Miners, the Bomb, and obstructing neoliberalism

James Fishwick
Aug 23, 2023
6 min read

Updated: Aug 30, 2023

The story of the People's Republic of South Yorkshire

ree — Photo credit: Lesbian Archive, Glasgow Women's Library

In 2023, local government in Yorkshire is in crisis. As Kirklees and Middlesborough Councils face potential bankruptcy,[1] councils and devolved authorities across the county are feeling the strain of underfunding and stripped-back services amidst rising inflation.[2] The promised benefits of devolution now ring hollow in the region: the levelling-up facade serves only to mask the effects of a continued government policy of managed decline. Today, efforts from local leaders to redistribute wealth are hindered by mandated austerity to which little alternative is proposed. The idea of local government enacting meaningful change in 2020s Britain feels somewhat obsolete. However, were our councils always so powerless in the face of neoliberal central government?

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the ideology of British central government made a sharp pivot towards neoliberalism. This intensified the privatisation of formerly-public goods, such as transport, utilities and social housing. In opposition to the ubiquity of Thatcherite ideology, certain dissenting local governments sought to obstruct the enactment of neoliberal policies. Alongside the Livingstone-led Greater London Council and the Militant policymakers in Liverpool stood the ‘People’s Republic of South Yorkshire’, fronted by David Blunkett at Sheffield City Council. These councils represented the vanguard of broader administrative efforts to bring about municipal socialism through council policy.

As the site of the earliest recorded attempt to found a trade-unionist alliance, Sheffield has a commitment to the interests of the working classes built through every brick.[3] With Blunkett as council leader, Thatcher’s monetarist pursuits of low inflation and widespread privatisation, which demanded drastic cuts to public spending, were strongly countered from the left.

Public transport and council housing were Sheffield’s key battlegrounds against Thatcherite privatisation. Under Blunkett, Sheffield City Council had upheld a policy of subsidised transport that was at odds with the transport policy of the Conservative government. Despite national deregulation, South Yorkshire’s buses resisted full privatisation and refused to sell off arms-length company South Yorkshire Transport, with the council subsiding fares. This spurred retributive action from Environment Minister Michael Heseltine, who cut the city’s transport budget as a means to force the Council to bring in privatisation.

By the 1980s, Sheffield was no stranger to widespread council housing building initiatives. To look beyond Blunkett’s leadership of Sheffield City Council, the efforts of previous Labour-led councils had already succeeded in providing homes for the working class population of Sheffield. The iconic Park Hill housing estate was built between 1957-1961 in a brutalist style. In accordance with the postwar social-democratic consensus which, following the publication of the Beveridge Report, had strongly affirmed the importance of social housing to ease social issues and improve living conditions.[4]

The first sections were opened by Labour Leader and Leader of the Opposition Hugh Gaitskell, with pamphlets about the housing project translated into several languages including Russian. Sheffield City Council wanted to contribute to the conversation, and partake in societal change, and the ideological debates of the post-war decades. Having someone as senior as Gaitskell open the project conveys a commitment to radical housing solutions, built and owned by the state for all, that is absent in mainstream political discourse today.[5]

Containing 995 residences, three pubs and dozens of shops, a dense town of residents was created to create a community, to rehouse the working class after large areas of slum housing were cleared.[6] Park Hill was a pioneering housing project in its time, but later fell into decline with the abandonment of Keynesian ideal and gained a reputation for anti-social behaviour and crime. Today, the flats are under mixed ownership, and the class composition of its residents has shifted – since the post-industrial fragmentation of Sheffield’s labour economy, Park Hill has become a desirable home for the city’s swelling population of young professionals.[7]

Nevertheless, Sheffield City Council’s continuation of its council housing drive in the 1980s stood at odds to Thatcher’s privatisation of housing under the Right-to-Buy scheme. Sold by Thatcher as a vision of a ‘property-owning democracy’, Right-to-Buy allowed Britons to purchase their council house for a subsidised price. In the long term, it led to a transfer of much of Britain’s social housing stock into the hands of private landlords, the lasting effect of which has only intensified into today’s rental crisis.

