Labour
He voted Labour all his life,
your Dad. I was a loving, loyal wife And glad To put my cross by the same candidate Then wait Watching TV in the crowded bar By the pithead, sinking jar after jar Till the results were in And we knew Which side would win And who Have to Take defeat on the chin. This time it was Thatcher. Among the posh Tory men None could match her Smart, pearled Vehement Acumen. She took us on. In her blue eyes our blackened world Of slag and seam, Of red flags unfurled, Was alien, Spent; Our time had gone, Dismissed like a bad dream; The mines had had their day, They would no longer pay. And we of the tin baths and the tin hats Who toiled in blackness on the brightest day, Whose men clocked up miles in cages not cars, With scars From rockfall, pick-axe, truck and buried friends, We were like rats To be rid of by brute means for Tory ends. Oh, The mines would go. Not clean, Not green, Old King Coal was dead. The wheels would stop at every pithead, And soon there would be nothing to be seen Of where we had been, Nothing to show For centuries of hard labour below. Then came King Arthur. Labour to the core And one of us, a husband and a father - And more, He courted fame: He rallied our communities for war. How could we know Scargill would let us starve? That slow And bitter year The government would halve Our meagre benefits; There would be no Help from the Miners’ Union for the poor Surviving on our wits, On fags and beer. And how could we know The misery in store at striking pits? Hectored men would go Desperate for a little Union pay Onto the picket lines Day after day Believing this would somehow save the mines; There they would stay Despite the broken hand, the bloody nose, Taunting the Right, Keeping the scabs at bay. Braving fight after fight, Arrests and fines, Under the scrawled signs Life-long friends coming to blows Over the side they chose. And how could we know After the charging horses, Black police And bloodied batons, and the riot shields In ugly deployment of national resources To keep the peace; After our lives became a TV show, Our banners headlines, How could we know the mines Would soon revert to ruins in the fields, The wild take back our spoil And at terrible cost Our loved labour lost To gas, to oil? Three decades on, Son, Your Dad has gone. And there’s no coal And there’s no soul In this damned coalition. Thousands went in and then came out of prison; All that pain Was utterly in vain. The Tories won. The pithead wheels are rusting in the rain, The talk is all Of tide and wind and sun And Labour has broken with the Union. You’ll try again To roll back time - but this is a strange World caught up in climate change. Each warring party goes by its old name But red, blue, yellow, purple, green, What do they really mean? Each faces the same Enemy, utters the same Platitudes, and this year’s men To our generation Are alien. How could I know your Dad and his Union brothers Toiling for coal and gas and oil and bread, Raising their standards for the wives and mothers Till they and the men exploiting them were dead, Laboured to waste the earth for all the others To come? Oh yes. The maps are turning red. |