Recent revelations about the 1980s show that some of the times were as dark as we remember. 

But the recently uncovered papers about the 1984-5 miners’ strike show some of their weaknesses and our strengths. 

They show that the miners ultimately lost, but the government did believe that the miners were close to winning.

I’d like to remind readers of one small footnote from official papers which shows that some of our enemies were indeed paper tigers. Or at least made of rotten wood.

Silver Birch was the anti-strike miner, the hero of the right, the true-blue pimpernel who toured the nation’s pits organising a “back to work” movement.

Silver Birch was funded by the Mail and feted by Fleet Street for his undercover work. At the time he was big news.

They presented Silver Birch like a hero of the French Resistance, evading and outwitting the Germans.

But it turns out Silver Birch was a bit more ’Allo ’Allo than Inglourious Basterds. And that’s official.

Documents released to me under the Freedom of Information Act include an intelligence report on Silver Birch drawn up in August 1984 by the Association of Chief Police Officers for home secretary Leon Brittan.

While Silver Birch was a useful propaganda tool, the police believed he was also, well, a bit of a tool.

He may have encouraged opponents of the strike outside the mines, but the police felt he had little direct effect on the miners themselves.

The report says that Silver Birch — actually 35-year-old Bevercotes miner Chris Butcher — reported to a detective inspector in the intelligence office at Nottinghamshire Police headquarters.

“This officer’s assessment is that [Butcher] ‘is genuine but not too bright’ although he appears sincere as to his attentions,” the paper states.

Not-too-bright Birch also seemed short on support in the pits.

The police say Silver Birch asked for police protection at his secret meetings in pubs “in the form of a stand-by unit in the vicinity but not in an overt position.”

The undercover cops used their secret protection squads to check out Birch’s roots.

“Special Branch checks indicate that the support at these meetings may not be as wide as [Butcher] himself suggests,” the report concludes.

However, that might miss the point. Silver Birch was more a propaganda operation for the rest of the country than an undercover operation among the miners.

The police note: “At the present time he is being accommodated at an unknown hotel in Blackpool, courtesy of the [Mail] newspaper, and his constant companion is reporter xxxx, who is the author of the present articles.” 

This indicates that Silver Birch was more of a press operation aimed at creating the image of disunity among the miners to try to undermine support for the strike from non-miners.

In the pits, Silver Birch was Silver Berk. But in the Mail he was a hero, designed to give the Tories attacking the strike — and the Labour right which didn’t want to support it — an excuse.

LET me encourage Morning Star readers to go see Jeffrey Lewis on his British tour next month. I’ll start with the music and end with the politics.

Lewis played in the New York “anti-folk” scene in the 1990s. Like others in that loose group, he often uses folk’s acoustic style, commitment to describing the everyday and the wordiness of some of the best ’60s folk. 

The everyday life in his songs is downbeat contemporary urban bohemia, the tone often runs from the self-deprecating to sarcastic, the musicality wilfully scratchy, as in one of his better-known numbers, The Chelsea Hotel Oral Sex Song. 

This song shows Lewis is both influenced by a big theme singer songwriter like Leonard Cohen, but also how he tends to the self-mocking shaggy dog story. As well as demonstrating this complex interaction of musical history, it’s a great song.

Lewis also has obvious affection for scuzzier New York underground music, especially Lou Reed. Lewis has some of Reed’s ability to give a skewed commentary on the streets, but while he can produce a similar pavement poetry, he is a lot more good-natured. 

If you take the equation: “Velvet Underground, minus squalor, plus good-humoured disposition,” you end up with: “equals Jonathan Richman,” whom Lewis often reminds me of at his rockier moments.

His current CD, Jeffrey Lewis and the Jrams, includes the song You’re Invited, which starts with the suggestion that we should all have a funeral while we’re still alive, as they have the best guest turnout of any of our parties, and Outta Town, a description of his descent into asocial uncleanliness when his girlfriend leaves him alone to visit her mum. Both ring true, entertain and have that Richman feel.

The Jrams, his current touring band, only add bass, drums and occasional keyboard to his guitar. But when I saw them in June, they managed to get a lot of different textures from this small palette — with splashes of folk, garage punk and a touch of ’60s acid rock.

All of which are good reasons to see Lewis live — he’s a witty, humane, punky-folk performer. Plus you can buy his CDs very cheap at the venue.

But the particular draw for Morning Star readers is that he has a deeply held, probably deeply unfashionable commitment to counter-culture, to keeping radicalism alive in music. 

As his spoken-word piece What Would Pussy Riot Do? argues, Lewis wants “bands that break through walls with speakers/not just try to sell you sneakers/do you want bands to sell you things, or tell you things?”

Lewis is also a pretty proficient comic book artist and often devotes a couple of slots in  his gigs to a live poem illustrated by an oversize comic sketchbook — often a funny, committed, weird political lecture. 

I’ve seen Lewis do his comic book lectures on the French revolution and he is currently working on a six-part history of communism, which is sympathetic but critical. 

If you can’t imagine what a punk-folk illustrated comic book lecture on communism looks like, you can just search for “Jeffrey Lewis” and “History” on YouTube. Or better still, just buy a ticket to see the man in August, when he will be performing at Cambridge, Leicester, London (with Neko Case, who is OK too), Crickhowell, Wakefield, Newcastle, Dundee, Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Stirling and Manchester. 

For more details visit www.thejeffreylewissite.com