It has been 25 years since the miners’ strike in 1984-85 when British coal miners, their families and supporters fought a year-long battle to defend their jobs and their communities against the threat of redundancies and pit closures. The anniversary provoked comment in the press and on television which showed, once again, that the bitter divisions that were opened up during the strike have not disappeared. They are as deep as they ever were. Where you stand on the miners’ strike is a question of class.
The anniversary was an opportunity for a number of Tory ex-ministers to parade their prejudices. Many of the chief players like National Coal Board (NCB) chairman, Ian MacGregor, are dead and Prime Minister Thatcher (now Baroness) is senile. Instead former Energy Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson (now Lord) stepped forward to deny there was a plan to destroy the coal industry and to blame the NUM President Arthur Scargill for the outcome (unlike the miners themselves who were ‘good chaps’, he said). Norman Tebbit (now Baron), Trade and Industry Secretary in the 1983 government, accused Scargill of ‘declaring war on democracy’. They hadn’t really meant to close the pits or provoke a strike. Having lied their way through the strike itself, the Tories are happy to maintain the habit of a lifetime.
The 1979 Thatcher government came to power, with the backing of the City of London, specifically to solve the economic crisis in the interests of the ruling class. This would require the liberalisation of financial regulation – they immediately abolished exchange controls to allow the free export of capital – and a fundamental attack on working class living standards. In particular trade unions and workers’ employment rights were targeted. It was no accident that MacGregor, with a history of anti-union activity across the US and Africa, merchant banker and darling of both Labour and Tory politicians, ended up as Chairman of the NCB. As chair of the British Steel Corporation he had managed to halve the workforce in the space of two years. His next appointment to the NCB was with the specific intention of destroying the NUM. In 1983 a list of proposed pit closures across the Yorkshire, Kent, South Wales, Durham and Scottish coalfields was leaked to the NUM. The battle had begun.
Sections of the British bourgeoisie who count themselves liberal (like The Guardian newspaper), the Labour Party and trade union leadership, and even some bizarre reaches of the British Trotskyist left, still blame the NUM leadership for not calling a national ballot on the strike. Such a ballot was in fact rejected by the miners themselves at a national delegate conference because it would have put the decision on striking in the hands of miners in the well-paid Midlands coalfields who thought (wrongly) that their jobs were safe, rather than in the hands of the threatened miners. The NUM was split and the ruling class encouraged an army of scabs, not just in the NUM but also in crucial allied industries like steel and electricity, to side with the government and betray the strikers. The media played their role as hired liars, paying the scabs to tour the country, lying about the violence of the pickets, editing television coverage of Orgreave to make it look like rioting strikers instead of vicious policing. The strikers were soon facing the armed brutality of the British state organised to defeat them. It was not just the NUM that was split: the division in the British labour movement between opponents of the British state and the opportunists who defended it opened a gulf that still prevails.
As always, in a fight with their rulers, the British liberal bourgeoisie, what passes for a Labour movement and most of the left, who actually preferred the defeat of the strike to a working class victory, dressed up their cowardice and treachery as rationality and humane realism. They are doing it still. ‘If only they had held a ballot…’ The Guardian, under the heading ‘A war no one deserved to win’, called the strikers ‘Lions led by donkeys’. These ‘victims’ should have ‘allowed their industry to decline more humanely’! Others like Neil Kinnock (now Lord), Labour Party leader at the time, accuse Scargill of ‘suicidal vanity’. ‘He [Scargill] fed himself the political illusion that as long as the miners were united they had the right to destabilise and overthrow the democratically elected government.’ This would have been the working class victory to make Kinnock and his ilk tremble! ‘The miners didn’t deserve him’ said Kinnock, ‘they deserved much, much better.’ That would have been why Kinnock refused to share a platform with a Yorkshire miner during the strike and why he and cohorts of trade union leaders actively scabbed, ensuring that the coking plants at Orgreave, Ravenscraig and Llanwern received enough coal to continue operations. They play the game that they would have supported the strike if there had been a ballot, but pigs might fly.
Twenty-five years have passed, the coal industry is destroyed, all the miners, including the scabs and the ‘good chaps’, lost their jobs and their communities were literally devastated. The state’s hirelings, on the other hand, received their rewards. Scargill’s predictions were right. In the wake of the strike other unions and other workers were defeated as the neoliberal agenda prevailed. Nevertheless the miners’ strike is still a brilliant example for the future. The miners organised in the coalfields and related industries, the pickets bravely fought the police and their families and communities widened the support network as they recognised common cause with other oppressed groups. When the South Wales miners hoisted a noose over Norman Willis (TUC) on a rally platform, they sent a shudder through the ranks of opportunists which still reverberates.* And times, once again, are changing.
The neoliberal programme which allowed the financial services and banking sector full rein is self-destructing. Workers who, like the Nottinghamshire miners, were previously privileged enough to ensure their loyalty to the British state, are losing their jobs and their homes. Despite the fact that under successive Tory and Labour governments the British state has armed itself to the teeth against any opposition, just as it did against the striking miners, there are people who know the multinational capitalist agenda must be challenged. There are young men who, against all the odds, emerge from the imperialists’ secret torture chambers to expose barbarity. Internationally there are people like the Palestinians who despite onslaught after onslaught against them continue to fight for their liberation. This issue of Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! is full of examples.
For all of them, the battle waged by the striking miners 25 years ago holds vital lessons about the treacherous role of the Labour Party and the opportunists and the importance of building support across working class and oppressed communities that can challenge the capitalist state and next time win.
* a full account of the Miners’ strike can be found in Miners’ Strike 1984–1985 People versus State, by David Reed and Olivia Adamson, Larkin Publications, 1985, ISBN 0 905400 05 4. We intend to make it available on our website in the near future.
