NORTH COUNTRY BLUES

NORTH COUNTRY BLUES.

I only ever did one manual job, in the Ibstock Brick Yard. 
Dunno what I was doing there, filling-in, maybe, doesn't matter.
The yard was a major employer in the Norman villages of that part of Leicestershire, fathers and sons, nephews and uncles, m'duck, a community, like. 

 Christ, it was fucking murder. I worked as a chucker,  picking-up three freshly-baked bricks between my two bare hands and throwing them to a setter, who caught them deftly  and arranged them in a pile, to be wire-bound, fork-lifted onto a lorry and delivered to building sites and builders' merchants all over the land. 

That was the job, all day, every day.  Some wore bits of inner tube on their hands, fashioned into fingerless gloves, to protect from the impact of ten-thousand bricks a day but most didn't. People did this one job all of their lives.  It was filthy work,  there were no showers and trying to get clean in the bath at home was very difficult, thick layers of red brick dust clinging to the bath, the taps, the floor, my body and my hair. Ibstock Brick and Tile Company, must've built half the country and shortened the lives of tens of thousands of its labourers in the process.

The miners strike of 1984 festers still and when I think of the miners I always remember the chucking of bricks and setting of them; compared to hefting a pick undergound, the brickyard  was a walk in the park, at least we were in the fresh air, didn't have a million tons of shit over our heads, a rotten timber away from being crushed  to death, in the dark; we weren't coughing our lungs out with pneumoconiosis and so, after working in the brickyard, I always wondered why people would be determined to continue with that filthy, mining way of life, scratching coal, underground; I  always was prepared to give the pit closures a fair wind, anything must be better than working down there.

That was just me, though, and what do I know, about trawlermen, scaffolders, coalminers, about those with whom Mr Death's sergeants share the tea-break. Somehow, for the miners, danger had become them and no matter how many tragedies befell the industry its labour force demanded the right to endure even more

There were, there used to be such communities, all over the place, joined-together by hard, dirty, dangerous, badly-paid work and the sensible thought would be - Let us, for fucks sake, get them up in the light, out from the foundry and into newer, cleaner, better, brighter jobs, jobs they might survive into their eighties, as do the rich.  No more  of this pouring of steel, no more of this  welding and riveting  of ships; burn the blue collars, all shall dress in white, all shall  own their homes and top-up their pensions from the wise investments they make on the stock market. 
It is for everyone, after all, gambling.
All shall share in the brave, new world.
  Even if we have to set the police on them. 

In my way,  I sometimes shared mr jgm2's view that these - miners, car-workers, shipwrights - were unruly, troublesome saboteurs, delaying the decent march of Progress,

but only sometimes.

Othertimes, I saw them as noble, more noble, certainly, than he or I, grammarschool boys, like all grammarschool boys since Shakespeare, on the make.   
   

 Even so, I always tried to be a bit realistic, about this Dignity of Labour thing. 
 It is the sort of enconium that Lord Mike Biscuits would confer on people less ruthlessly and contemptibly  spivvish than himself. 

Oh, a fine specimen, the British working man, 
salt of the Earth, he is, when he's not being confused with all this talk of rights and equality and what have you.
 And unrealistic wages. 
I blame the unions.

Always have.

 

I say, do you happen to have a  couple of Garibaldi biscuits, 
with my tea?

And I still do think that the dignity, the comradeship of hard, filthy, dangerous, menial work is exagerrated, not least by people like this,

Sir Billy Bragg, workers' champion, professional folk-singer and unspeakable arsehole.

 

He's an honorary miner, isn't he, Sir Billy, done more for working men, he has, than anyone.  I mean, just imagine how much worse things would have been without Billy the Buffoon and his GodAwful two-chord fucking racket. 

It's OK, in your twenties, singing protest songs but making a career of it is well, just making a career out of other people's shitty lives and scurrying off back to your mansion. Cunt.

Not just Billy Arse, though, he has lots of friends, the working man; today it's Mr McCluskey, the man who, just recently, handed the country to CallHimDave and JunkyGeorge Osborne, and over which we now expect them to give full-rein to their YahBoo Bullingdonism.  Quite how or why Laughing Len was able to install the clown, Miliband - either of them, actually, but Ed, in this case - as political leader of the Labour movement, then - and still, now -  set my eyes to watering.  He must be a Tory, McCluskey, it's the only explanation.

