Working Class Gathers in Durham for the Northeast Fighting Festival

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122nd Miners Gala and Big Meeting:
Working Class Gathers in Durham for the Northeast Fighting Festival

The Right of the DPRK to Defend Itself Is Inviolable

The Durham Miners Gala took place on Saturday, July 8, this year. On a cloudy day but without rain the organisers estimated even more people gathered than the 70,000 last year which was itself the largest for several decades. There were more that 100 bands and banners – not just from former colliery towns but also from all the union contingents in the northeast. This compares with the 60 last year, and it took almost all day for the mass contingents to enter and leave the racecourse. So full was the fencing that many banners had to be laid on the open field. The whole racecourse was covered with people, making it almost indistinguishable from the thousands that gathered for the Big Meeting at 1.30pm

In his speech to the Big Meeting, Steve Kemp, National Secretary of the NUM, spoke about the struggle of the miners in terms of Britain’s energy needs. He pointed out that since the defeat of the miners and the closure of Britain’s pits, and against all the miners’ warnings, Britain was now in a complete mess over energy. He condemned the government for allowing big business to run energy, saying that the wars it was waging were not against weapons of mass destruction but wars for energy. If the government had listened to the workers in the mining communities, the world would have been a much safer place, he said, calling for the energy industry to be taken back into public ownership.

Australian - Newcastle People's Choir

In his contribution, Bob Crow, General Secretary of the RMT, said that in the railway and shipping industry the employers were hiring eastern European workers at 2 dollars a day to undermine wages. He said that it was an absolute insult when in a world that produces food sufficient for three times the number of people that live in it a third of the people go to bed at night starving. He said that unions should demand not just that coal and gas be pulled back into public ownership but also those banks that are raping the people left, right and centre, as well as insurance companies and private companies that do the same. We want a different kind of world, he declared, a world where we look after people from the cradle to the grave and a world of peace.

During the Meeting, most of the speakers tried to take account of the growing consciousness of the working people for a fighting programme to build the new society and the new world that they aspire to, and that the working class must take the lead in this. At the same time, the speakers, to a more or less a degree, placed themselves in the camp of the old consciousness of a return to old-style social democracy, or worse came across as apologists for New Labour. For example, one leader called for a return to the values of social democracy. Labour MP John McDonnell condemned the government for sending troops to Iraq and for its attack on civil liberties, ending with the call that another world is possible and that we must create it. Trade union leaders Derek Simpson, General Secretary of Amicus, and Dave Prentis, General Secretary of Unison, only half-heartedly condemned the anti-social offensive against their members and more firmly placed themselves as apologists for New Labour.

Big Meeting - Durham Racecourse

It is only by breaking with what is holding the movement back and openly refusing to conciliate with any apology for privatisation, fascism and war – applying the workers’ militant traditions to the present and demanding a fighting programme – that will build the workers’ opposition to safeguard the future of society.

In its call to the Gala, the northern region of RCPB(ML) gave out hundreds of leaflets and took up this theme in its statement Only the Working Class Can save the Day! It firmly called for the workers to take the lead and unite the whole of society around its own programme. It called on the workers to put their stamp on society with such a programme, vesting sovereignty in the people, guaranteeing the rights of all in law, and establishing a sovereign economy that stops paying the rich, invests in social programmes and meets the claims of the people on society. Such a pro-worker, pro-social government would also be an anti-war government, which bases its foreign policy on resolving international conflicts through peaceful means, no longer deploying troops on foreign soil and ending its intervention in the internal affairs of other countries.

— Statement of the Co-ordinating Committee of Friends of Korea, London, July 9, 2006 —

The Co-ordinating Committee of Friends of Korea (CCFK) condemns the hysteria generated by the US, Japan, Britain and some other countries around the issue of the missiles launched by the DPRK. It fully supports the legitimate right of the DPRK as a sovereign state with its Korean People’s Army to safeguard the country’s military capacity for self-defence, particularly in the face of the hostile threats of the US for a "pre-emptive nuclear strike" against the DPRK.

It is not the DPRK that is staging a "provocation" or violating any agreement. On the contrary, the experience of the world’s people, particularly since the wars against Iraq and Yugoslavia, the aggression against Afghanistan and the invasion and occupation of Iraq, is that it is the US and Britain and other like-minded forces who are threatening the peace and security of the world. The experience of US-Japanese threats and hostility on the Korean Peninsula on which the US maintains 70,000 troops together with bases and nuclear missiles, consistently threatening the peace of the peninsula and attempting to stifle and isolate the DPRK, also testifies as to who presents a threat to the peace and sovereignty of nations and peoples.

It is the US which has reneged on agreements it concluded with the DPRK and acted in a cavalier and reckless fashion in scuttling its dialogue with that country, and constantly conducted large-scale military exercises in the region directed against the DPRK. In these circumstances, the DPRK has exercised considerable restraint while carefully taking measures to strengthen its defensive capabilities.

It is extremely crucial in the tense international situation created by the US, Britain and others over the past few years that the progressive and people’s forces take a stand in defence of the principle of sovereignty against such doctrines as that of "failed and failing states". By means of such doctrines, the big powers attempt to justify their intervention and aggression around the globe. A stand in defence of sovereignty and independence is in favour of stability and peace. In particular, as the Foreign Ministry of the DPRK points out, it could well be that but for the DPRK’s measures to strengthen its readiness for self-defence, the US would have attacked the DPRK, which it has provocatively and unjustly labelled as part of an "axis of evil", "an outpost of tyranny" and a "target of pre-emptive nuclear attack".

The CCFK adds its voice to all those who are demanding calm over the DPRK’s missile development and test-firing, and regards its self-defensive measures as legitimate measures aimed at preserving peace and stability in northeast Asia.

It is not the Korean Peninsula which is at present erupting in flames, but the Middle East, including Iraq and Palestine, in which the doctrine of aggression, collective punishment and the brutal racist oppression of entire peoples, religions and cultures has taken the upper hand.

The view of the CCFK is that it is not the people and government of the DPRK who are "isolated", but the reactionary elites of the US and Britain and other big powers who adopt the role of the world’s policemen against the will and sentiment of the broad masses of the world’s people, including the working and progressive people of their own countries. It is they who are throwing the world into a crisis of their own making, while humanity resists and takes a stand for a different world, one where, like the DPRK, the people are in control of their own destiny.

The denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula remains a cherished objective for the DPRK, the Korean people and all peace-loving forces. This has not changed. But this will not come about while the US is able to exercise nuclear blackmail. The stand of the DPRK in remaining strong and looking to the future is both just and far-sighted.

In standing firm against US provocations and hostility, the Korean people are making an important contribution to the struggle of the world’s people to block the road to world war and bring about a world worthy of humanity. The CCFK stands as one with the Korean people and their defence of their independence and the right to determine their own social system, free from all outside interference.

Co-ordinating Committee of Friends of Korea can be contacted c/o:
170 Wandsworth Road, London SW8 2LA; 14 Featherstone Road, Southall, UB2 5AA.