From The Archive: Just Pawns in Their Game

From The Archive is a special Friday feature. It features posts from my earlier (now-deleted) blog: Stuff & Nonsense and a few items from previous versions of A Tangled Rope that I feel deserve reprinting here, mainly as a way of archiving them. The dates are only approximate, I’m afraid, and there is a possibility that some links may no longer work (although, I will try to remember to test the links before republishing the piece).

Just Pawns in Their Game - 24/03/05

I found this rather sad just as sad as when I saw the TV pictures of miners as they left their closing pits for the last time.

There was talk that the banning of foxhunting was an act of revenge again 'the Tories' by Labour activists and MPs in much the same way as the defeat of the miners - and consequently trade union activism - was said to be revenge for the humiliation and defeat of the Heath Conservative government.

Now, I've never been a supporter of fox hunting, but I have seen the damage that foxes do. I can't see it as the great moral outrage that the anti-hunt protesters claim it to be; rather I see it as a mostly harmless - if not benign - pastime. Okay, foxes are chased by a pack of dogs and often get killed, but so what?

Nor have I ever been a great lover of coal mining - it killed my grandfather, and I can never forgive it for that - but it gave work, and therefore meaning to the lives of, a great many people and places.

If it is true that the one act was revenge for the other then both were - to say the least - misguided. They both went after the wrong targets.

The ordinary miners were not particularly zealous militant trade unionists - not by the standards of the time, anyway. They were just ordinary men doing a rather unpleasant job in order to earn a living, and because of the nature of mining - you have to go to the coal, it doesn't come to you - communities grew up around the mines where those men worked.

If the whole attempt to ban fox-hunting debacle was an attempt by Labour party MPs and activists to get revenge on the Tories for what happened to those miners and their communities after the strike, then the ironic thing is that they've got the wrong Tories. The Tories that closed the mines were the new Tories - the free-market Thatcherite ideologues, not the traditional patrician Tories who were the land-owning fox-hunting class.

But, the main point is, if this petty-minded revenge, and counter-revenge, taking is a symptom of what politics has become - or is even perceived to have become in the minds of voters - then it is no wonder that the overwhelming majority of people have turned their backs on party politics.