Back then,  the People's Tribune was another Tory, 

                 

  

socialist firebrand, 

Baron Scargill, seen here with and his common-law Mrs.

They fought tooth and nail, Arthur and Nell, like proper Tories, like Neil and Christine Hamilton,  to retain a grace and favour apartment in London, paid for by the now-tiny NUM, in addition to the large cottage they bought for him in Barnsley and in addition to a princely pension. With all the vulgar cheek of his fellow Tories, Jack Straw and Sir Malcolm Shouty, Arthur insisted that the apartment in the Barbican be paid for, for the rest of his life, by the 1,200-strong miners union which he led to disaster.
Isn't it great, how so-called socialists do so well, while their own  rank and file get shat upon ?

 

Doesn't matter which brand of socialist leader we refer to.
The Kneecapper and the Nonce.

These two fuckers, for instance, 

grow richer and more pompous by the day.    

Whilst those who died, starving, for the cause,

 well, they're dead, so th'are; fuck 'em. Aye, fuck 'em, 'sme and Marty's left here,  to continue the revolution. And them boys as starved 'emselves to death....

Well, more fools them.

Bobby Sands, MP, starving in his shit-splattered cell in the H-Blocks or some nameless miner crippled by a baton charge;  what are we to make of them? Are they martyrs or fools?

I would like to think the former but the evidence indicates the latter.

After the miners' doomed strike, Scargill and Thatcher lived-on in relative luxury, bloated hypocrites to their dying day, both as  guilty and as wicked as Sin.  Although driven by monstrous vanity, Scargill, economically speaking,  was probably right; a handful of corporate energy oligarchs now extort as much from us as they can and millions live in fuel poverty, me, strictly-speaking, among them.  We live with the unnecessary threat of lights-out, radiators-off unless we pay more and more to grubby carpetbaggers. Centuries' worth of energy lies below our feet and all it needed to be viable was an efficient carbon capture process. Instead, spivs like Tebbit and Lord Biscuits gleefully poured concrete down the mines.  With any luck I'll see them both dead and, if I get the chance, piss on their graves.

  I heard,  on Radio Four, the other day, the news of the report or inquiry by some cover-up artistes into the policing of the Orgreave NUM picketing, thirty years ago.  Too long ago, now, insisted some rotten, gabshite harpie, all the police're retired, nothing to be gained, things're different, now; lessons were learned at the time. 

She was one of those ghastly shrews who are appointed to bodies such as the laughable Independent Police Complaints Cover-Up Service and who have several degrees in NothingTo See Here, Move Along Studies. She was not interested in persuasion or emollience, this crow, it was just a matter of This is what I'm telling you, it doesn't matter what you think, fuck off and shut up.  I guess that many, like her, a nation's impudent bureaucrats, lost their heads to Madame Guillotine, and quite right too.

 "I have therefore concluded that there should not be an IPCC led investigation into police behaviour at Orgreave."

Ms Tubby  Greene, IPCC second-in-command.

And then we  heard from the miners, still aching from their encounter with the nation's finest, that thin blue line which is the only thing protecting us from Complete Decency.

Theirs was a howl of pain, Quite what they, of all people, expected from the IPCC I don't know but its denial clearly wrought very genuine outrage. At least I think it did.

I don't know about you but I am of the unwavering opinion that any official body  with the words Police and Complaints in its title will be as much  use as a hatful of melted snow.  I don't know how long one must live in order to be made aware that the police are beyond the law but in my case it wasn't very long  and I would have thought that any veteran of the miners strike would expect, from govament, only what Ms Tubby Greene 

so charmlessly delivered. She is paid to cover things up and that's what she did. Safe pair of hands is what they call it. The Independent  Police Complaints Commission exists purely to protect the police from scrutiny, discipline and correction.  The idea that the IPCC would open the door to criticism of government's historical, overt politicising of the cops in pursuit of class warfare is risible   

What did the Orgeave complainers expect?

