Strike that changed everything
140,000 BRAVE MINERS & A YEAR WE’LL NEVER FORGET
This week the TUC marks its 150th anniversary at its annual congress. Since its founding in Manchester in 1868 the Trades Union Congress has backed workers and fought attempts to undermine rights and pay. Today it represents five million people. This week the Mirror looks back at some critical points in its remarkable history.
It was the greatest of times, it was the worst of times. The miners’ Great Strike for Jobs of 1984/5 scaled the heights of struggle and plumbed the depths of despair.
It was a watershed in post-war history, signalling the end of trade union power. For 12 hard, bitter months, the men and their families fought to keep alive their pits and their communities.
At its height, 140,000 miners were out. The strike cost around 26 million working days, the most since the General Strike of 1926.
The men had the strongest organisation in the labour movement, the National Union of Mineworkers, led by charismatic firebrand Arthur Scargill.
They took on the Thatcher government, the state-owned National Coal Board led by American “butcher” Ian MacGregor, a police force mobilised as Tory militia, MI5 spooks, the courts and virtually the entire media.
The strike became a way of life in the coalfields. Families created their own welfare state in beleaguered pit villages, run by a new generation of strongminded women who came out of the shadow of their menfolk.
I reported the strike throughout, as I had the 1972 and 1974 strikes, which were successful. My family had been in the industry for generations. The miners were my friends.
They had unprecedented support from fellow trade unionists at home and abroad, and from members of the public who instinctively grasped the grim nature of what was at stake: survival. And still they lost. W hy? Because this was no ordinary industrial dispute. It wasn’t about money, like in the 70s. It was about “who rules?” – the state-owned coal industry, and ultimately, the country.
The men who dug the coal that fuelled the nation, or the politicians at Westminster? The Left-wing triumvirate of NUM leaders, Scargill, Mick McGahey and Peter Heathfield, or Thatcher who called them “the enemy within”?
That’s how the strike came to be characterised. In reality, it was more like the Peasants’ Revolt of 600 years before. An unplanned insurrection of men and women who’d had enough. Enough of fear, enough of job insecurity, enough of being taken for granted.
Scargill didn’t start the strike in March 1984. The men of Cortonwood colliery, in South Yorks, did when MacGregor announced their pit’s closure with no warning. Thatcher threw down the gauntlet. “King Arthur”, whose Camelot was the castellated NUM HQ in Barnsley, had no option but to pick it up.
The government chose its time carefully. Coal stocks in the power stations were a record high. New laws banned “secondary picketing” that had won previous strikes. Unions could now be sued and bankrupted in the civil courts. Armed with this panoply of powers, the Cabinet was confident of winning a long, drawn-out conflict. At first, it looked like the miners would take all before them. This was a young men’s strike. They believed they could win. Pitmen walked out, or were picketed out, across the country. Winding wheels fell silent across Scotland, South Wales, Yorkshire, Durham, Northumberland, the Midlands, Lancashire, Staffordshire, Kent and Derbyshire. But, critically, not in the rich coalfield of Nottinghamshire, which had a history of non-militancy, or moderate Leicestershire. More than 30,000 men continued working, boosting power station stocks. They were angry Scargill had refused to call a national strike ballot, as required under NUM rules. Flying pickets from Yorkshire failed to dissuade the working miners, whose numbers gradually grew from a trickle to a flood, spreading to hitherto-solid coalfields.
There were frequent peace talks between the NUM and MacGregor, but there was never a real prospect of a deal.
The TUC and Acas tried to bridge the gap, and failed. Even Robert Maxwell, booming rogue proprietor of the Daily Mirror, had a go, and flopped. Both sides wanted victory or nothing, and only one side had the power to deliver. S cargill demanded no pit closures, even of what were labelled as uneconomic mines. Thatcher wanted to crush the NUM – to set an example to workers or their unions who dared to take on the Tories.
At the so-called Battle of Orgreave in June, thousands of pickets clashed with police, leading to charges of riot – later dropped. In the autumn of 1984, an unexpected fillip for the strikers came from sister union Nacods, representing pit deputies whose safety duties kept the mines operational.
