Out of the blackness and the water

By Grace Fletcher-Hackwood / @msgracefh

Before last week, if I’d heard about a mining accident I would have thought of the Pretoria Pit or of Chile. It’s not just because, post-80s, we tend to forget that there are any miners left at all. With the honourable exception of the fire service, it’s easy to assume that people in this country, at this time, do not face terrible danger as part of their everyday job. That it’s restricted to the past, or another country. On Thursday last week, while I was on a train, a friend who I talk to daily on Blackberry Messenger started to tell me what was going on in Gleision colliery. “Four miners trapped underground.” “One miner found dead.” “Still the second story on the BBC website.” “Now it’s the third story.”

Of course, the media didn’t exactly ignore the miners – Sky even sent Kay Burley along to ask people what a colliery is – but you might have noticed that last week’s tragedy (four deaths) has now dropped off the news altogether, as compared to the riots (five deaths, six if you count Mark Duggan) which dominated the news all summer.

There are a lot of reasons for that contrast. The riots were in big cities, where the news and commentary gets filmed and written. Property was destroyed, as well as people. The riots fit into one of the themes the press love best – Broken Britain – but the ‘elf n safety nanny state gone mad’ narrative doesn’t have much room for a story about four men who died because their job is unhealthy and unsafe. Less cynically, the riots were happening to more people. The fear of someone smashing a window right in front of you – the breakdown of law and order on your street – is, for almost all of us, a lot more in your face than the fear of water pouring into the mine where you work. As a friend of one of the dead men said, “It’s beyond belief to think of the blackness and the water.”

We saw – and heard a lot about – ‘communities coming together’ during and after the disturbances last month, and rightly so. The pictures of the Clapham Junction broom army and the Sikhs protecting a mosque in Southall, the immense dignity of Tariq Jahan: these things are little bright pieces of the big picture of this country. In Manchester we did it our own way – branding the city with a cheesy recycled slogan, slapping it on tacky t-shirts, icing it on cupcakes in the Northern Quarter, encouraging people to party and businesses to offer bargains. You won’t find me complaining, of course: you’ll find me in a tacky t-shirt, eating a cupcake at a street party.

It’s a far cry from the quiet way the communities of Cilybebyll and Resolven have come together to support the miners’ families – with nothing like the media hype that surrounded the riots, their cause appears to have been promoted mostly by Peter Hain (and very well, at that).

But we can’t let the lack of hype allow us to forget what happened there. We can’t forget the families who still need our support (you can donate here if you haven’t already), and we can’t forget every worker who still suffers dangerous conditions every day. As the Workers’ Memorial Day slogan goes: remember the dead, fight like hell for the living.