David John Douglass
David John Douglass, sometimes known as Dave or "Danny the Red", is a political activist in Tyneside and Yorkshire. He is a member of the IWW, the NUM and Class War, and was formerly in the Revolutionary Workers' Party (Trotskyist) and the Socialist Union, of which he was a leading member. He is a regular contributor to the Weekly Worker, the newspaper of the Communist Party of Great [Britain (Provisional Central Committee)]. He has also written Pit Talk in County Durham, a book about the dialect Pitmatic.
He holds an MA in Industrial Relations and Law.
Work history
He worked as a coalminer in the coalfields of Durham and South Yorkshire, and was NUM Branch Delegate for Hatfield Colliery from 1979. He appears in the documentary The Miner's Campaign Tapes to discuss the role of the popular media in the strike of 1984–85. In 1994–95 he was Branch Secretary at Hatfield Main, but after the pit was privatised the NUM no longer had any recognition there.From 1994 to 2006 he helped to run the Miners Community Advice Centre in Stainforth.
In 1999, Douglass appeared on the BBC Two television series Living with the Enemy, "in which ideological enemies spend a week in each other's company," at the home of Lord Rowallan of Kilmarnock.
He worked at the National [Coal Mining Museum for England] as a researcher on the exhibition Strike, Not the End of It, and subsequently published a book with the same title on the history of industrial disputes in British mining.
The three volumes of his autobiography, Geordies — Wa Mental, The Wheel's Still in Spin and Ghost Dancers, were published by Christie Books between 2008 and 2010.