The Sunday Ishmael 28/11/21

Which story shall we feature today, from this week's grubby pack of cards?

New Variant omygodcron out of Africa? Dr Angelique Coetzee says not to worry, you'll be fine.

 

War with France?

J'suis rolling up mes manches, Borees . And that Prittee can't come to my party.

 

Europe's leaky border with Bellarus? And Morocco? And Turkey?

Britain's with France?

 

stupid blow-up rubber dinghies.

Ru Paul's Drag Race?

will someone carefully explain to me why this isn't a contemptuous mockery of women?

 

 Is Everything OK, Prime Minister?

 

Lobsters and crabs are sentient and object to being boiled to death?

Storm Arwen?

Oor Gnasher, speaking to Andrew Marr on the eve of her Conference speech to her party? 

Slow down - always fun watching Marr wind her up. 

 

There were 300 extra deaths this year in Scotland, Mrs Fish.

 I'm responsible.

Yes, you are. A man died after waiting forty hours for an ambulance in Glasgow.

Well, I'm not responsible for that. When I say I'm responsible, I mean that I'm responsible in the sense of having responsibility as First Minister, but I don't drive the ambulances or anything.

As First Minister, can you tell me why there are 1,358 acute beds less in the NHS than when you became responsible?

That's because when my mum had her cataract surgery she was in hospital for weeks. Now we get them back on the streets in a day.

 

It is estimated that Scotland needs 1000 extra beds to deal with the backlog.

Well, that's because there are over 1,000 people in hospital as what we call "delayed discharges".

 

Why is that, First Minister?

 

Because there is no capacity in the community.

 

Ah, thank you for that, First Minister. And will you be announcing the date of the Independence referendum in your speech to the SNP Conference tomorrow?

No, Andrew, don't be silly. Covid. I'm fighting a pandemic here in Scotland.

 

No, this Sunday, I'll be going with the class war, as usual.

mr mongoose said: "The truly cheaper energy source (nuclear) has been badmouthed and demonised all my life, and yet deaths and illnesses from nuclear power are a fraction of a single 1% of all the slaughter of oil and coal over the years."

Which neatly segues into this story, which can be heard in full on BBC Sounds - Aberfan: Tip Number 7, and was dramatised in Series 3 of  The Crown.

 

Ishmaelites who are aged 55 and younger can have no contemporaneous memories of the Welsh mining disaster on the 21st October 1966, yet the sheer horror of it has seared itself into our collective unconscious. 

It looks like a lava flow - but this disaster, which, as you can see, destroyed a farm, 20 terraced houses and the Pantglas Junior School, depositing mud and rubble in depths of up to 33 feet, was entirely man-made and entirely avoidable. The Merthyr Vale Colliery had been established in the nineteenth century, and a town had developed at Aberfan, the sole purpose of which was the extraction of coal from underground, in the usual conditions of extreme dangerousness attendant on coal mining. After nationalisation, the National Coal Board took over the profits and liabilities - liabilities that included the seven mountainous slag heaps that surrounded the little town of 5,000 people. Slag heaps are a by product of coal extraction, comprising unwanted soil and rubble, just parked up in man made massive heaps. Inherently unstable - with no attempts to stabilise them, as that would eat into profit, the Aberfan slag heaps were more unstable than most as the rubbish waste products were dumped on underground springs. The NCB had been repeatedly warned about the danger these unstable mud mountains presented - especially Tip Number 7, as it loomed over the village school. After heavy rain, the tip went, sliding down the valley, destroying everything in its path. Two broken water mains continued to pump water into the slurry, adding between 2 and 3 million gallons of water to the spoil slurry, which continued to move through the village. There was no time to evacuate the school. 

The corpses of 116 children and 28 adults were extracted with extreme difficulty from the compacted slurry over a period of a week, and were stored in the nearby Bethania Chapel, pending burial in a mass grave.

Queen Elizabeth II, by then a monarch of 13 years' experience in the job, delayed her visit to Aberfan by 8 days, thinking that was for the best.

The subsequent report of the Aberfan Disaster Tribunal said: "The Aberfan Disaster is a terrifying tale of bungling ineptitude by many men charged with tasks for which they were totally unfitted, of failure to heed clear warnings and of a total lack of direction from above."
It was said that this was corporate negligence towards the working class.

