Over 200 People Commemorate Llanelli Uprising 2018!

Last Saturday (August 18) saw over 200 people turn out for Llanelli Uprising 2018, this was to mark the anniversary of the railway strike of 1911. Each year the march and rally and the graveside ceremony commemorate the uprising triggered by the killing of two protestors by the Worcestershire regiment during the strike, and we aim to celebrate solidarity, anti-racism and the unity of workers in struggle as a result.

The event was co-hosted by Wales Stand Up To Racism and numerous speakers warned of the rise of the far right and called for a fight to defend the political freedoms we have won over many years. The extensive list of talented speakers included Steve Hedley (Senior Assistant General Secretary of the Rail), Maritime & Transport Workers Union (RMT); Leanne Wood (Leader of Plaid Cymru), Mark Drakeford (candidate for Leader of Welsh Labour) plus Tyrone O’Sullivan (former National Union of Mineworkers Branch Secretary and Chair of Tower Colliery).

Also on the line-up were Cerith Griffiths (Regional Secretary of the Fire Brigades Union-FBU), Emyr Rees (Save Amman Valley Hospital Campaign), Fozia Akhtar (Labour councillor and first Muslim and first Muslim woman on Carmarthenshire County Council!); Sean Rees (Independent councillor on Llanelli Town Council), Nimisha Trivedi (Stand Up To Racism), Martin Chapman (Swansea Socialist Workers Party), Logan Williams (Youth Rep for Welsh Labour) and Sue Hagerty (Llanelli Labour Party).

Adam Balchder, the leader of the Cambria Marching Band, also spoke with the band leading the march through the town, as they have for the last seven years. Chair of Llanelli Rural Sian Caiach Council and myself compèred proceedings.

We were over the moon at the turn-out this year. It was a bigger march and rally than even the centenary year in 2011. We made a conscious decision way back then that the commemoration of these state murders was never going to be presented as distant history, but as a living celebration of when workers fought back, as they still do today, against cuts, austerity and the forces that seek to divide us.

We are already planning for 2019, and for an even larger and more vibrant celebration.
Saturday’s exuberant commemoration set me to thinking about why, in 2018, it has become more important than ever to remember our history – a history of resistance, rebellion and endurance that is the history of the working class the world over. It is also important to remember how central to that task is our determination to fight the barbarism of the new authoritarian regimes and to combat the racists and fascists, empowered by the vile President Trump, before they become strong enough to engage in the evil genocidal projects that characterised the 1930s. This is why we march to remember the state murders of 1911, and all such violence everywhere, especially as the Israeli state intensifies its murderous assault upon the Palestinian people. Those who do not remember their history are condemned to repeat it.

“Historical memory has become dangerous, because it offers reflection on lost acts of resistance, collective struggles, and a legacy of what might be called troubling knowledge. The violence of organised forgetting signals how mainstream politics and the new communication cultures largely function to erase history by producing a notion of time wedded to speed, instant information and an endless flow of fragmented knowledge…” To remember our history “is especially important at a time in which issues of racialized violence, violence against women, and the ongoing assaults on the future of younger generations cannot be solved on an individual basis.”

These words, by the cultural critic Henry Giroux, from the foreword to ‘Portraits of Violence’ by Brad Evans and Sean Wilson, encapsulate for me why we march each year in Llanelli.
We resist “the violence of organised forgetting” we remember the violence of the British state, and we remember how working people rose up to resist it.
The workers united will never be defeated!

Reported by West Wales Chronicle Columnist/Author Tim Evans

Photo accreditation: Llanelli 1911 Railway Strike Committee