March saw the 25^th anniversary of the beginning of the 84-85 miners’ strike, one of the great historical industrial and ideological battles of the modern era. Jock Penman looks back at the heroism of the mining communities and assesses some of the lessons of the dispute.

It’s 25 years since the Miners’ Strike and it seems like a faraway dream now. A nightmare for some, the lessons may be invaluable to a new generation of workers facing a struggle to stay in work as the economic crisis deepens. It certainly demonstrated that unity is absolutely crucial, particularly when you take on the state. And it also demonstrated the courage and commitment of the miners trying to save their industry and communities.

When Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979 she was determined to push through a new economic strategy which had been tried in Chile - after dictator General Augusto Pinochet had all but destroyed the labour and trade union movement there. This strategy required a switch to the service industries like banking, insurance, credit and financial services rather than investment in manufacturing and public services. Extensive privatisation and cuts in wages and conditions, and the ‘sale’ of public utilities were what followed from the logic of this ideology. By the end of the 80’s one third of the manufacturing industry in Britain was wiped out. But before she could achieve her monetarist aims she knew she would have to break the power of the Trades Unions, and the miners were the ‘Spartans’ of the movement.

The National Union of Mineworker’s (NUM) had taken on and defeated the National Coal Board in 1972 to become some of the highest-paid manual workers in the country. Edward Heath was forced out of office by the miners’ strike of 1974. Margaret Thatcher, the Education Minister at that time, was incandescent with rage and never forgave Heath. Saltley coke plant had been successfully picketed by miners, humiliating the police in the process, and ‘allegedly’ giving them a ‘bit of a doing’. Neither the miners nor the police forgot that.

In 1981, with Thatcher now Prime Minister, the government announced that 23 pits were to close. The miners threatened strike action, and the government apparently caved in again. But as Mick McGahey, Scottish NUM leader feared, Thatcher had lost nothing, making only a tactical retreat from a skirmish - to prepare for the real battle.

Mining communities had learned from bitter experience that they had to look after their own and that principle saw them through many hardships. Socialist ideals had played a major role in mining communities mainly through the activities of the Communist Party in the ‘20s and ‘30s. Miners, under Mick McGahey’s leadership, even went on strike for more pay for NHS nurses, so they wouldn’t have to strike. After the military coup in Chile in 1973 the NUM in Scotland ‘adopted’ trade unionists and Communists and brought them to Scotland to save them from torture and even death. The camaraderie among miners themselves was comparable to that of soldiers on active duty. Each knew his life could depend on the man working next to him some day.

Yet it should be recognised that many people, in the towns and cities, looked down on mining folk and didn’t have the same outlook.

NUM President, Arthur Scargill, was a fiery left-winger who was an uncompromising, strong, powerful orator who would never sell them out. There was a justifiable confidence about them that they could defeat Thatcher and they saw no reason why the rest of the labour movement shouldn’t back them up if called upon.

But only one side was fully prepared for this mammoth encounter.

Thatcher and her advisers had learned the hard lessons of ’72 and ’74 and introduced more anti-Trades Union legislation, a new Metropolitan Police Force and a military-style strategy which covered the entire country; coal was stockpiled, and the government prepared in for the battle to come. Some of her closest advisers and cohorts have admitted that the Miners’ Strike was planned, “with military precision.” Former chancellor Nigel Lawson (Nigella’s dad), said, “it was just like re-arming to face the threat of Hitler in the 1930’s.”

On 28^th March 1983 Thatcher appointed Ian McGregor as head of British Coal. McGregor had a history as an industrial mercenary both in America, where he used brutal methods to close down pits and, as Chair of British Steel, had overseen massive job losses. His objective was clear – shut down pits, break the power of the NUM, and prepare for privatisation.

The miners’ leaders, in stark contrast, relied on tried and tested methods of secondary picketing, calling out other workers and applying the sheer strength and discipline of the NUM members. Miners who were still working, like those in Nottinghamshire, were expected to strike because their brothers elsewhere were on strike, fighting for their future. There seemed no need for any further discussion. They also relied on power stations running out of coal - tactics which worked in ’72 and ’74.

The strike kicked off on March 5^th 1984 after the expected announcement that Cortonwood pit was to close but it wasn’t straightforward or uniform. Each area conducted their own ballot, and it was expected that the others would follow the lead set by the Yorkshire Area. Neil Kinnock and the TUC, followed by other Labour and right-wing trade union commentators, tried to justify their subsequent betrayal of the miners, by declaring that the miners lost because they didn’t call a national ballot. But history is not always written in primary colours.

This was a different strike altogether from ’72 or ’74. This was not about wages or conditions but to ensure that the mining communities stayed alive and that there would be jobs for the next generation. While I never met a miner yet who wanted his son to go down the pit, the wages were pretty good and the miners were pragmatic if nothing else.

Soon after the strike started Women’s Support Groups began to be set up and they weren’t there just to make the tea. They stood with the men on the picket lines, marched with them and starved with them and even when the strike was going against the miners, when morale was low and they were on the point of starvation, the women stood strong. Many made speeches in public for the first time in their lives and some even traveled far and wide and spoke at rallies and meetings on a regular basis. They found themselves doing what had been previously claimed to be ‘men’s work’ and a new confidence in themselves as equals among men developed. This was revolutionary in mining communities.

