as a suitable descrip- tion of IRA murderers, so Mr Geoff Naylor, the NUM branch official at Frickley, where Jones worked, takes up the tale: 'I was on the picket line earlier and everything was all right. But then it seems a load of local yobs turned up. They came out of a boozer rolling drunk and looking for trouble.'

There is much to be said for a stiff drink or two before contemplating unwonted acts of physical violence. But it is interesting to

see how the villagers, defending their area and livelihoods against an invasion of strangers with uncouth accents, become branded as bullies and yobs in the story. 'A brick was chucked by these yobs at the picket,' explained Mr Naylor — with the unfortunate result of one dead miner.

This article is written before the Not- tinghamshire miners have had time to chew over the events described. Perhaps they will be so overcome by remorse that they will agree to do whatever the Yorkshire miners tell them to do. I hope not. Regrettable as Mr Jones's death undoubtably was, I think I would be quite proud, if I were a Not- tinghamshire miner, to have put up some sort of token resistance, at least, to the engulfing tide of stupidity and self- righteousness from the North.

What makes me hopeful for the future is the reflection that one really has to be very stupid indeed to be taken in by Mr Scargill's rhetoric. Many of his followers are, of course, very stupid indeed, but even the stupidest of them must be aware that in the long term they are backing a loser. Useless pits will not be kept open, and they must know that they are flying in the face of reason when they try to convince themselves they have the 'clout' to force history to take a different course. The clout which Mr David Jones received from his fellow-miner although deeply regrettable may yet prove salutary. Every clout has a silver lining, perhaps.

A further glimpse of the demoralisation of the Left might have been afforded to those Daily Mirror readers who, on Budget Day, greeted the return of Mr John Pilger, that newspaper's star reporter. While miner was clouting miner for all either was worth in other parts of the country, Pilger was travelling around London hostels for the homeless with a photographer and Bill, 'an unemployed lad from the North'. In one of them there was no heating, no hot water. . 'as Bill said, to lie down in this would be to surrender something of yourself'.

Their greatest scoop was to find the six McKirdy children living with their parents — 'unemployed and caught in the poverty trap' — in two small rooms of a privately owned hostel called Princes Lodge in Tower Hamlets. For this accommodation, accor- ding to Pilger, they paid £196.85 a week, or rather the Welfare did, which was not quite the same thing. Four pages of the Mirror were devoted to describing the horror of it and, with a picture of the McKirdy children sprawling on top of each other on the front page: 'London 1984: LIVING HELL'.

After declaring that Princes Lodge was on a par with a similar hostel he had seen in Calcutta, Pilger continued: `Princes Lodge is not unusual. Places like it exist in London and in other cities. Stories about "scroungers" living in them, as if the people are the problem, not punitive government policies, are obscene.'

The most interesting thing about this was not so much that in my opinion few Mirror readers would have been much impressed by the plight of the McKirdy family. We were told nothing about their background — I would have liked to hear more — but I should have thought that most Mirror readers would accept it as obvious that homeless families live in somewhat reduced circumstances. That is what being homeless means, and why all the rest of us take such pains to avoid it. More interesting than this, however, was the discovery that in all four pages of this torrid narrative I could not detect a single genuine note of indignation — from the unemployed Northern lad's somewhat fancy descriptions of surrender- ing part of himself to Mr Pilger's use of the word 'obscene'. It was a story which could have been written in London at any time since the Romans arrived, and everybody knew it. The only really interesting aspect was how the ratepayer was being ripped off.

But the tribulations of the McKirdy fan-Il- ly were not over. Next day, apparently as a result of Pilger's intervention on their behalf, they were evicted from Princes Lodge and we saw the same six children sit- ting disconsolately on their colour television set and freezer cabinet in the street, waiting to be moved to their next £196.85-a-week accommodation.

'One of the children,' wrote Pilger, 'held an outsize teddy bear as if to say that nobody would take that from her.'

The odd thing about this claim by Niger was that, stare as I might at the picture of the six McKirdy children, I can see no trace of the outsize teddy bear. One does not wish to make too much of this, of course, but I wonder what had happened to it. The most alarming and mysterious Piece of information came on the end of the third day of the McKirdy Pilgerama. We were told that the McKirdys were now 'in hotels while the Greater London Council and Tower Hamlets arranged real homes for them'. It was the last paragraph of all which made one wonder what on earth was really going on:

`Mr Ewan Cowie, the manager of Princes Lodge who evicted the families with the aid of bouncers, briefly appeared last night to drive away in his Mercedes. But he chose. to run back into the hostel. He was wearing what appeared to be a monkey mask.'

End of story. Meanwhile, the Daily rot has launched an entirely admirable initiative to introduce the readers to th_r delights of poetry. I will be taking N't Pilger's evidence with me to Singapore; Thailand and Hong Kong in the hope than someone will be able to throw some light 0 it.