'With Banners Held High' ends in Green Mush!

by Dave Douglass

WITH Banners Held High over the few years of its existence has been an increasingly contradictory event. At first it had a strong focus on the Miners and the NUM and the struggles of the mining communities. Miners’ banners predominated. Miners and their families turned out to celebrate our identity and heritage and use it as an excuse for a canny drink and meet old comrades. Alongside this came the ‘left’ which had over the last couple of decades become more and more infused with a middle class largely southern based liberal agenda, the Identity Politics obsession, and an adoption of the politics of climate alarmism. Climate hysteria for those who are rapidly consumed by it until it becomes an unchallengeable article of faith, simply assume their acceptance of the whole panic and ‘emergency’ agenda is commonly accepted, it isn’t of course. The political demands of Climate Extinction and the Green Party, Green Peace etc confront the very idea of an industrial proletariat, traditional British industry is fighting for life against a war of extermination. That Yorkshire and Humberside TUC have gone over wholesale to their politics and changed the Banners platform into a carnival of green mush and anti-industry propaganda. So, we found in previous years while miners banners and miners proclaimed the fight against pit closures in defence of coal, coal does not dole, and the whole pro mining struggles of the period 83-93 and down to the last three mines. At the same time stalls at the event everywhere called for an end to coal, and much of industry.

This current proposed event marks really an end to the miners connection and its wholesale adaptation to the politics of ‘Climate Emergency’. Where in this ‘virtual event’, which one presumes will be a zoom rally, is the case for coal? Where are the speakers to DEBATE and CHALLENGE the assumption of ‘Climate Emergency’ the degree of ‘Man Made Climate Change’ against an ongoing natural process? Where are speakers from NUM or UNITE to talk in defence of Steel, and coal which is vital to make it? Where are the speakers from the Cement industry who rely on coal for cement and concrete the building industry, including Turbine installation? Where are speakers on the absolute necessity of coal and steel for Boris’s ‘Green Deal’ or Labour’s version of it? Nobody from the NUM invited to speak on the struggle to develop our new mine in Whitehaven, bringing with it 2500 new jobs, and the prospect of mining our own coal again and supplying a steel industry making for example our own wind turbines and our own electric cars or solar frames. None of us from coal, steel, construction, cement, car manufacture etc have been invited to speak on the necessity of fossil fuel in any green manufacturing programme. Where is the workshop on Clean Coal Technology, Carbon Capture and Storage etc? It does not feature.

One thing which made my blood run cold is the session on Labour’s plan to bring in compulsory climate panic lessons into every classroom, with lectures on ‘climate change’ which I for one doubt in the extreme will be an objective assessment of climate change over the last 4.6 billion years before we got here. The dramatic changes in atmospheric composition and weather and temperature and extinctions before we arrived and the context for current changes, mild by comparison and only partially due to our presence. Objectivity, debate, discussion and different points of view and science are not being encouraged here.

I am frankly disgusted at this platform and programme which ignores everything we fought for as miners and steelworkers and our unions. It shows how deeply the climate panic propaganda has entered into the ideology and leadership of even the Trade Union Movement and more shockingly the Northern industry-based Trade Union Movement, one wonders who is running this show and just what are their credentials?

All of that being the case, I don’t think there is any room for miners’ banners on this event, as we have been treated with gross contempt.

I would urge the organisers whoever they are, to think long and hard before next years event, to allow a proper debate and discussion around the question of what is ‘green’ and how does coal and steel meet any challenge of climate concerns. What is the role of clean coal technologies and carbon capture and most importantly the hypocrisy of exporting OUR carbon emissions abroad, our coal and steel requirements abroad, in order that we can use the imported produce here but claim to be emissions free ourselves? Any Labour Movement body let alone Yorkshire and Humberside TUC worthy of its manufacturing traditions would be debating these real issues and facts rather than joining the anti-industry middle class green liberal chorus.

**********************************************************************