“If we stop running, they will stop chasing us – stand firm and fight.”
Mick McGahey
By Richard Leonard MSP
“If we stop running, they will stop chasing us – stand firm and fight.”
These words, first uttered and often repeated by the miners’ leader Mick McGahey, remain a powerful appeal to the working class.
Mick McGahey was a working class hero.
— Richard Leonard (@LabourRichard) January 30, 2024
He should have a permanent legacy in our parliament. pic.twitter.com/pGcnCrrsUJ
It was an appeal that resonated during the era-defining miners’ strike of 1984/85, in coalfields and communities across Britain as the battle raged for jobs and a very way of life.
Mick was a political visionary, a man of real integrity and intellect, an internationalist and, in his own words, a product of his class and his movement.
He never hid his political beliefs, he was a lifelong member of the Communist Party, and he was bugged by the secret service, vilified by the tabloids, denounced by the right of the Labour Party, and the subject of a witch-hunt by the Tories.
Mick McGahey truly was a working class hero.
Last night I was honoured to lead a debate in the Scottish Parliament to mark the 25th anniversary of his death and to call for a lasting memorial to be erected in Holyrood. There was cross-party support, and every MSP who spoke praised him in the highest possible terms. As we discussed Mick’s life and legacy, his daughters Caroline and Elaine looked on from the public gallery, surrounded by dozens of former miners, many of whom were themselves sacked and blacklisted during the 84/85 strike. Class heroes all.
A lasting memorial would be a fitting tribute. Mick was a passionate advocate of devolution. In his first year as President of the Scottish area of the National Union of Mineworkers, he went to the Scottish TUC to call for the establishment of a Scottish Parliament to bring power closer to the people. The significance of that contribution cannot be over-stated, this was a pivotal moment not only in the history of the Scottish labour and trade union movement but for Scotland as a whole.
He argued that the essence of socialism was the decentralisation of power, but in his demand for devolution he rejected “any theory of a classless Scotland”, identifying the common bonds between the Scottish miners and the Durham miners, the London dockers and the Sheffield engineers.
When Mick died, his family approached the then First Minister, the late Donald Dewar, to ask if his ashes could be scattered in the foundations of the parliament building which was under construction, and which Mick had done so much to create. Such was the high esteem in which this lifelong communist was held, Dewar arranged with the site manager for that to happen.
Mick McGahey was great because he represented great people and a great cause ✊ pic.twitter.com/AigK5jLJjj
— Richard Leonard (@LabourRichard) January 31, 2024
Of course, Mick’s commitment to the workers he represented started long before the miners’ strike of 40 years ago. In 1967 nine miners were killed in the Michael Colliery disaster, poisoned in an underground fire. Mick’s tireless campaigning led to every miner in every coalfield being fitted with self-rescuing breathing equipment.
But again Mick’s horizons went beyond jobs, pay and conditions for miners alone. He lived and breathed class politics and class solidarity. He led the Scottish miners down to London to stand with the migrant, predominantly women, workers at Grunwick during their struggle.
Mick was a working class intellectual. This miner, the son of a miner and many generations of miners before him, who left school at 14, would regularly draw on Karl Marx, William Morris and John Maclean with ease, on Robert Burns, Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Shakespeare. Nicky Wilson, the current President of the NUM, recalls how Mick would urge young comrades around him to read as much as possible, to educate themselves.
Mick understood that defeating Thatcher would be short-lived if it was not accompanied by defeating Thatcherism. He said: “I know the importance of electoral victories. But within the question of the defeat of Thatcherism is the key question for what? To have another Labour Government that will be defeated in another five years, or something like that. No, it is to change British society – win the case for socialism.”
Mick’s appeal to the working class is as urgent now as it ever was. Mick lit a flame that burned red for socialism. We cannot let that flame go out, we must always stand firm and fight.
- Richard Leonard is MSP for Central Scotland and former leader of Scottish Labour. You can follow him on Twitter/X and Facebook.
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