Opinion: Why we must draw on the community spirit of the miners' strike of 1984

Both were on the frontline, because the strike was not for a rise in pay, but to combat a brutal pit closure programme. It was a campaign to save jobs, mines, communities, even a very way of life itself.

By the time 1984 came round Kinneil had been closed just weeks earlier. Polmaise was fighting a rear-guard action to stay open.

The Stirlingshire and West Lothian coalfields became key battlegrounds. And the community rallied round. With practical solidarity organised by the Central Region Miners Support Group, soup kitchens set up overnight in local strike centres, women against pit closure groups coming to the fore, and outstanding demonstrations of political support, culminating in a march and mass rally at the Grangemouth stadium.

The challenge facing workers in the local petrochemical industry today has clear parallels with what happened to the miners and our mining communities forty years ago.

We know that right across private industry there is a squeeze on jobs and wages. Meanwhile public service workers fear that last month’s SNP/Green Budget will add to an already under-resourced and over-heated system, not least in health, social care and education.

The Coalfields Regeneration Trust still supporting former mining communities is faced with a funding cut. Housing investment is being axed.

And how shameful it is, that the venue for that huge rally for the miners locally, which thousands of us attended all those years ago, is now itself under threat of closure.

So it is good to see a campaign up and running to defend this important community facility which is of national importance.

It is a local grass roots initiative which has my full support.

Working class history is important in both understanding the present and shaping the future. That’s why we must draw on those values and on that class and community spirit of forty years ago, and apply them to win the battles of today.

Happy new year.