There are lessons for today in the defeat of the miners’ strike which began 30 years ago next month

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the start of the miners’ strike. Most people aged 40 or younger will have little or no personal recollection of that dramatic industrial dispute. For those over 40, however, the experience of the miners’ strike, even if experienced vicariously, will be profound. It set brother against brother, government against citizen, and, ultimately, wooden truncheon against flesh and bone.

It forced people to take sides; it was impossible to be neutral. For the left, it was a straightforward ‘good versus evil’ fight to the death. For the right, it was the opportunity to take on, and defeat, the ‘enemy within’ in the shape of militant trade unionism. Sir Walter Marshall (soon-after ‘Lord’) was appointed by Margaret Thatcher to lead the Central Electricity Generating Board. He, alongside the new energy secretary, Nigel Lawson, had one simple goal from early 1981 onwards: build up the coal stockpiles at the power stations and prepare for battle in the coal fields.

When it came, support for striking miners came from across the Labour and trade union movement. The Women Against Pit Closures groups, support groups on college campuses, the collections of food parcels (presaging by some decades the explosion of ‘food banks’ for the poor) and donations from across the world kept the families of south Yorkshire, Lanarkshire and Kent from starvation. It was perhaps the last great act of industrial solidarity, before Britain became firmly post-industrial and the curry houses and call-centres took over from the factories and foundries.

As recorded in drama from Our Friends in the North to Billy Elliot, the striking miners fought on for a year. Then, on 3 March 1985, with their banners and brass bands at their head, garlanded by carnations, they trudged back to work, defeated. Within 12 months, over 40,000 miners had left the pits, with their redundancy cash in their hands. Thatcher’s victory was total. She smashed the National Union of Mineworkers and killed the industry it served.

The anniversary should be marked with a celebration of the miners and their communities, and their heroism in the face of riot shields and police horses. But there needs to be something more than the old badges, songs and slogans. There needs to be a proper understanding of what went wrong, of how an unpopular government could win a dispute with an industry which had formed part of national life since the start of the industrial revolution, which had shaped the landscapes of our towns, villages and imaginations.

If the striking miners were lions, then the donkey-in-chief was Arthur Scargill. Today Scargill cuts a rather pathetic figure. When he stood for parliament in 2001, in the Labour heartland seat of Hartlepool, against New Labour’s Peter Mandelson, he got 912 votes, or 2.4 per cent of the vote. He has been involved in a series of legal battles with the NUM over the funding of his London apartment in the swanky Barbican. As an apologist for Stalin and someone who attacked the Polish Solidarity trade union’s struggle with the Communist regime as ‘anti-socialist’, Scargill has been left like debris by history’s high tide.

Yet in 1984 he saw himself as a revolutionary leader like Lenin or Che Guevara. Even a cursory glance over his political writings and speeches reveals a simple truth: his mission was not to secure better wages, conditions and a future for the coal miners his union represented. It was to use the NUM as the vanguard in a revolution to overthrow, not merely a democratic government, but a social system. This delusion meant that he made serious tactical errors: starting the strike in the summer and not allowing a national ballot to legitimise it.

But far worse was the major strategic error in believing that miners were revolutionaries, and that Britain would undergo a revolution like Russia, China or Cuba. When trade union leaders hold such views (and Scargill was not alone in this, then or now), they cannot hope to claim to be ‘representative’ of their members. When they are elected on the smallest of votes, or eschew democratic procedures such as national ballots, such leaders cannot expect to carry their members with them. The tragedy is that the miners could have won some of their demands in the 1980s, just as they had in the 1970s, with a different, moderate leader, and a willingness to negotiate and compromise.

The industrial syndicalism of Scargill, shot through by the Marxism-Leninism of his youth, represents a strain of politics which can still be found at the top of Britain’s largest trade unions. The lesson of the miners’ strike is that such politics, when allowed expression beyond the pages of the Morning Star, leads to disaster. As Martin Adeney and John Lloyd, historians of the strike, wrote of the NUM: ‘In trying to gain all, they had lost much: most of all, they had lost, for themselves and their comrades in the movement, the great illusion of possessing an irresistible power.’

———————————————————

Photo: Amgueddfa Cymru