The Lamps That Were Put Out

Robson Green’s programme on the pitmen painters was a dazzling example of just how good ITV can still be when it puts its mind to it. Green’s own accent has been mangled (and, yes, I do know that I am a fine one to talk, but I did not start out with the blessing of a working-class background), but what a delight it was to hear recordings of the real old accent of the Northumberland coal field, its unique and utterly inimitable vowels exemplified by the pronunciation of the word "coal". And to hear read the prose of which men were then capable who had left school at 12 or 13.

The old union and municipal machines were hated and destroyed, not despite, but precisely because of, their success in acting as and in facilitating civilised and civilising forces. They loved a bit of ceremony, and a lot of hierarchy. They sustained the Workers’ Educational Association and the Miners’ Lodge Libraries, the pitmen poets and the pitmen painters, the brass and silver bands, and so much else destroyed by the most philistine Prime Minister until Blair. They fought to secure the economic basis of paternal authority. They frequently marched behind banners depicting Biblical characters and events, or local landmarks, or the fallen of two World Wars. Like public ownership, they were safeguards of the Union.

Today, even in their reduced condition, at least the smaller and more traditional of the unions are Britain’s most significant force for national sovereignty, a fact of which you would be left entirely oblivious if you relied on the ideologically Blairite broadcast media or on print media under the lunatic delusions that there are anything more than trace elements of Eurosceptricism among Conservative MPs and that Margaret Thatcher was ever of that mind. If the former were true, then that party would be clamouring to re-open the pits and otherwise to restore the great unionised industries maintained by the good offices of the State.