THE ENEMY WITHIN
‘But they will not dream of us poor lads,
Left in the ground.’
MINERS, Wilfred Owen
Of course she would win: Snatcher Thatcher; The Iron
Lady; She of the Marilyn Monroe Hair
and the Caligula Eyes; Scourge of the Argies!
It was the conflict and the outcome of her dreams –
the opportunity to destroy
the National Union of Mineworkers,
and the Labour-voting pithead villages,
and make Britain great for greed again!
The comrades, the brothers and the sisters,
were too certain of the power of the rubric
of rule books, rhetorical abstractions
like ‘solidarity’ and ‘community’,
too sentimental, too innocent
to take note of the mounting stockpiles of coal
at the coking plants, and the lines of police
waiting with their horses in the woods.
Kevin Dyer
December 30, 2024Tight and bitter. I love it.
Jeff Teasdale
December 30, 2024A small-minded, vengeful woman who saw the world only through her own narrow prism. One of my friends in Barnsley (of all places) supported her, even when we were walking through a council estate where they were chopping up their furniture to burn in their grates. He was a Freemason by the way (so no surprise there then) which made me think how far a friendship could be tested until it snapped.
The scenes at Orgreave with the police imported from London and looking for a fight, made me think of Peterloo – the not so-brave men in uniform battering braver men than they with sticks, men wearing only t-shirts.
Thanks for this, David. And thus welcome all to the still dis-UK. The seams of inequality, class bigotry and discontent run very deep…