Anyway, this is me re-launching Class Warfare with a recently unearthed poem that I penned twenty-plus years ago, in the wake of the Battle of Orgreave.
Thoughts after watching pickets on TV
Disheartened miners knew just who to blame.
Perhaps they found analogy in Scargill’s name –
a vengeful shark? “But then, just when w’ thought that it
was safe t’ go back in t’ pit, w' saw’
a comrade gettin' fisted off the law.
‘E nearly got away but slipped in horse’s shit”
Most viewers watched with empathy the charge
of mounted police on humble moles and serg-
eants urging desk-acquainted cops, “advance and cosh.”
The angry pickets, lacking MUFTI train-
ing, hurled abuse and bricks and sticks in vain.
It seems they weren’t as disciplined, nor half as posh.
I watched in shock the state-rewarded thrust
Of wooden batons on some miner’s crust.
His temple spewed the colour of his politics.
He grabbed a sound recordist’s coat and said,
while pointing to his coal-seem-gaping head,
“I ‘ope your bleedin’ camera’s catchin’ all of this.”
What was that army beating shields and chant-
ing one in unsion? Some muffled rant
intended to un-nerve their foe? Will right-wing press
explain away the carnage here without
the commie imagery – the front page clout
at Marx – neglecting to include the Russian mess?
Will evolution give the miners thick-
er skulls to help absorb those downward sick-
ly thuds, or elongate the long arm of the law?
Will miners one day grow immune to pain,
or will they calmly compromise and gain
a mole’s buck teeth, his quite efficient digging paw?
JB
