«Paul Heaton: The miners' strike was inspiring - but working people have less power now»

Paul Heaton, vocalista dos extintos -e míticos- The Housemartins (e ex-hooligan do Sheffield United, Blades Business Crew: http://lowprofiler16.blogspot.pt/2010/04/housemartins-paul-heaton-blades.html ) numa entrevista em que transcorre os turbulentos tempos de revolta social em que a Classe Trabalhadora britânica se levantou contra as políticas de austeridade de Margaret Thatcher, nomeadamente as greves mineiras, e de como esses eventos o ajudaram a forjar uma consciência social adormecida até então.



«Somewhere in a South Yorkshire pit village near Doncaster, a miner’s son, now aged about 40, is still watched over by a guardian angel.

Paul Heaton, the singer-songwriter who earned cult status with The Housemartins and Beautiful South, sponsored the boy during the great Strike for Jobs 30 years ago.

Families were going skint as pitmen went unpaid for a full 12 months to save their coal mines and ­communities in a heroic battle with Maggie Thatcher and her police.

Heaton donated money he was beginning to earn from gigs with The Housemartins and gave away the toy soldiers and small matchstick-firing tanks he had played with as a kid.

“You could call me, I suppose, a disciple of the miners’ strike. It was a time when a lot of things came together politically,” recalls Heaton.

“Until then I’d thought of politics as something that interested middle-class hippies but in the strike it was the working class against the Tories and the state.

"I met some genuinely inspirational people. Women became powerful, joining the front-line to save jobs and pits and communities.

“We were fighting like hell for what we believed in.”»



Ler o resto da entrevista, bem interessante por sinal, aqui:
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/paul-heaton-miners-strike-inspiring-4141637#ixzz3EQoc0Mvi


No estúdio: Paul Heaton and Jacqui Abbott



Heaton no seu pub, King's Arms, em Salford. Note-se que enverga uma tee dos VIRTUS VERONA FANS...