THE recently formed Wales Congress in Support of Mining Communities holds its first all-Wales conference in Cardiff City Hall today.

It is appropriate that the capital city should welcome miners’ supporters from all over Wales and beyond, for it is a city built on the exploitation of coal, the miners and their communities.

The Wales TUC was born out of the unity of miners and transport workers on the picket lines on 1972 and 1974. So also today the Wales Congress has been created out of the unity of the Welsh people around the miners’ struggle.

The congress is a modern-day “popular front.”

Wales has not known such a broad front since the days of “Spanish Aid” and the mass struggles against scab unionism and unemployment in the mid-1930s. But there are signs that today’s unity could be far longer lasting.

In the midst of the present miners’ strike, through the growth of miners’ support groups, inside and outside the coalfield there was a growing awareness that the miners’ cause is everyone’s cause.

The idea of a Wales congress grew in the minds of many. But it was in August at the Welsh cultural festival the National Eisteddfod, where two rallies were organised for the miners, that people and organisations came together for the first time.

The unifying factor was the memory and experience of past and present struggles.
One Treherbert miner described the Welsh as having “too much history to be defeated!”

And one historian said at the Eisteddfod: “Remember the debt we owe to the Welsh miners.

“It was their sacrifices, their industry and their vision which gave us the great national institutions of Wales — the University, the Library and the Museum.”

But far more than that, it is not a romantic movement. It is a movement that sees the need to support communities not in order to put them into museums but to change them for the better.

The miners’ union is correctly seen as the linchpin for the industrial and social survival of Wales.

The broad front of the congress embraces members of the Labour Party, Plaid Cymru and the Communisty Party, the peace, trade union and women’s movements, churches and the Welsh Language Society.

Among its hundreds of sponsors are poets, actors, writers, union and religious leaders, MEPs and MPs, and representatives from all levels of government, including four leaders of county councils.

The congress sees as its main aim the increasing of fundraising by more support groups as winter draws nearer.

The strength of the new organisation is that it has unified so many who see common cause with the miners.

The congress is also urging local authorities, with the aid of universities, to conduct as a matter of urgency a social audit of the consequences of the present pit closure programme on valley communities.

Today’s conference will reveal two of the more important achievements of the miners’ strike.

First, the women in the mining valleys, as in all coalfields, have performed a crucial role.

The women’s groups will rightly demand that they are not cast aside after the strike.

Secondly, the working-class solidarity engendered by twinning mining communities with  the rural areas in north and west Wales has created a national unity wholly unexpected by many — crossing language and geographical barriers.

Twinning with English towns and cities as far afield as London, Southampton Swindon and Birmingham has also been a useful experience.

People from many of these towns will be present at the conference and will then be staying with miners’ families.

In all our battles the miners of Wales have used their cultural heritage to good effect. The conference will be entertained by the widely acclaimed South Wales Striking Miners’ Choir which has toured all over Britain fundraising for our food centres.

When this great struggle is won, the congress may still have a role to play in defending the Welsh people.

But that is for the future. At the moment supporting mining communities feeding miners’ families and helping to organise for victory — is our priority.