Book launch: We’re All in it Together: Huddersfield Literature Festival 30/03/2022

My next publication is a contribution (one poem) to a book called We’re All in it Together, published by Grist, at the University of Huddersfield. This is the link to book a place at the launch event (free of charge but booking recommended):

https://www.huddlitfest.org.uk/event/gristlaunch/

Michael Stewart and Gaia Holmes. The cover of Escape Kit is on the tableau, but Michael is standing in front of it.

I hope all the contributors attend the launch event, especially Gaia Holmes, my poetry mentor; Joelle Taylor, the current holder of the T. S. Eliot Prize, and Ian Duhig, whom I have not yet had the pleasure of meeting.

If this event is anything like as good as the recent Grist salon events, it will be a blast.

This will be the fifth publication by Grist which contains my work. I think that is a record.

I will always be grateful to Grist for having provided my first published short story, my first published poems, and first published novella, which I later adapted for BBC Radio 4. I submitted three poems to the recent competition. They chose what I consider to be the worst of them.

What price the ruling class?

This is a piece I wrote on Facebook, in 2019.

The bitterest irony of Brexit is that the Tories, not the Ukips, have managed to take the rational resentment that resulted from the closure of mines, steelworks, and major manufacturing industries, and re-package it in such a way that they can control the degree to which the working class in places like Barnsley, Consett, Grimsby, Stoke, and Merthyr Tydfil become disengaged from mainstream politics.

It is not that the lunatics have taken over the asylum. It is more that the clinical director of the asylum has consulted with the lunatics, and come up with a programme to make them all more mad. But they will still be in the same asylum, and, because of the increased costs associated with this programme, everybody will get less food, shorter exercise and recreation time, and some medications will be withdrawn.

When the Great Strike ended in 1985, the people of the mining communities were tired out, and conflicted. It was a war and, like any other war, in spite of what Billy Bragg says, it was not a “liberating experience”. Wars are complex and nasty sequences of events in which mass groups of individuals are crushed by forces. The strike made things different but, if it made anybody free, it was only for fleeting moments. As J. K. Galbraith observed, absence of money limits freedom more than dictatorial government ever could.

I am presumptuous enough to say “we” still have our banners. Nobody in my family was a miner, but I supported the strike when I was 17. I donated money. I went on marches. I gave out leaflets. I had never-ending arguments with my father. It got to the point where we could not ask each other if we wanted a cup of tea without it resulting in an argument about the miners’ strike.

But the banners represent nothing if we are not in control of our own destiny. If you march behind one of those banners, I would like to think you are an independently-minded, democratic socialist. I would like to think that you have the instinct to question what you are told. In 1985, the ruling class used the strike to accelerate the pit closure programme that they had already started. This country appears to be on the brink of another epoch-making political and economic change, the direction of which still lies with the ruling class.

However you voted in the referendum, I ask you this: since when did change which is in the hands of the ruling class ever benefit the working class?