But aggrieved they were; from within and without,these last thirty years,  they had been  battered,  betrayed  and sold down the river,  their expectations - aspirations we would now obediently call them - denied,  their working lives consigned to the scrapheap of vicious, ministerial whim, no glittering prizes, theirs. Gosh, we even paid Chris Huhne £17,500 for having to leave his job and go to jail. None such for some dirty troglodyte.  We were promised, raged one man, now in his sixties, re-training and re-employment and there was nothing.  The police assaulted me, said another, and I got the criminal record and I haven't worked since. Bless him, this is Britain, he should know that when the police attack you, that's what happens, you get charged with attacking them and I grew a bit impatient at this sustained naivety ancien. Another man complained that where once son followed father down t'pit,  his own grandson now spent the days waiting for a call from a firm which had him on a zero-hours contract, a call which rarely came.   Your grandson and many others' grandsons, too, oh, noble, formerly mining savage.

They wanted an enquiry, the former miners,  to match the one grudgingly given to  those bereaved at the Hillsborough football ground massacree, an event shamelessly rehistoried by Chief Constable Slag and his Merry Men and now being unpicked.

It's been bugging me for days, now, the fact that I don't support the miners' demands  but I have been beaten by the police, more than once, and never demanded a public  enquiry, sought public support. And I was on my own, whereas there were hundreds of miners.  The cops are brutal crooks, that's the way it is. 

Get over it.

I don't know if the miners had any solidarity with the Ulster Civil Rights Movement, when the B Special Constabulary was beating people half-to-death but I don't remember any;  I don't think they took to the streets over the death of Blair Peach or countless others, not cracked on the head but actually killed by PC Filth and I am fairly sure that few miners went to the wall in defence of homosexuals bullied and bashed  by officialdom in all its guises.  Why, then,  should I give a fuck about a bunch of miners run-down by horses and smacked around by the Filth?

No, I won't support them, not because I approve of the police smacking people around nor because I approve of their shabby treatment and not because I agree with the closure of the pits because I don't and I certainly do not dispute that savage economic policies such as these, at incalculable cost,  destroy marriages,  fracture families and devastate communities, fostering crime, alienations,  drug and alcohol dependance, vandalism, decay and ruin.

  I won't support them because they want to own her, they want to hug her vileness all to themselves and  Whisky Maggie, you see,  her wickedness and her ruinous works,  they belong  to us all.

There's nothing special about them, the former miners, they   can just fuck off and join the queue of national grievance, it starts somewhere round Glasgow way.

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 Mining, though, here, in South Africa or South America is a Fool's Game; if you are not killed the odds are that you will be crippled or diseased; and whichever grim fate ensues, your employer will treat you like shit.

Here was the wunderkind, Bob Dylan,  in 1963, narrating in the first person female, the old tale of capitalism's contempt for its labour. The melody is Irish, the observations and the added images probably as old and as universal as mining and money, themselves. 

Come gather 'round friends and I'll tell you a tale

 Of when the red iron pits ran a-plenty 

But the cardboard-filled windows and old men on the benches

 Tell you now that the whole town is empty.

 In the north end of town my own children are grown

 But I was raised on the other

 In the wee hours of youth my mother took sick

 And I was brought up by my brother

 The iron ore poured as the years passed the door.

 The drag lines an' the shovels they was a-humming

 'Till one day my brother failed to come home

 The same as my father before him

 Well, a long winter's wait from the window I watched 

My friends they couldn't have been kinder

 And my schooling was cut as I quit in the spring

 To marry John Thomas, a miner

 Oh, the years passed again, and the giving was good

 With the lunch bucket filled every season 

What with three babies born, the work was cut down

 To a half a day's shift with no reason 

Then the shaft was soon shut, and more work was cut 

And the fire in the air, it felt frozen 

'Till a man come to speak, and he said in one week

 That number eleven was closing.

 They complained in the East, they are paying too high

 They say that your ore ain't worth digging

That it's much cheaper down in the South American towns

 Where the miners work almost for nothing

 So the mining gates locked, and the red iron rotted

 And the room smelled heavy from drinking

 Where the sad, silent song made the hour twice as long

 As I waited for the sun to go sinking

 I lived by the window as he talked to himself

 This silence of tongues it was building

 'Till one morning's wake, the bed it was bare

 And I was left alone with three children

 The summer is gone, the ground's turning cold 

The stores one by one they're all folding 

My children will go as soon as they grow 

Well, there ain't nothing here now to hold them.