Sheffield City council also played a key part in the rate-capping rebellion of 1985, where multiple English local councils refused to set a budget for the year in protest to government budget restraints. 15 local councils across England joined the rebellion in response to central government's move to restrict council spending in the hope that the boycott would force the government to concede, or risk having to directly intervene in providing local services themselves. The rebellion failed eventually and local council budgets have been controlled by central government ever since; nevertheless, the rebellion itself perhaps marks a spirit of resistance that is somewhat lost in 21st century local politics.

Moreover, as Thatcher waged war on Trade Unions, Sheffield was a site of solidarity. During the Miners’ Strike, the city played a key role as a heartland for the industry and its union leadership. Sheffield had nearly 100,000 workers involved in the production of coal, and its economy was heavily reliant on several key industries supported by coal mining. The National Union of Mineworkers had commissioned a new headquarters in Sheffield, and it was in Sheffield that the NUM had called for national action at a Special Delegate Conference in April 1984.[8]

As with many revolutionary strikes throughout history, the women of Sheffield were integral to the maintenance of the Miners’ Strike. They organised within their communities to support the striking miners, and worked together to provide vital mutual aid and morale.[9] Working with the council, which organised food parcels for striking workers, women represented an often-unrecognised driving force of the revolutionary action.

As well as opposing privatisation and monetarist economics, the ‘People’s Republic of South Yorkshire’ also took on an ideological stance against the militarism of Thatcher’s regime. At the height of the Cold War, Sheffield stood out from the warmongering ideology of the government, declaring itself a ‘nuclear-free’ and ‘demilitarised zone’ and signing a peace treaty with the city of Donetsk in the USSR. Understanding the disproportionate hardship inflicted on the working classes at times of war, the council sought to utilise the labour-power of its population to better potential than in the construction of weaponry.

The fiercely socialist nature of the City Council deteriorated following the rise of New Labour, but its importance as an example of local resistance should not be underestimated. Thrashing across the ideological bandwidth of the Labour Party, Blunkett was recognised as a standard bearer of the Left, a leader constantly making national headlines for his radical administration of Sheffield City Council. However, post-Thatcher he found himself at the top of Blair’s New Labour Governments as Home Secretary and Secretary of State for Education. Blunkett was launched into the British response to 9/11, and the state monitoring of Muslim communities, actions which contributed to allegations of Islamophobia, and widespread damage to civil liberties all in the name of fighting the ‘War on Terror’.[10] Maybe this is a sign we cannot be complacent with the left leaders that we put our trust in – one inch of power and they give miles to the right.

Sheffield ultimately didn’t win against deindustrialization. Thatcher’s mass pit closures had devastating effects on its other industries, such as steel production. The race to the bottom of global capitalism, moving production out of Britain to buy from cheaper foreign markets, all contributed to the dismantling of the British working class. As much as Sheffield stood up to the threat, shoulder to shoulder with other towns and cities of the UK, it was not enough.

The power and the ferocity of local governments of the past to counter neoliberal economic and social policies show up many of today’s devolved leaders in comparison. Today, the superficial nature of devolution ensures similar actions are neutered by the commitment to austerity demanded by central government, which obstructs any efforts in the interests of the working class. Labour-led councils such as Preston City Council continue to lead the way with successful methods of community wealth-building, but others, following the direction of the visionless and bureaucratic Labour right, have yet to offer any opposition to mandated austerity.

This is not an extensive history of the actions of Sheffield City Council, but more an outline of the accomplishments of principled left Labour socialists, who sought to reconstruct their society in opposition to the imposed structure of neoliberalism. As well as prioritising the needs of the working class, they demonstrated how local government could be an active and principled force within national and international politics.

Leadership shown by Sheffield City Council at the time supported the agitation of the working classes for better conditions. Having been dimmed, a new generation of post-Corbyn grassroots leftist activists has slowly reignited this flame within local governments. The People’s Republic of South Yorkshire conveyed the duty of elected officials to work in the interests of the most oppressed, whilst also providing a vision for better. Not so much a blueprint, but a recipe to be added to.