No-one was prosecuted, no-one from the National Coal Board lost their jobs. The Chairman of the NCB tendered his resignation, as a PR gesture, after being assured that his resignation would not be accepted. 

All of this was bad enough, but subsequent actions were appalling. A Disaster Fund had been established, with contributions flowing in from around the world. My dad didn't contribute. He said Corporate Greed and the Government had caused the disaster and they had to make it good. Poor people sending in their pounds and shillings would let the perpetrators off the hook. That's what happened. The Disaster Fund reached £1.75 million. The National Coal Board refused to pay for the removal of the remaining six unstable slag heaps. The Government removed £150,000 from the Disaster Fund to pay for the removal. That sum was eventually repaid by Government in 1997 - thirty-one years later, with no accounting for inflation, which would have put the sum to be repaid at around £1million.

The victims' families were treated as trouble makers. Some children had been pulled out of the slurry alive. When the sounds of a child buried in the mud and filth were heard by the rescuers, a whistle was blown, the whole scene fell silent, so that rescuers could hear where the trapped child was making efforts to save themselves from drowning or suffocation, and then scrabble away the slurry with their bare hands to avoid further injuring the trapped child.

The Aberfan Disaster Fund wanted to pay compensation to those surviving children for their trauma. However, the Fund's trustees believed that proof of trauma would be required by the Charity Commission and so the children were subjected to medical tests in a psychiatric hospital. Survivor Gaynor Madgwick described the test: thick gel was put in her hair and a cap was put on her head.
"You were then plugged into a board - the board was behind your head on the bed - like a piece of wood board. There were all these plugs and leads coming out of the board which would be fixed into the cap on your head and you had to sit there and be interrogated, basically. You had to stare at these different lights and follow this beam that went around the room. It was torture, interrogation. You lost all sense of who you were."

Gerald Kirwan,  eight years old when he was rescued, said he was attached to machines and asked if he was afraid of the dark or if he had nightmares. He said: "I was thinking... you better not say the wrong thing or you might not be coming back out of here. It was just horrifying."

 Jeff Edwards was the last child pulled out alive. He said he was taken to the hospital every three to four months."Being fitted with these head devices with electrodes all on and flashing lights was a really frightening experience. I used to hate going down there. It was not a children's hospital as such. It was a mental institution for people who were quite seriously mentally ill."

The Aberfan Disaster Fund also wanted to give bereaved families £5,000 - the Charity Commission eventually  sanctioned that sum after initially holding out for £500, but advised that "before any payment was made, each case should be reviewed to ascertain whether the parents had been close to their children and were thus likely to be suffering mentally".

Parents were questioned about their feelings for their children. It was as though the working class were a different species, lacking human emotion. Ironic - as the working class do not send their children away from home at the age of 7 or 8 to cry themselves to sleep in expensive boarding schools, and, if really unlucky, to be beaten and buggered by senior boys and masters.  

When the sealed documents were released after 30 years, the Charity Commission expressed regret - the regret can be summarised along the lines of we're sorry we've been found out, the past is a foreign country, they did things differently then and we won't do it again. 

Less than 20 years  after the Aberfan disaster, Mrs Thatcher solved the problems presented by working class mining communities. The Miner's Strike of 1984 to 1985 was led by Arthur Scargill of the National Union of Mineworkers against the National Coal Board in an attempt to prevent colliery closures - which would destroy mining communities and livelihoods. Opposition to the strike was led by Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who wanted to reduce the power of the Trade Union movement. mr ishmael reviewed a BBC documentary about the Miner's Strike:

 WOTSONTELLY. ALL OUR WORKING LIVES, BBC 4, THE COAL INDUSTRY, MINING A DEAD HORSE. (17.10.2010)

Well worth a look, on many levels, this is contemporaneous documentary about the miners strike of 1984, spliced into a  a recent  history of coal  mining  versus the greenhouse gases agenda;  one couldn't help but think that many of those types who coalesced around the miners would, today, be damning them as ecovandals; protest, like hemlines, comes  dictated by political haute couturistes, angry layabouts at the Guardian, policing consumerisme totalitarienne, as though all we need to do is make  constantly evolving informed choices and Money's teeth will be painlessly pulled;  in my short, sweet lifetime coalmining - and, inescapably, coal burning - has been both virtue and vice;  miners lionised, salt of the Earth blokes; miners holding the country to ransom, the enemy within.  That the workshy at the BBC make a series called All Our Working Lives is an irony simply too delicious,  darling.