They voted 82% to join the miners, but ratted on them when given an illuat sory pledge of employment security. I was in the bar of the Danum hotel in Doncaster with jubilant strikers when news of the betrayal filtered through.
I said to my friend Johnny Stones, NUM delegate at Frickley colliery in South Yorkshire (and uncle of the England footballer of the same name): “That’s it. We’re finished.”
I was able to say “we” because like all decent trade unionists, I had a personal interest in the strike. I gave a day’s pay – £50 – every week to Frickley feeding centre for the duration of the dispute.
Cheques were made out to a fictional Pit Inspection Fund to keep the money out of the hands of court-appointed sequestrators, who seized NUM finances on the grounds it wasn’t a lawful dispute.
After Nacods’ treachery, it was downhill all the way, through a cruel winter to a desperate spring. The Coal Board offered more and more inducements to the strikers to go back, publishing daily figures of returnees to lower morale.
Mass picketing became more violent, on both sides. I saw police at Brodsworth colliery, near Doncaster, come under a hail of missiles, then chase the men through a housing estate, smashing car windows indiscriminately with their
batons. The homes of “scabs” were attacked and daubed with paint. David Wilkie, a taxi driver taking a returnee to work in South Wales, was killed by a slab of concrete dropped on his car by strikers, later jailed for manslaughter.
Two strikers, David Jones and Joe Green, had already died on picket lines.
Broke, burdened with debt, humbled by the power of the state, and with no hope, they went back even in Yorkshire.
Only South Wales, the bedrock of milive tancy, stayed 98% out – and this gavits leaders the moral authority to challenge Scargill’s policy of “no surrender”.
They proposed an orderly return to work without a settlement to a special union conference at the TUC’s London headquarters on March 3, 1985. It was carried by 98-91 votes, against the wishes of King Arthur.
Striking miners penned behind steel barriers outside the building shouted “No!” and some wept. On a railway bridge in Fitzwilliam, near Wakefield, the painted slogan read: “We [underlined] told Arthur – No Surrender.”
Was it all for nothing? The sacrifice – cars repossessed, mortgaged homes lost, marriages wrecked, families divided. The Iron Lady had won,
boasting: “I’ve seen the miners off.” Then came the revenge for daring to defy her.
The industry privatised. Humiliated union reps sent back to the coalface. Deduction of union subs from pay packets ended – reducing NUM membership by half at many mines.
Longer hours and pay rates imposed, not negotiated. Petty bossing-about by cocky colliery managers.
And then the accelerated pit closures, as forecast by Scargill, but on an even larger scale. Whole coalfields were destroyed within a few years. C ommunities that knew no other work were abandoned to mass unemployment. Drugs took over young people who once had a well-paid future, even if it was dirty and dangerous work underground. Community policing collapsed.
Britain’s last deep coal mine, Kellingley in North Yorkshire, closed in 2015, with the loss of 450 jobs.
At its peak, the Big K produced a million tonnes a year for power stations like Drax. It is now fuelled by wood pellets made in Mississippi, shipped to Liverpool and trained over the Pennines, a debatable environmental gain. Scargill called the outcome of the Great Strike for Jobs a “most important victory”.
My friend Johnny, a man of few words, said to me: “Well, I lost the car, and my life savings, and nearly the house – so it’s a good job we didn’t get beat.”
With spirit like that, something vital, something unforgettable in that bitter, unequal conflict will never die. They had to fight for their future. But they are a dying army, now, the men who dared.
I still see some of them in a club in South Elmsall, near Pontefract. They tell stories of their war as if it were yesterday. Like the police Land Rover that charged a pickets’ snowman and found it was built round a concrete bollard.
MacGregor and Thatcher are long dead, the mines are gone, the muckstacks are being regenerated. Scargill, 80, is a virtual recluse.
But the legacy of the strike lives on, inspiring books, songs, films – Brassed Off, Ken Loach’s Which Side Are You On?. It thrives in community memories.
No other strike so inspired those who took part and those who watched as the events unfolded until exhaustion forced the inevitable end. An unforgettable, and unforgiveable, experience.