Two sides to argument over strikes and Iron Lady’s legacy

JOHN Sykes (Yorkshire Post, April 17) might have had an unpleasant experience or he might be over-egging the pudding. When he was 20, the transport strike of February 1979 had been simmering for 10 years as the wages of lorry drivers, like those of miners, restored temporarily five years previously, plummeted down the league table behind local government workers.

Blacked by the Economic League, I’d left the rat race for teaching but stayed in my Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU) Branch.

As chairman, I was instructed to move a motion for a general strike at a Leeds regional meeting.

When the composite was carried nationally, I organised secondary picketing in the Barnsley area. Our prime concern was to keep our comrades in manufacturing industries in work so I borrowed the disused Cokemen’s Office on Victoria Road from Arthur Scargill for a Dispensation Committee (DC). Unfortunately, we had to work with the extremist United Road Transport Union (URTU) which had been growing as wages slipped.

By the time the strike started I was a Community Education Tutor (CET) on flexi-time. My TGWU shop stewards arrived at school one day and ordered me to come to the NUM office to sort out a URTU member who had usurped the position of chairman of the DC. They had already had to throw a URTU member off the picket line when he turned up with a mattock shaft. They told me the URTU chairman was treating applicants for dispensation like a leader of the inquisition.

There was a queue from 
the DC office down Old Mill 
Lane. I entered, listened to the URTU man’s third degree, stopped the next applicant and closed the door, gave the URTU man a lecture about our comrades asking for dispensations, told him to get out of the chair, told him if we had any more trouble with the URTU, co-operation was at an end. I put Tommy Briscoe – ex-Communist President of Monk Bretton NUM – in the chair and the queue quickly evaporated.

My shop stewards sat in the boardrooms of firms like Redfearn National Glass and Lyon’s Bakery and negotiated productivity agreements for storage and dispensation for essential supplies. Beatson and Clarke produced medical glassware; I kept a copy of Roy Fisher’s agreement with the board as evidence that the lads were intelligent, articulate and compassionate.

John Sykes praises Margaret Thatcher for destroying such unionism but steam will blow-off or there will be an explosion; the extremists are now stoking the boiler.

From: Michael Robinson, Barugh Green, Barnsley.

IN response to Martin Fletcher’s letter (Yorkshire Post, April 17) regarding the picket line at Redfearn National Glass, I was on that picket line and no way did he have to go cap in hand to shop stewards for permission to cross the line.

It was a peaceful picket in response to a shop steward at a glass works in Mexborough being wrongfully sacked.

From: Roy Miller, Malt Kiln Croft, Sandal, Wakefield.

IT’S a pity that amid all the Thatcher euphoria the Yorkshire Post’s writers omitted to mention her admiration and support for General Pinochet whose regime in Chile slaughtered thousands of his people in pursuance of his right-wing dictatorship; or her use of the military in the miners’ strike.

Before yet another Tory tries to refute this latter point, let me say that I saw RAF helicopters being deployed. Living on a limestone plateau 600ft above the rest of South Yorkshire, I watched them hovering as I walked the dog. One day a helicopter headed towards Maltby Pit, which lay out of sight below the edge of the plateau – the very day some miners were to brave the picket line and return to work.

On another afternoon I had emerged from an overgrown, little-used steep bridle path on to a road parallel with the M18 which at that point was in a deep cutting. Bridge weight restrictions meant that coal from Silverwood could not be transported down to the main road in Rotherham. Instead, lorries brought it on a route past the end of the hamlet where I lived, over the road spanning the motorway.

There, above the M18 cutting, hovered a helicopter bearing RAF roundels, as the police vehicles shepherded the coal lorries down a back lane.