Politics
Grimethorpe or Dorking?
Ctoars been going from Day One,
and manager's seen it. Lads were taking it for pensioners. As for selling it if thy kids are starving, by hook or by crook, tha's going to put some snap on table.—; thus a striking miner from Grimethorpe quoted in the latest Sunday Telegraph. 'These people have a strong code of morality,' the report continued, 'but round here morality is not a set of abstract principles . . .' For instance, the principle, 'Thou shalt not steal' is clearly tod abstract for Grimethorpe. The Ober- ver's reporter chose to handle this delicate question differently. Grimethorpe people, apparently, do not steal coal, they 'pick' it. Coal 'picking' is a tradition in Grimethorpe and so 'By prosecuting an increasing num- ber of coal pickers the police may be stockpiling more righteous [my italics] in- dignation than ever built up in Grimethorpe'.
Let us try to transpose this situation. Suppose that striking Nat West clerks in, say, Knutsford or Dorking found — as they inevitably would — that striking meant that they had less money than usual and that as a result their children would soon not have so much food; suppose that they found a way of operating the 24-hour cash dispenser in the local branch so that it fed them small sums of Nat West money without debiting their accounts, suppose further that they had been doing this in a small way for years, but that now they were on strike they began to do it in rather a big way. Would there be anyone to write reassuringly about their old-world habit of pound note 'picking' or to explain that their strong code of morality led them to act as they did? Would the angry residents of the bank clerk communities of Acacia Avenue and Laburnum Close fell the acacias and laburnums across the road, set fire to them and describe the police who tried to restore order as 'Nazi storm- troopers'?
Poor old Knutsford and Dorking, of course, suffer terribly from not being close-knit communities. In Knutsford and Dorking the actions of a man who hits somebody on the head or steals his wallet are seldom explained in anthropological terms; there are no sympathetic observers to record the tribal customs, reproduce the beguiling argot or celebrate the brass band. There are also no Knutsfordians or Dork- ingites so ignorant or mendacious as to say of their own towns, as one Grimethorpian told the Sunday Telegraph: ' "As for help- ing people, there's nowt folks won't do. It's one of the best village in bloody world".' Or if there are, there is no one who wants to listen to or believe them.
But the miners, or rather, the striking miners, are close-knit and so they are guaranteed sympathy. Just like villages which still speak Welsh or Gaelic, mining 'communities' are supposed to be able to tell us something we need to learn about how to live, something which we have lost and to which , if we could find it, we would all return. There was a golden time when most of England was like Grimethorpe and everyone was right neighbourly and every- one 'picked' coal to distribute it among the poor. If we outsiders do not like all of what we see happening in these communities, this is because we do not understand their ways, nor their struggle for existence. I have even heard this argument applied to the IRA's rule in West Belfast — punish- ments like kneecapping which, if used by police, would summon the wrath of every civil libertarian and human righter on earth, are justified as the hard but fair price which an embattled community must exact from its members. For the same reason, Mr Scargill is excused in not condemning violence against working min- ers because scabs are people who are fed up with being close-knit and so deserve what they get.
One would be an unimaginative brute indeed if one never toyed with the fancy that life was once better and more beauti- ful. I prefer to believe that England was once the place described by Jane Austen rather than a collection of thousands of Grimethorpes, but one should not beg- rudge anyone his particular lost world. What is extraordinary, though, is how strong the desire for such worlds is and yet how much stronger is the unstated desire to get away from them. Again and again, people opt away from Grimethorpe and into Dorking. If people know that they can have central heating, cars, supermarkets, mortgages, foreign holidays, they choose them. Even Mr Scargill, for instance, does not live in a two-up, two-down in a pit village, but in a comfortable, suburban- looking sort of house. When in town, he lives in the rather loosely knit community of the Barbican. In this, if in nothing else, Mr Scargill shows himself to be an ordinary human being. He avails himself of the comforts and conveniences, the unpre- cedented amount of choice offered by a rich and free society. In fact, Mr Scargill is one of the success stories of modern Britain. He has made a name for himself and broken free from the narrowness and poverty of a close-knit community.
Many thinkers, particularly those of a Christian socialist bent, would agree with this description of the change in English life, but would argue that it only shows
how sinful men are that they prefer luxury to good fellowship. One would certainly not want to suggest that people are im- mensely altruistic in the choices which they make about their lives, but still there is a moral case to be made for the Knutsfords and Dorkings, a case which becomes more powerful with every new day of the miners' strike. The assumption behind the way of life of modern suburbia is that people have a right to be private and to run their lives more or less as they think fit. Dorking man is far more tolerant of diversity than Grimethorpe man. Suburban people re- gard one another as sufficiently grown UP to be capable of looking after themselves without the help of mass organisations — traditional trade unions are weak in Knuts- ford and Dorking. And they are not violent — loosely knit communities are simplY more humane.
Politicians have been oddly slow to make much of people's actual rather than proc- laimed preferences. Every Government since the 1950s has come to or retained power because of its ability to appeal to the nation's spiritual Dorkingites, yet far more political energy has been spent flattering and placating the Grimethorpians. This tendency has been so extreme in the case of the miners that any ideas like privatisa- tion of some aspects of the industry, free passage of imported coal and electricity generating's independence of British coal are heretical even in a Government in love with free markets. Mr Walker and, it would seem, the professionally bonhomous Mr Michael Eaton, appear to wish to propagate the idea that the coal industry only needs a little more common sense to justify huge and indefinite subsidy. Politic- al and 'social' considerations apparently. demand the artificial prolongation of scores of Grimethorpes. One suspects that the Left is making a similar mistake. It is so intoxicating to see the miners (if one can manage to forget the third that is working) taking on the might of the Thatcherite state, that it is hard to notice that, far from being the vanguard of the working class, the miners are bringing up the rear. Most other British workers, even manual ones, have steadily refused to join in, preferring what they have already secured for themselves to what Arthur wants for himself. Even if Mr Scargill does win this strike, the stoppage will still have hastened the decline of coal in Britain and therefore of the miners' political power. This is probably the last coal strike that any Government will have to pay serious atten- tion to. After it, there will be fewer Grimethorpes and more Dorkings. If the Left is to succeed, then, it should turn from the miners and start working on the civil servants and the bank clerks. The Militant, Tendency, of course, has been quick oft the mark. It is working hard on the DHSS computer centre in Newcastle.
Charles Moore
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