Mr jgm2, mr mongoose and others who congregate here lament ever the nineteen-seventies' shortsightedness of organised labour and to a lesser degree the multiple incompetences of management and directors and insist that Ruin would not be so complacent had the unions been more co-operative - supposing the managers had had something on offer to co-operate with - if we had some eggs we could  have ham and eggs,  if we had some ham,  that sort of thing, ifs and ands, if ifs and ands were pots and pans there'd  be no need for tinkers and there'd be horses for beggars to ride on.  I have never bought the argument that recalcitrant shop stewards buggered the economy, buggered industry, buggered everything.  I believe that much that we rightly take for granted  is due to organised labour in the early and mid-twentieth century,  that all Tories are bastards, that Growth - population, consumption, energy expenditure - the Tory  mantra of spunkfaced zombie boy and his gang - and by Tory I mean Labour, LibDem and the rest of consumerisme totalitairienne -  is actually a synonym  for planetary suicide, but fuck all that, there's enough air left to see me out, enough living seas;  poison clouds are only just forming on the horizon, I'll be in the bosom of Abraham by the time zombieism runs its course.  The miners strike, though, viewed through this prism,  is almost enough to make a believer of me, to convert me to the  labour-bashing cause.

Bob Dylan sang in 1964's North Country Blues that the Minnesotan Iron Range ore wasn't worth diggin',  it's much cheaper down in the South American towns, where the miners work almost for nothing -  early globalisation laying waste to communities defenceless against Money's pursuit of itself and in 'eighties Britain many felt that our mining communities would soon suffer the same, stars one by one they are folding, fate - coal bought-in, from abroad, their men made workless and depressed, their children made migrant;  these were decent and righteous concerns shared by many.  The strike became a focus for wider anxieties, for a head-to-head between the Then and the Now and in the brouhaha, in the All-I-Can-Do-Is-Confrontation posturing of Whisky Maggie, we all lost sight of the concept of Energy Security and Self-Sufficiency, of  the fact that, maybe, these pits could have been made more competitive, less a filthy subterranean co-operative, more of an energy business, and maybe they would still be working, today, cleaner,  vastly safer, massively more productive, maybe, most likely a carbon-capture technology in place,  the envy of the world.  All that stored-up sunshine, cleanly harvested, employing people.

Thatcher, though, happily pissing North Sea Oil revenues up the wall, the mad bastard, concerned herself only with a short-sighted, Methodist victory over her tribal enemies, cheered-on by vengeful,  gutless spivs like Tebbit and that foul, screeching  bullyboy, Ingham, she spun and she spun and she blew the mines down. Job done. Pour concrete down the mines.  Rejoice, we are a fuckwit.

In the programme, once prominent strikers, union officials  and scabs appeared,  following footage of themselves  shot during the strikes. These blokes, twenty-five years on, proudly still speak their fucking awful dialects, nobutting and summating and  'appenyerrightin' and loosin' and middlin' and mashin'; Jesus fucking wept, self-caricaturisng 'emselves, as though whole o t'world were a play, like, by that DH Lawrence, and them all reight good sooarts, werkin chaps, like. I wanted to punch them hard in the gob.  I kind of agreed with them about the scabs, although the scabs made a good Thatcherite, right to work case for themselves and who could not be pissed off by the Tory politicisation of the cops,  made crass and irreversibly  obvious during the strike, but, oh, the language of these men, long redundant, handsomely so.  We all have an argot - lovers, families, trades, regions but to go on national telly and speak like a sub epsilon Morlock is unforgiveable, a take-it-or-leave-it contempt for the viewer, and most significantly a diminution by slipshod carelessness of the  arguments they made in the 'eighties about the strength and importance of their communities,  the social capital which would be squandered by mine closures;  interviewed today these men sounded like extras from Heartbeat or Emmerdale Farm. It's not as though they can't speak English, of course they can, it's just that, Oh fuck, I don't know what it is, but it's fucking stupid, like them; stage Lancashire, stage Yorkshire, stage Notting-um;  All Our Yesterdays  meets The Good Old Days,  political struggle togged-up as music hall. Wankers.

