'Still The Enemy Within'

This week sees the national release of the award-winning documentary about the miners' strike: 'Still The Enemy Within.'

In June the film won the audience award at the Sheffield Documentary Film Festival. Since then it has been shown at venues like the Durham Miners Gala and the TUC, but now goes out nationally. Barnsley Trades Council have organised - in conjunction with the Civic, Barnsley - the film's first screening on the old Yorkshire coalfield.

We also will have stalls from the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign, Fast Food Rights Campaign and Bookmarks. We will hold a collection for the Care UK UNISON strikers on the night - and a group of the strikers will be our guests of honour.

Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian gave the film 4 stars on Fri. Oct 3rd:

'Owen Gower’s documentary about the striking miners of 1984 and 85 is as gripping as any thriller. Thirty years on, the strike looks like a civil war that turned into a siege, during which the insurgents were starved into submission. One side was ruthlessly strategic, able to mobilise well-trained, well-paid unformed battalions. It was overwhelmingly supported by the press – who accepted the view that farmers were allowed to be “uneconomic” – and bankers with the Johnson Matthey bailout. But not miners. The Conservative government planned nothing less than the emasculation of union power by abolishing the domestic coal industry, and was quite uninterested in what all those irredeemable non-Tory voters were supposed to do for a living afterwards. Before the hostilities began, the miners had been bamboozled into creating the coal stockpile the government needed to ride out the big confrontation. Once the strike began, the National Union of Mineworkers lost two crucial battles: to picket Nottingham non-strikers, and to block power-plant coal supplies at Orgreave. TUC comrades failed to come out in sympathy in the autumn, and then a long, cruel winter set in as the strike crumbled. Gower’s film is a heartfelt tribute to the communities who were hammered by political, not economic, forces. They look bloodied, but unbowed.'