For Mim

This Tuesday would have been my sister's forty fifth birthday - had she not died as a result of a road accident in her twenty first year.



Those of us who knew and loved Mim know what we have lost - and have been aware of her absence now for quarter of a century. The rest of you can take my word for it that we lost a very great deal.



Mim died just weeks after the end of the Miners' Strike - in the middle of that terrible Tory decade. She had been active, as a student in York, supporting the miners.



Her activism might have gone on to cost her the first class honours degree which she could otherwise easily have obtained the following year.



I am a shadow of the activist she would then have become.



Her coffin travelled through Brighton draped in the banner of the Constituency Labour Party.



At her death Mim left unfinished work on the "Battle of the Lewes Road" - one of the most violent incidents of the 1926 General Strike, when the police attacked peaceful pickets blockading the tram depot in Brighton.



She lived to see similar treatment given to the miners nearly sixty years later.



We can expect more of the same in the next few years as our enemies step up their class war against us.



We will all need to draw courage from the beliefs and memories which inspire us.



I shall draw mine from memories of Mim.





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