40th Anniversary of the British Miners’ Strike
A personal view
The yearlong British coal miners’ strike which began March 6, 1984, and ended with a defeat was class war and a civil war which the working class lost, producing the current political degeneration, economic collapse and social catastrophe that has been imposed on the people of Britain since. The strike began with a walk out at Cottonwood colliery, near Rotherham in South Yorkshire following the notice of its closure with 19 other pits. In response the National Executive of the National Union of Miners (NUM), which was committed to opposing all pit closures, used its authority to call a national strike.
The first of six miners was killed on the picket lines within days on March 15th. After a bitter year when Margaret Thatcher’s government used everything at the State’s disposal, the police, the army, MI5, legal and illegal measures, the miners were finally beaten. With prospects of starvation and eviction, with the failure of the official British labor movement to give its full support to the NUM, a national return to work was scheduled for March 3, 1985.
My father was a coal miner as were my two brothers for a period in the 1970s and had been involved in the national coal strike of 1974 which brought down the Conservative government of Edward Heath forcing a general election which was narrowly won by Labour under Harold Wilson. During the 1974 strike the entrenched and conservative national leadership of the NUM was replaced by a more militant faction led by Arthur Scargill from South Yorkshire supported by other regional leaders, many who were members of the British Communist Party (CP). Among the achievements of that strike was, for the first time, a national pay scale for all miners, irrespective of the productivity of the particular mine they worked. The 1974 miners’ strike demonstrated that militancy and organized mass picketing could win strikes and even topple governments.
Coal had fueled the industrial revolution in Britain from the 18th to the 20th centuries and was so important that during WWII, in 1944, one-in-ten conscripts (Bevan Boys) were sent to work in the mines. The post-war Labour government knowing its importance to the economy nationalized the industry under the control of the National Coal Board (NCB). By the 1980s North Sea oil and gas production meant that coal was no longer paramount for the economy though still vital for electricity generation and steel production.
Following the 1974 strike elements within the ruling capitalist class decided then that the NUM had to be destroyed and found their champion in the Tory Party leader, Margaret Thatcher, Edward Heath’s replacement, when she became Prime Minister in in 1979. The strategy was to close down British coal mining and to replace what was still needed with cheaper foreign imports. That would need the destruction of the NUM. Miners who had been essential to the victory over Hitler were now vilified by Thatcher and the right wing press as “The Enemy Within.”
Preparations including stockpiling coal at power stations began immediately after Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979. Thatcher put Ian MacGregor a hardline businessman, in charge of the NCB. The police, secret services and military secretly prepared measures to control picketing at mines, power stations and steel works. The logistics of transporting coal from ports to power stations was planned. Following the British success in the Falklands war Thatcher, on a tidal wave of nationalism, had a landslide victory in the 1983 general election with a massive majority in parliament of 144 giving her the power to confront and destroy the labor movement, to reverse the working class’s gains of the previous 100 years and to implement her neoliberal economic plan. That strategy would begin with destroying the NUM.
Unsure of obtaining a majority vote in a ballot on a national strike Arthur Scargill and the national NUM leadership used their authority via a legitimate but bureaucratic procedure to call a national strike. While not officially a closed shop, every miner in the UK was a member of the NUM and all were expected to strike when instructed to by the leadership.
The failure to have a ballot was then used by the High Court to declare the strike illegal and allowed the leaders of other unions from calling sympathetic actions. The behavior of the Parliamentary Labour Party under Neil Kinnock’s leadership was the most despicable, using the ballot excuse to avoid supporting the strike. Kinnock, a working-class MP from a mainly mining community in Wales, refused to publicly support the NUM only meeting with striking miners behind closed doors with the media excluded. A traitor to his class he was later rewarded with a peerage1. The ballot excuse was used by strike breaking miners in some areas, Nottinghamshire mainly, to form the short-lived Union of Democratic Miners (UDM) with encouragement from Thatcher and the support of the mainstream press.
The Battle of Orgreave
One of the most infamous confrontations between miners and police occurred on June 18, 1984 at Orgreave on the outskirts of Sheffield where coal was made into coke for the steel industry. Hundreds of miners had gathered to stop lorries taking coal into the plant. The police were massed too, organized and prepared in advance to initiate a violent confrontation. Unarmed miners on the picket line were charged by mounted police and in the melee set upon and battened by riot police and maybe military personnel too. BBC TV footage was controversially reversed to show the pickets initiating the attack on the police justifying their response.
Arthur Scargill described the battle:
“We’ve had riot shields, we’ve had riot gear, we’ve had police on horseback charging into our people, we’ve had people hit with truncheons and people kicked to the ground.... The intimidation and the brutality that has been displayed are something reminiscent of a Latin American state.”
The government gained a major victory as NUM pickets failed to stop the movement of coal-carrying lorries into the Orgreave plant due to the numbers of police deployed and their unrestrained violence.
After a year of unrelenting police brutality on miners and their families, including smashing up strikers’ homes and miners’ clubs with over 11,000 arrests, hunger, poverty and above all the failure of the labor movement to give them the necessary support, the NUM was forced to call the strike off. Marching in procession with displays of dignity, union banners waving and bands playing, the miners returned en mass to work reluctantly on March 3, 1985, knowing that they were beaten by everyone on all sides. A tragedy that would unfold not just for the miners but for the whole of the British society and the labor movement in particular. The view became prevalent that “If the miners can’t beat Thatcher, then none of us can.”
