Retired miner’s view of strike

Press, 31 January 1985, Page 13

Retired miner’s view of strike

The British miners’ strike will probably collapse “within weeks,” according to a visiting British trade unionist and former miner, Mr Les Dennison.

Mr Dennison, who is aged 70 and retired, began work as a miner at the age of 14 in a pit in Northumberland.

His father and his grandfather were miners, but his father had to move out of Durham after being blacklisted by the management of the private mine where he worked. “He was blacklisted for 19 years because he was a local miners’ representative and reported bad ventilation in a mine. The Government inspector closed the mine so the management retaliated by blacklisting him,” said Mr Dennison. Mr Dennison worked in the mines until he was 19, vhen he ”• laid off dr

when he was laid ok luring the Depression of the 19305.

He went to work in a Midlands factory and became active as a trade union delegate and a member of the Communist Party. He tried to go to Spain to fight as a mercenary in the Spanish Civil War but was turned back because he was under the eligible age of 21.

He stayed on in the Midlands factory and rose to the position of president of the Midlands district committee of the Electrical, Electronic and Plumbers’ Trade Union, whose secretary is Mr Frank Chappell. He said that the struggle by the National Union of Miners was a typical struggle to bring down a democratically elected Government, but the attempt would fail because the Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher, was not directly involved. He did not see the role of

the Trade Union Congress as being important in the dispute, because it was a “toothless thing,” with union leaders making promises and rank and file members

of unions voting in the opposite way. Unions such as the transport workers and dockers had not supported the miners because they had “seen through” the machinations of the Left wing within the N.U.M., said Mr Dennison.

One thing which was not generally understood, he said, was that long before the present dispute erupted, the previous Labour Government had agreed with the N.U.M. that uneconomic mines had to be closed.

“People also ignore the fact that no-one was going to be sacked. A redundant miner could come away with $30,000 and the Coal Board was only asking for older miners to volunteer redundancy. Now the situa-

tion has got to where pits are being closed which shouldn’t have been closed. The action of the militants is irresponsible. “The saddest thing is how you heal the bitter divisions in the mining families. I met three of the executive members of N.U.M. in the last three months. They’re sick to death of the strike but are terrified because of threats such as having their union pensions cut off,” says Mr Dennison, who quit the Communist Party in the 1960 s when he became involved in the Moral Rearmament movement and became a Christian.

“The thing I long for is that somehow the sound men get together and spell out what needs to be done,” he savs.