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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 183 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 183, February 1995.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Coming Back Brockens: A Year in a Mining Village
Mark Hudson
Jonathan Cape £16.99
Coming Back Brockens is a depressing book and not, as the title may imply, about the miners’ strike of 1984–85.
The author goes in search of his forebears who were mine workers in the Durham pit village of Horden which once employed 5,000 men.
Durham, like the rest of Britain’s coalfields, has been laid waste by the closures of 1992 and before. Horden pit went in 1986 leaving behind high unemployment, high crime and low expectations for the future. As Hudson searches for the history of his family, which is not particularly interesting, he starts to recognise the bitterness and despair of people’s lives, but time and time again his contempt for working class people comes through.
Not only is his book patronising, but at times it is downright insulting. It reaches its depths when he claims that Viz characters such as Biffa Bacon populate the nearby town of Peterlee, or when he refuses to make way for a group of schoolgirls on a narrow pavement, ‘Not in this shithole.’ As if to say he would play the gent if walking down Oxford Street. He rails against a community that could pull together during the 1984–85 strike but can’t come up with a collective solution to crime and who refuse to ‘shop’ local youth to the police. This is something common enough in working class communities, in particular mining ones. The police’s role in the strike means they are more hated than the kids who nick and vandalise through desperation and boredom.
Hudson is obviously a member of the school of thought that believes the working class is dead – he tells us that the ‘great British public rallied to the miners in 1992 because the power of organised labour was no longer a threat to them’.
Hudson does most of the talking throughout the book, but the only decent part of it is where he gives over two chapters to political activists, one an ex-Communist Party member and the other from the Labour Party, who give an account of being involved in local politics.
Instead of giving us such a shallow view of working class life maybe Hudson should have followed his friends’ advice. They could not understand why, he wanted to go to such a place as east Durham, ‘where they all vote Labour but when you examined what they believed in most of them were fascists’.
He should have listened to them and done us all a favour.
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