Within a few years the remaining mines had been sold off to a private company and 20 years later virtually every deep coal mine in Britain was closed with the communities they had supported left to rot. Trades union membership in all sectors fell dramatically in the years following. Thatcher could then unleash her economic and social plans in Britain virtually unopposed. In 1984 she had trades union membership banned in the spy station, GCHQ (the UK’s intelligence, security and cyber agency) being a union member was in her view “a threat to national security.”
Yet despite the triumph, Thatcher would be forced from office only six years later due to the nationwide rebellion against her Poll Tax.
There are many factors that contributed to the defeat of the miners’ strike in 1985. Thatcher had mobilized the whole state apparatus, the police, the military and even had a spy in the NUM leadership. To deal with that the miners needed the wholehearted support of the labor and trades union movement especially the Parliamentary Labour Party. Using the excuse of “no NUM ballot,” Labour leader, Neil Kinnock and the majority of Labour MPs failed to give the strike their support. Employing the same get-out, right wing leaders of other trades unions refused to give the strike their active support. Had the rail, dock, steel and power workers refused to handle scab coal, the miners’ strike could have been successful after a few weeks. In the past the miners had given wholehearted support to workers in other industries and had helped the power, rail, and steel workers to win significant strikes. The reciprocal level of support did not come from the leaders of unions in those industries—a cowardly betrayal.
The miners’ strike also demonstrated the weakness the far-left groups and parties in Britain. Though all organizations to the left of Labour and many thousands of Labour Party members gave their unconditional support to the strike it was not sufficient to influence the final outcome. Individual activists, leftwing organizations, local trades union branches and Gay Liberation groups2 all made an immense contribution through fund raising events, transportation, housing miners away from home and numerous other acts of solidarity. Many musicians, comedians, actors and other entertainers performed for, and to raise funds for, the miners’ families, but this was not enough to sustain the strike. Hunger, poverty, relentless police brutality and over 11,000 arrests after a year forced an end to the strike. The March 3 return to work was one of the saddest days in British working-class history.
Following WWII in addition to the mines, rail, steel, utilities such as gas, electricity generation and the national grid had been nationalized by the Labour Government. Developing industries such as air travel, petrochemicals and the ports were also publicly owned as the Post Office and its telecommunications branch had always been. Most important of all was the creation the National Health Service (NHS) in 1948, with free medical and dental care for everyone. “That it meet the needs of everyone, that it be free at the point of delivery, and that it be based on clinical need, not ability to pay” declared Nye Bevan. Thatcher’s hatred of the NHS was such that she refused to have a minor hand operation carried out in a London NHS hospital and it was performed in a private hospital 25 miles away using equipment temporarily removed from University College Hospital.
With the miners beaten and the rest of the trades union movement cowed into submission, Thatcher was able to unleash her economic strategy on Britain—the systematic selling off of publicly owned assets to private capital. Beginning first with British Telecoms, other publicly owned industries and services were sold off over the next years. The former Tory Prime Minister Harold MacMillan was provoked to described it as “Selling off the family silver.”
In 1984, over 13 million persons were members of trades unions but as a result of the post-strike demoralization of the working class, membership declined to less than six million over the following years. A whole generation of workers in a range of industries have never been union members or known the power of collective bargaining. Dressed up as the “gig economy” suggesting a rock and roll lifestyle, it is work with low wages, poor conditions and few safeguards or benefits. There has been a revival in union membership in recent years but still less than 25 percent of British workers are in unions.
The miners’ strike was civil war with families, communities and the whole country divided between supporters of the miners and Thatcher’s government. With the unanimous support of the mass media and the whole state apparatus at her disposal the odds favored the government but in the early stages that was not guaranteed. The failure of the large trades unions and the Labour Party to give their unconditional support to the miners’ strike gave Thatcher the advantage she needed.
Britain today is the result. Twenty percent of school kids arriving hungry, thousands of full-time workers using food banks, homelessness continues to rise while rough sleeping was nearly criminalized. Privatized companies are raking billions from public assets which is directed to shareholders not to the public coffers. Government regulation and controls of these industries have been slashed allowing rampant profiteering. Water companies are repeatedly pouring untreated sewage into rivers and the sea while their executives and shareholders are rewarded with big payouts and bonuses. The whole infrastructure of the country, schools, hospitals, roads have been starved of funds by successive Tory governments and allowed to decay. Over 200 years of social progress has been reversed in just a few decades.
A whole generation of workers has been without the experience of unionization and collective bargaining in dealing with their employers. In industries where unions are recognized there are severe legal restrictions and limitations on industrial action and strikes that have been imposed since that time. The right to be a union member remains the law only through UK’s former membership in the European Union which Tory Governments have not had time to rescind.
The whole working class in Britain has paid dearly for the defeat of the miners.
1 The Peerage is the collective term for peers of the realm. A peer is someone who holds one (or more) of five possible titles (duke, marquess, earl, viscount, baron) inherited from a direct ancestor or bestowed upon him by the monarch.
https://debretts.com/peerage/the-peerage/what-is-the-peerage/
2 The movie “Pride” gives a moving account of the solidarity of the gay community with the miners’ strike.