It's hard to imagine a strike dominating the headlines for a year in 2009. The era of flying pickets in industrial conflict is long over, which makes the bitterly fought British miners' strike of 1984-85, which began 25 years ago this week, seem like a chapter from a far older story.
The strike divided the country. There was widespread sympathy for the miners, whose communities were threatened with catastrophe at a time of mass unemployment caused in part by the brutal economic policies of Margaret Thatcher's government.
Thatcher was determined to defeat the miners - permanently. Ten years before, the National Union of Mineworkers had humiliated the Conservatives as the Heath governments called election to decide who governed Britain: the elected government or the striking NUM? Heath lost. In 1981, the deeply unpopular Thatcher administration quietly gave in to the miners. Three years later, the new NUM leader Arthur Scargill called a national strike against pit closures. The scene was set for a monumental battle.
Famously, the NUM decided not to call a national strike ballot. Scargill today ducked the question, telling The Guardian that miners in Nottinghamshire wanted a ballot to call off the strike, as if that justified the decision to avoid one. Many who would have supported the NUM changed their mind as a result, especially when the NUM indulged in mob violence to try to intimidate working miners. The sickening low point was the killing of a taxi driver, David Wilkie, who was driving a working miner to his pit in South Wales. He died when two striking miners threw concrete through his windscreen. The thugs were later jailed for manslaughter.)
All miners deserved better than the fate they suffered in the 1980s and after. Scargill was a disastrous leader: anyone who knew anything about power knew it was folly to launch a miners' strike as spring was approaching. The Thatcher government was well prepared: I remember passing Didcot power station in April 1984 on the train and seeing an enormous stockpile of coal: the miners had no hope of forcing power cuts this time.
Scargill was a far better communicator than the chairman of the National Coal Board, Ian MacGregor, The government feared it was losing the PR battle, and after six months drafted in an NCB area director Michael Eaton as NCB spokesman. In reality, few people trusted Scargill. A quarter of a century later, he's as unapologetic as ever, despite a well-deserved reputation as a first world war general, sacrificing his men for no advantage.
Miners in my native South Wales had very mixed feelings towards the strike. Initially, they were reluctant to come out, but once the strike began they proved very solid, with the highest support at the end of any NUM area other than Kent.
The Guardian today summed up the disastrous strike as the war that no-one deserved to win. That reflects how many of us felt in 1984-85: sympathy with the miners and their communities; deep unease at the Thatcher government's indifference to their suffering; revulsion at the attempt to intimidate those who did not want to go on strike yet had been deprived of their right to vote to keep working.
Margaret Thatcher was always a deeply divisive leader. But her decision to force the unions to hold strike ballots and to outlaw secondary picketing - violent or not - was hugely popular. Within a year of the collapse of the miners' strike, Rupert Murdoch broke the power of the print unions - probably the most self serving workers in Britain - and life was never the same again.
Yet most would agree the pendulum has swung too far the other way. In 1992, Michael Heseltine's proposals to close a huge number of coal mines led to a huge protest, even in solid Conservative areas. (Though the protest ultimately proved futile as the Tories sold off Britain's remaining pits.) The current anger at the rewards failed bankers like Fred Goodwin have pocketed shows that the British people are disgusted at the way management has feathered its nest since the Conservatives vanquished the unions in the 1980s. It's a tragedy that the 1997 Labour government was unwilling to make even modest amends to the Thatcherite settlement. Its failure to do is likely to hand victory to the Tories in 2010 - surely the ultimate irony.
PS: six months into the miners' strike, the coal industry ran a consumer advertising campaign headlined 'Coal Now'. An extraordinarily timed move. I photographed this poster on a Cardiff bus (Dinas Caerdydd is Welsh for City of Cardiff) passing Cardiff Castle in September 1984.
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