Mining communities were not so unified

As coalminers’ daughters growing up in the 1950s and 60s our experiences were of a coalmining community that has always been divided – between socialist traditions and more deferential conformist ones, between a powerful anti-racism and deeply entrenched racisms and sexism, between strong trade union loyalties and elements that have always colluded with management and the bosses (including within the National Union of Mineworkers itself).

Yet we are constantly presented with damagingly nostalgic views of coalminers and coalmining communities in the past as harmonious and unified. That distorted image is now increasingly being deployed as a central motif in the relentless attack against (for the current period, at least) a socialist-led Labour party. Yet the solidarist, oppositional section of the mining community we grew up in has been under attack for decades from rightwing policies of regional impoverishment, anti-trade-union legislation, privatisation and labour-market casualisation.

We heard little of the miners’ voice while that destructive process was under way. The Guardian should avoid reinforcing oversimplified stereotypes of working-class history (The miners’ voice, 24 January). It is ironic that now the miners’ voice is increasingly being heard, it is primarily to attack the only party leader for decades who has actually been on the workers’ side.
Prof Diane Reay University of Cambridge, Lesley Burgess UCL Institute of Education, London

• Your article (Labour in crisis: In the rush to fix ‘red wall’ in north, party risks loss of urban BAME base, 25 January) perhaps gave too little attention to the declining role of trade unions in our society. The main picture, of the Grunwick strike from the 70s, could have been added to by a picture of the strike at Imperial Typewriters in the same decade. Those strikes radicalised the mainly Asian workers involved, often with minimal support from the mainly white males in the trade unions at the time. This crisis of the relationship between traditional Labour and BAME workers has been around for a lot longer than the period covered by the Labour party’s current reflections.
John Simmons
London

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