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From Socialist Worker, No. 118, 19 April, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
DONCASTER:– Yorkshire miners are preparing for a bitter struggle against the National Coal Board’s plan to increase their rents by as much as £1 10s a week.
The Coal Industry Housing Association which runs NCB housing, asked the Yorkshire Rents Committee, drawn from ‘a panel of experts with professional connections in the estate and property business’ (the chairman earns £18 a day), to reassess miners’ rents on an economic basis, bringing them into line with local authority rents.
This comparison is totally false. CIHA commitments on houses built 16 to 40 years ago bear no relation to those of a local authority trying to build new houses with an 8½ per cent interest rate.
And local authorities have much greater responsibility than the NCB for maintenance and other amenities.
Following the bosses’ time honoured principle of divide and rule, assessment forms, printed aptly on thin lavatory paper, have been arriving through the letter boxes on the coalfield over a three month period.
Next door neighbours have received their forms at quite different times and some enraged miners have thought the man next door had escaped the increase.
The forms call for landlord and tenant jointly to indicate their agreement of the new ‘fair’ rent, which can be anything up to 31s 6d a week.
Many tenants believe that against a background of sharply rising prices in the shops, wage freeze and Alf Robens’ pay increase of £15,000 a year, the only ‘fail’ rent that they could agree to would be one considerably less than they are paying at present. They are understandably angry at the judgment of the ‘panel of experts’.
Since rents are docked from wages at the pit head – which is another issue worth fighting – a total rent strike is not practical. But refusal to sign the forms means that the increase cannot be levied until after a public enquiry – and forms are being collected by tenant activists.
Plans are under way to make the enquiry genuinely public, with tenants attending in force.
Despite the value of insisting upon legal rights to the bitter end, there is an increasing awareness that the only really effective weapon is a strike at the pits, a policy that can only be won and sustained through open discussion at mass meetings of tenants and miners.
The miners have been kicked around and blackmailed long enough as their differences have been exploited by the NCB brass hats. The rents question is an issue that unites the whole coalfield. Determination can bring victory.
John Charlton | ETOL Main Page
Last updated: 15 January 2021