Michael Addresses The Free Colliers Procession.

Honorary Free Collier Michael Connarty MP had the priviledge of addressing the assembled Free Colliers as their march concluded at Wallace Stone.

After taking part in the Free Colliers march from Reddingmuirhead to Wallacestone Michael gave this rousing speech to the assembled Free Colliers.

“I welcome the continuing existence of the Free Colliers Procession as a reminder of the ability of working people to band together to advance their terms and conditions of employment, and to give support and provide services for their local communities, even under the harshest of laws with the harshest of government, and I am proud of being given the honour of being an Honorary Free Collier.It is significant that the Free Colliers Procession 2010 which ends its’ journey through the former East Stirlingshire mining communities also marks the 200th anniversary of the raising of the Wallace Stone on the site which now carries that name in Falkirk. It is a monument to a member of the lowland leadership of the ordinary Scottish people, no great appointed Baron from another land, who raised up the Scottish people to fight against oppression and unjust laws.The working communities throughout the UK were banned from forming Trade Unions until only 150 years ago by the Combination Acts of 1802, and colliers were only able to win their freedom from being bonded servants of their Coal Owners since the Mines act of 1799.The 1799 Law contained a clause that they would be returned to the colliery from which they had been freed if they were found to be meeting with one or more other miners to discuss the terms and conditions of employment. The Free Colliers Lodges were formed as secret societies and eventually affiliated to the National Federation of Coal, Iron and Lime Miners when trades unions were legalised in the 1860’s.The Free Colliers formed to protect their wage rates (paid on the tonnage they brought up from the mines in terrible of conditions) but also to create a community support structure where all money paid on tonnage above a certain level was paid into a Benevolent Fund to care for the families of injured or deceased miners.The significance of the procession of the last remaining Free Colliers lodge, aptly named the William Wallace Lodge, is the way in which it reminds people of the need to organise together to defend their working conditions and to organise for the provision and defence of services for their communities. As the Free Colliers approach their 150^th anniversary, the UK faces a government that would bring in Acts as vicious as the Combination Acts, as the CON – DEM coalition prepares to tear the heart out of local services and does not want to see people band together and organise resistance. The Free Collier’s procession must remind people that we are all going to be damaged by the cuts that will come and band together, people must if we are to resist and repel the unjust and unjustifiable damage to our communities, just as the Free Colliers did all those years ago.”