Your Mothers Farthers was on the front line:

Twenty-five years ago, an accelerated programme of pit closures triggered the miners' strike, which divided friends and families and ended with the loss of tens of thousands of jobs.

Ian McMillan's poem for the Miners Strike

It feels like a hundred years ago, or it could just be last week When they stood on a freezing picket line and history took a turn When communities refused to die or turn the other cheek And what did we learn, eh? What did we learn?

For a year the pit wheels stood stock still, And money dwindled, then ran out But collectivism's hard to kill And if you stand and listen, you'll still hear them shout... But what did we learn, eh? What did we learn?

It feels like just a week ago, or it could be a hundred years When the police vans charged with their sirens on through the silent weeping streets;

And they cooked and marched and argued through a mist of pain and fear And a shut down pit's a symbol of depression and defeat So what did we learn, eh? What did we learn?

The past is not just Kings and Queens, it's those like me and you Who clashed with a woman at Number 10, who had to stand and fight Cos when your way of life's being smashed to bits, what else can you do?

As the pickets braziers glow and smoke in the freezing Yorkshire night; What did we learn, he? What did we learn? Buy frozen peas where the braziers burned What did we learn? What should we learn?

Ian McMillan, March 2009

Now the Sons and Daughters of those, and the Mothers Farthers of those who stood along side, are now saying NO NEW COAL, attacking the very people you once suported, who said this was NOT A CLASS WAR?

Speaking as a worker, radical trade unionist and class struggle anarchist. We cant afford to burn coal.

Workers should be international in their viewpoints, and not just concerned with the British proletariat. The billions of peasantry and proletariat in countries in south east asia, for example, will not have any water in 50 years - this is because about 2 billion peasants and proles rely on the meltwater from the mountains, which is decreasing rapidly as global temperature rises due to GHG concentrations in the atmosphere. They will suffer droughts, famines, and most will die, or become refugees.

New coal, wont help the old coal communities, those that were created around the collieries. It wont create many jobs - they are all going to be open cast mines, and so what once took hundreds of workers in deep mines, takes a dozen. Deep mining was also terrible work - lets not romanticise it - lung diseases were common, horrible and fatal.

Coal cannot be made clean - the technology is not properly tested on a large scale yet, and it will come too late. We can build wind farms *today*, and since the problem is *urgent* we cannot wait for a technology that might not work, and is maybe a decade off.

And in the end, we could turn the planet mostly into a desert if we continue burning fossil fuels. and who do you think will suffer the most in britain? the ruling class? no - it will be the working class who will suffer the most, while the ruling class ensure that they protect their wealth and status by any means they can.

So, i say support the British proletariat, *and* the international proletariat, by supporting green jobs, green technology, and re-training/skilling for green jobs fully paid for. In the end we need a green anarchist-communist society for the sake of the proletariat, (our sake!) or we are all going to be completely boned.

Solidarity,