Arthur Scargill Quotes

Arthur Scargill — British Politician born on January 11, 1938,

Arthur Scargill is a British trade unionist and politician who was president of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) from 1982 to 2002. Joining the NUM at the age of 19 in 1957, he became one of its leading activists in the late 1960s. In 1973, he was instrumental in organising the miners' strike that toppled Edward Heath's Conservative Government in March 1974. A decade later, he led the union through the 1984–85 miners' strike, a key event in British labour and political history. It was a confrontation with the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher, and the miners' union was decisively defeated. A former Labour Party member, he is now the leader of the Socialist Labour Party (SLP), which he founded in 1996... (wikipedia)

Yet what you need is not marches, demonstrations, rallies or wide associations, all of them are important. What you need is direct action. The sooner people understand that, the sooner we'll begin to change things.

The trade unions and the Labour Party... failed miserably. Instead of giving concrete support, and calling upon workers to take industrial action, they did nothing.

The trouble with the Labour Party leadership and the trade union leadership, they're quite willing to applaud millions on the streets of the Philippines or in Eastern Europe, without understanding the need to also produce millions of people on the streets of Britain.

All too often miners, and indeed other trade unionists, underestimate the economic strength they have.

You may see the emergence of a new political party from the body of the trade union movement which represents a very clear-cut socialist alternative policy and which gives expression to the views of the trade union movement in parliament.

Arthur Scargill Quotes

Arthur Scargill Quotes

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