The police were used to great effect, not so much in their own communities but bused in from other areas, and many miners swear to this day that there were soldiers in police uniforms. Miners were beaten and arrested for virtually standing still. During the strike, 2 miners died on the picket lines, 3 died digging for coal in the winter, 320 people were injured or even hospitalised during the strike, 11,300 were arrested, 100 were jailed, and many lost their homes, even their families.

The miners were no angels – they were fighting for their livelihoods and communities - but the media was blatantly and cynically used as a propaganda machine for the government and were complicit in the cover-up of police brutality - widely acknowledged but never reported.

If proof were needed that the government and the police were treating the strike like a military exercise - a “war without guns” as former Labour MP and journalist Brian Walden described it - Orgreave provided it.

For the first time in this strike a mass picket was allowed to take place. Many of the miners wore just t-shirts and shorts, in carnival mood, playing football and eating ice-cream. The police wore body armour, lined up in ranks, holding riot shields and truncheons and wearing battle helmets. They looked the part. Then there were the mounted police. When the lines of ‘footsoldiers’ parted on command, they attacked, causing panic among the six thousand miners who didn’t know what was really happening or that they had been led into a carefully planned trap - not till the cavalry charged.

Hardship

As the strike wore on things got harder for many miners’ families but the community spirit grew as people rallied to help their neighbours. Local shop-keepers contributed money or goods. Socials, galas and meetings were held to raise much-needed cash and support. Some sheep were ‘borrowed’ from local farms as well as milk, potatoes, turnips etc.

To be called a scab is one of the worst insults anyone can throw at you, particularly in mining communities. Men who scabbed in the 1926 General Strike were never forgotten or forgiven, even to this day, and the very mention invoked anger among the old miners. In 1984 the rules were still the same, even though the strikers and their families were tested to the very limit of their endurance.

The miners depended almost entirely on contributions from the working communities to feed them and their families. The Guardian reported that over £60M had been raised during the strike, with many workplaces also donating food parcels, and toys for the kids at Christmas. Some active trade unionists worked hard to raise money, but others did very little, adopting their leaders’ attitude, “that the miners had bitten off more than they could chew, and it wasn’t worth the whole TU movement suffering because their leader wanted to bring down Thatcher” as a reason for turning their backs on the miners. Scargill was seen by other right wing trade union leaders as an ultra-left, self-opinionated maverick who needed to be taught a lesson.

There were times when the miners looked like winning. Thatcher and her allies had only planned for a maximum of 6 months, and they began to look very shaky after that, especially when NACODS, the pit deputies’ (supervisors) union looked like joining the strike in October. If NACODS had joined the strike, the miners would undoubtedly have won. All the pits would have been closed down, and that was what the miners’ leaders were after. But they voted narrowly against (only to be to be subsequently betrayed by coal boss McGregor) and the miners’ morale was severely damaged.

As it was the miners were defeated. After a narrow vote of 98 to 91 by the NUM Executive, the miners marched back to work, their banners waving, but with heavy hearts. Arthur Scargill declared, “One of the reasons is that the Trades Union Movement of Britain, with a few notable exceptions, has left this Union isolated. We face not an employer but a government aided and abetted by the judiciary, the police and you people in the media.”

While the Miners’ Strike was in progress the government had not had time to deal with Liverpool City Council’s defiant stance. Led by the left, they had voted to defy the government and set a deficit budget to build thousands of quality homes for rent and maintain public services. That was still going strong, and it took the Labour leadership to defeat them by suspending the local Labour party and expelling its Militant leadership. But the resilience of ordinary people remained strong, burning with a hatred of Thatcher and everything she stood for. And when the Anti-Poll Tax Campaign began five years later the fight was taken from the industrial battlefield to the housing estates. The mining communities gained their revenge when a tearful Thatcher was ousted, knowing that it was ordinary people just like them who had brought down the iron woman; not the TUC; not the Labour Party, but ordinary people who organised themselves into Anti-Poll Tax Unions, refused to pay an iniquitous tax, and stood united.

However, the official Trade Union movement was in full retreat. Thatcher’s infamous claim that, “There is no alternative” was echoed by trade unionists and Labour reformists like Blair and Brown who had accepted ‘New Realism’.

The bureaucracy of the TUC considered militant industrial action to be a bigger threat to the consensus policy of the ‘social pact’ than the furious attacks from the Thatcherite regime. Many years later, the TUC admitted that it had been wrong not to support the miners’ strike, but by then the damage had been done and, remarkably, the TUC has not altered its support for the ‘social pact’ even under the threat of mass redundancies and closures. Maybe they really believed Blair when he declared that the “class war is over” and Gordon Brown when he declared “an end to boom and bust”, or maybe they just wanted an easy life. Regardless, they have been reluctant to even show anything other than sympathy when job losses or factories closures are announced.

Had the miners won, the political shape of Britain, indeed the world, could have changed. Thatcher would have been brought down sooner, and Britain might not have followed extreme right-wing American economic and foreign policy strategies. We would certainly not have been subjected to the explosive dogmatic surge towards ‘market’ economics that happened after the strike, and the Trades Unions could have been in a much stronger position to combat the poverty and misery that has brought. At the end of the day it has to be acknowledged that mistakes were made, but one abiding lesson is clear – Unity is Strength.