But the greatest revelation to me was not the shallowness of the workers but the almost laughable shallowness of their champion-for-life, Arthur Scargill.  More  shrilly Thatcher than Thatcher herself, Arthur was nothing less than a diva, operatic in his fists clenched to his bosom, his arms outstretched, his head, though, rigidly immobile, lest dramatic gesture disturb his comb-over.  

These days, men like Arthur can shave their heads and not be fucking about with all that comb-over nonsense, can look like hardmen, even when they're fairies,  fairies with  shining  skulls, like Ross Kemp and, well, all of them, really; just  a different masculine vanity, it's true, but less cumbersome, less at the mercy of the wind.  And Scargill's rhetoric was as phony as his haircut, difficult to credit that it inspired tens of thousands to beggar themselves. Lambchop sideburns and hair picked up on one side and deposited on the other, Scargill gave his own version of Prince Hal's speech, when your children ask you where you were, you can say you were on strike, men now abed will wish they were on strike, it was fucking dreadful, really, it was, made Gordon Snot look sincere and eloquent. Maybe all the miners were fairies and it was all, Orgreave and Saltley and the rest, a big, dirty, GayPride event. What was Arthur like, getting arrested and everything, like a silly big girl?  For there was nothing pragmatic about  Arthur, he was no technocrat, no visionary, not even a polemicist, a one hit wonder's what he was, Strike and Never Surrender, what matters is not the industry, not your jobs, not the nation's energy, what matters is me, and No, comrade-darlings, I am not bald;  like Thatcher, he was a rabble-rouser, both of them too vain, too stupid to even recognise the damage they were doing. Maggie, Maggie, Maggie;  Ar-thur Scar-gill, Ar-thur Scar-gill, we'll support you ever more, ev-er more......

It is a fascinating documentary, interviews with Rudge, the man who bought many of the pits and made shitloads of money, hint at what might have happened, had the nation and the miners not been governed by screeching fuckwits, each as bad as the other, each emblematic of their own constituents, too stupid and too selfish to breathe. The sinister appearances of  the National Coal Board's Ian McGregor, Thatcher's imported US industrial gangster, foreshadow Enron and Goldman Sachs and Haliburton, all the shit we now take for granted, pimps and gangsters advising the govament on how best to short-change the people.

The closing sequence is of one of those dialecting babymen, proper  over t'moon, that his lad has followed him underground and now works maintaining the high speed belts which retrieve coal from the face, in an industry which now, where it once numbered more than  a hundred thousand,  employs six thousand. And we fret that some Ukrainian bandit might turn off our energy.
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In the good old days, to which spunkface zombieboy would return us, coalmines were in  careless, private  hands;  the Gresford Mining Disaster,  in which 242 colliers were lost, and three men of the rescue brigade, was one of those terrible events which underpinned Scargill's shabby, vainglorious rhetoric,  the owners' lust for profits far outweighing the safety of the miners.  For those interested, the Albion Band's telling  of the Gresford Mining Disaster is on youtube. 

 

There's more from mr ishmael and his young friend Stanislav in the two books: Honest Not Invent and Vent Stack from Lulu or Amazon. It is cheaper to buy from Lulu. Register an account with Lulu to save a couple of quid, as going straight into the link provided below seems to make paypal think it's ok to charge in dollars, and apply their own conversion rate, which will put the price up slightly for a UK buyer. Once the new account is set up, follow our link; a pop-up box asks for age confirmation - simply set the date to (say) 1 January 1960, and proceed. (If you type the title, the anthology will not appear as a search result until the "show explicit content" box - found at the bottom left by scrolling down - has been checked.  You may also see the age verification box, as above, at this point.) 

 The full title is "Vent Stack love from stanislav" by ishmael smith, and the cover you'll see is red with white titles and a picture of Buster the Previous Blog Dog having a green thought in a green shade. 

Link for the paperback:

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With the 15% voucher, the book (including delivery to a UK address) should cost £10.89

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