The country is sliding swiftly from crisis to chaos. By this time next week, there is every chance that the mines of the Midlands will be closed by the pit deputies’ strike, that picket-line violence will escalate, and that the politics of Britain will be frozen in an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation between contestants unable to break each other’s will. If President Mitterrand turns on the television news during his visit this week, he may even be reminded by the scenes at Grimethorpe and elsewhere of his own country’s événements of May 1968. British viewers need look no farther than Belfast for parallel scenes of youngsters throwing stones through police station windows.
It would be a marvellous thing, even at this late stage, if one could call for compromise and old-fashioned common sense, for the government to intervene to knock heads together.
The gap between the two sides is, after all, not so very wide – at best a form of words, at worst a stubborn pride among the main players.
Words, of course, matter, and there is a world of difference between closing pits on grounds of geological exhaustion and on grounds of economic calculation.
Talking point
To turn your nose up at darts is to belittle a game that is etched deeper into our national character than most, an historical pursuit that so many have learned in parallel with the long and often messy apprenticeship of finding one’s level as a beer-drinker.
Observer sports editor Peter Corrigan on the delights of the public bar
Key quote
“No one should live without a fire, whoever they are.”
South Yorkshire miner convicted of stealing coal.
