Labour Heartlands

18/06/2026

The Battle of Orgreave

Monday, 18 June 1984, was the most violent day of the year-long miners’ strike.

On that fateful day in June 1984, a clash of epic proportions erupted outside the Orgreave Coke works near Rotherham. Thousands of determined pickets faced off against a massive deployment of 5,000 officers brought in from all corners of the country.

The ensuing Battle of Orgreave, widely regarded as one of the most violent confrontations during the year-long miners’ strike, left an indelible mark on the collective memory of the mining community.

Amidst the chaos and brutality, 95 individuals found themselves charged with riot and violent disorders. However, the cases against them soon crumbled under the weight of doubt surrounding the reliability of police evidence.

Allegations of excessive violence by the officers tasked with policing the picketing were further compounded by the shocking revelation that fabricated accounts tainted the subsequent investigation.

Read more, watch the video...

https://labourheartlands.com/the-battle-of-orgreave/

However, in 2016, then-Home Secretary Amber Rudd dashed hopes of justice when she categorically ruled out a public inquiry. Her reasoning? "Ultimately there

18/06/2026

Great song: The One And Only Kier Starmer — Protest Song for British...

17/06/2026

A seat in Parliament is not a man's to give away. It belongs to the people who live in it.

Yet last month a sitting Labour MP, Josh Simons, the former director of Labour Together, stood up and handed his Makerfield seat to Andy Burnham. Today the voters are asked to rubber-stamp a decision already made for them.

Here is the part the mainstream press will not put to you plainly. It does not matter whether Burnham wins or loses tonight. Insurgent, safety valve, or sacrificial lamb, every road leads to the same place. The machine has built a table at which it cannot lose, and the public are invited only to choose which way it wins.

We followed the seat, the strategy, and the history, including the 1965 precedent the party would rather you forgot.

No ads. No proprietor. No party line. Just the working class spoken to like adults.

Full piece in the first comment.

First comment (post immediately after):

17/06/2026

2022 tells us trickledown economics is a "p**stake" . And promises change.

2026 takes the p**s telling us trickle down politics is a "p**stake". And promises change.

The only thing that will change is the name on the door. New boss same as the old boss...

17/06/2026

For years, the left has been told that reality is reactionary.

That s*x is a feeling, class is an afterthought, women’s rights are a nuisance, and anyone who asks for evidence is somehow doing the work of the right. Meanwhile, the actual right marches through the gap we left behind, talking about freedom while the official left ties itself in knots over language, symbols and purity tests.

Kay Green’s account of the Materialist Left meeting in Manchester matters because it points to the road back.

Not back to nostalgia. Not back to old banners and museum-piece slogans. Back to the thing the left was supposed to be built on in the first place: material reality. Housing. Work. Health. War. Women’s rights. Class power. Free speech. The facts of s*x, race and poverty. The conditions people actually live under.

That should not be extraordinary.

But in a political culture where honesty is treated as heresy, a room full of socialists and feminists speaking plainly about biology, class, imperialism, Zionism, the military-industrial complex and the failures of identity politics begins to look almost revolutionary.

Perhaps that tells us everything about how far the left has fallen.

And perhaps it also tells us where the recovery begins.

Kay Green’s central point is that the materialist left has to rebuild around evidence, debate, class, women’s rights, internationalism and real community organising, rather than cancellation, fantasy politics and identity-driven fracture.

https://kaygreen.blog/2026/06/17/an-extraordinary-materialist-meeting/

Actually, I had the cheek to wonder on the way home if the conference I attended on Saturday was unique. It’s certainly unusual in the current political climate… The materialist left That means peo…

17/06/2026

PMQs 17/06/2026

17/06/2026

Smyrtos Tanker Seizure: Newton’s Third Law The Reaction Is Never Equal

Every schoolchild is taught Newton’s third law. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. What the schoolroom leaves out is the small print. In the affairs of nations, the reaction is rarely equal, and it is almost never opposite. It is larger, it is sideways, and it has a way of becoming something nobody chose and nobody can stop. History is a catalogue of small incidents that were meant to be contained and were not. A car turning down the wrong street in Sarajevo. A single Soviet officer in a sweating submarine in 1962, declining to fire the torpedo that would have ended the world. We remember the ones that were survived. The others we call wars.

This week, in the busiest shipping lane on earth, Britain took another step into that catalogue, and almost no one was asked.

On Tuesday morning the Russian frigate Admiral Grigorovich was passing through international waters between the Isle of Wight and Normandy. A British-registered yacht came within a few hundred metres of the warship. The frigate’s crew fired warning shots. The yacht turned away. No one was hit. No one was hurt. HMS Mersey, already shadowing the Russian vessel, sent a boat across to check the crew were safe.

Say it plainly: the yacht was not hit, and that is a mercy. Now say the rest. A foreign warship has discharged weapons near a British civilian boat twenty miles off the English coast, and the only thing standing between that sentence and a far worse one was a few hundred metres of water and a helmsman’s nerve.

The Ministry of Defence says it is investigating. It does not believe the shots were linked to events two days earlier. Hold that thought. It is the wrong reassurance to the wrong question.

Read more...
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https://labourheartlands.com/smyrtos-tanker-seizure-newtons-third-law-the-reaction-is-never-equal/

A government with no direction has sailed Britain into deep water. This week, somebody started shooting.

16/06/2026

Al Carns My resignation speech to the ⬇️

16/06/2026

Pavel Durov says the quiet part out loud.

The excuse is always the same: “protecting children”.

Keir Starmer now reaches for it over under-16s and social media. The same warm words, the same moral blackmail, the same demand that ordinary people stop asking awkward questions.

But according to Durov, the British government’s own High Court submission gave the game away. The principal part of the Online Safety Act was not really about children. It was about capturing “large platforms with significant influence over public discourse”.

Read that again.

Public discourse.

Not child safety. Not safeguarding. Not protection.

Control.

Of course children should be protected online. No decent person argues otherwise. But tyrants have always hidden behind children when they want adults to surrender their freedoms.

Because once they say “child protection”, debate is meant to stop. Logic is meant to switch off. Anyone who objects is painted as reckless, dangerous or indifferent to children.

That is how the trap works.

First comes age verification. Then, identity verification. Then digital permission to speak, read, publish and organise online.

They told us this was about protecting children.

It was always about controlling the gate.