AI job losses: Workers need a hero like miners' leader Mick McGahey

In an interview in The Herald 10 years ago by the arts writer Cate Devine, Ms Kay spoke of her family connections with Mick McGahey.

“I did know Mick, because my parents knew him really well,” she said. “To me he was Uncle Mick, like the Jimmies Reid and Airlie were Uncle Jimmy. He was part of my extended family. I have a vision of Mick at events like the Miners' Gala in Edinburgh, where we went every year.

“There used to be a real buzz around events like this and the May Day celebrations in Glasgow. There was a sense of everybody united in a common cause in great gaiety.”

Jackie Kay (Image: free)

It was hardly surprising that the prospect of someone like Mr McGahey being hung among the great figures of the Scottish establishment and former ruling classes might then have caused a frisson. He had been a lifelong communist committed to dismantling the societal structures that enriched and empowered many of those whose images adorned the National Galleries.

And besides, 1988 was a mere three years after the end of the Miners’ Strike and would still have been considered too recent for comfort for those who watched Britain’s last great class struggle proceed towards its brutal conclusion. Arthur Scargill, national president of the NUM at that time, was the man whose eloquence and bouffant features were usually front and centre of the miners’ strike. Mick McGahey, though, seemed to represent its heart and soul.

If you had never previously met a coal miner then Mick McGahey would have been a decent approximation of what you’d have imagined him to look like. You’d have described his face as “lived in”, meaning that it knew something of what it was to struggle and face down adversity.

You hesitate to use the word ‘honest’ to describe it because this sometimes conveys naivete and simplicity. With Mick McGahey though, it simply suggested that here was a man you could rely upon not to let you down. It also carried that charism that miners valued above all else: that he had your back.

It was when he opened his mouth to speak that the managerial classes began to fear him and also to judge him. It’s been described as rough and gravelly when it was actually smooth and lucid with a compelling rhythm. What made it rough to the ears of some was its authentic, working-class cadences.

In the 1970s and 1980s English regional accents were only just starting to be heard on the BBC. On the six o’ clock news, the sound of an uncompromising west of Scotland accent being delivered by a man who looked like Ronnie and Reggie Kray’s harder big brother might have caused some in the Home Counties to look out their passports.

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Jackie Kay’s description of the old May Day celebrations – “there was a sense of everybody united in a common cause in great gaiety” – could also apply to Dalkeith Miners' Club on Saturday as more than 500 former pit-workers and their families gathered to celebrate the beginning of the 84/85 strike. You don’t often see it these days as Labour and trades union conferences have increasingly come to resemble the Confederation of British Industry.

And when you see how easily both of these defenders of workers’ rights have been hollowed out you know that you’re unlikely to see either of them engage fully in the great class struggles coming down the line. These will be fought when employers begin to take full advantage of AI to bring about the ultimate capitalist fantasy: making profits without actually having to employ workers.

Mick McGahey’s name was invoked by several of those who spoke at Dalkeith Miners' Club. My dad’s view in 1984/85 – that if he had been in ultimate charge of the struggle the miners could have beaten Margaret Thatcher – was shared by some in the room.

I have my doubts though. Such was the implacable class hatred displayed by Mrs Thatcher and how easily she was able to mobilise the police, the judiciary, the security services, the bosses of British industry and the BBC in her war with the miners that it was always going to be a difficult task. That Neil Kinnock’s Labour Party and several other trade unions were cowed into silence made a formidable challenge more or less impossible.

Four decades on from the last great industrial and moral struggle of my lifetime, the miners and their families are still fighting. Two years ago the Scottish Parliament finally granted pardons to those miners who were either unjustly criminalised or subsequently black-listed for standing up for their communities in the face of the brutal tactics deployed by the police.

The next stage is to win adequate financial compensation for these men and their families. Hundreds of them – many still in their 20s – were deliberately denied the chance to work in what remained of the mining industry and were shunned in other sectors. Older workers had their pensions stolen.

A lost industry - and a lost way of life (Image: Newsquest)

Meanwhile, a quieter, but no less compelling campaign continues: to have a permanent memorial to Mick McGahey and his miners at the Scottish Parliament. It’s long overdue.

The former MSP Neil Findlay, the last authentically Socialist politician in Scottish Labour, led the campaign to pardon the miners. In 2019 on the 20th anniversary of Mr McGahey’s death, Mr Findlay invited his family and former comrades to lay wreaths at Holyrood. Mick McGahey was influential in securing STUC support to establish the Scottish Parliament and his ashes are buried under its debating chamber.

As in 1984, the next class war will be declared by the forces of unfettered capital. Sadly, I don’t see anyone of Mick McGahey’s stature in either the Labour Party or the modern trade union movement with the guts to take them on. And as for the SNP and the Greens? Don’t make me laugh.