Dispute left scars that run deep in communities even four decades later
SIMON GREAVES, an FT journalist who was coal industry reporter for the Nottingham Evening Post throughout the miners’ strike, writes on the dispute 40 years later, drawing on insights gained from his unique position on the frontline of news reporting at t
THIS is the story of a 358-day struggle of ideologies that changed Britain forever. The key players were Margaret Thatcher, Arthur Scargill and the miners he led on strike, or instead broke away in Britain’s last large-scale industrial battle.
Forty years on since the start of what was the longest and most bitter industrial dispute in British history the industry has – as the strike leaders and opposition politicians then feared – disappeared without trace.
The 1984-85 miners’ strike – which saw more than half the country’s 187,000 miners take action – cost one murder, 13 further deaths, thousands of injuries, nearly 10,000 arrests and over £7bn in taxpayers’ money to police. But the costs didn’t stop the day the industrial strife ended.
Its implications for Britain’s economic, political and social fabric have been far-reaching over the subsequent four decades, having left deep scars in communities, none more so than in the Nottinghamshire coalfield which became the crucible for a back-to-work movement and birthplace of a moderate breakaway union.
It is a story of personality and ideology clashes, with historical significance and lasting lessons since this epic fight for hearts, minds and pockets was characterised by key decisions and tactical errors that left an industrial landscape changed for ever.
Today’s young workforce with work-from-home flexibilities, corporate gym memberships and incentives to work such as free office food, Pilates and yoga classes know little of the picket-line clashes and regional rivalries that took the Coal Board and the Conservative government to the edge in the early 1980s.
The fate of an entire industry was sealed by this last great industrial battle of the 20th century. In 1983 the UK had 174 working coal mines. The last pit closed in 2015. But by
March 1984, the word had spread that the National Coal Board was again aiming to close 20 mines, leading miners in South Yorkshire’s Cortonwood colliery to walk out calling for a strike to protect their jobs.
Divisions quickly emerged between striking and working miners while the NUM avoided a national ballot for fear some regions would not support action.
The strike was solid in Fife, County Durham and south Wales but in the Midlands, and especially Nottinghamshire, the threat was less clear.
Here, the communities were traditionally more moderate with a record of settling with their employers dating back to the 1926 General Strike.
As Bertrand Russell wrote about another conflict: “War does not determine who is right, only who is left.” This class war left an indelible mark on former industrial regions where still-raw memories and the ghosts of political activism still occasionally stir. In many towns and pit villages a collective social consciousness cannot be extinguished as bitter memories linger, the unintended consequence of a clumsy determination to crush the will of a workforce and their communities regarded by many at the time as ‘working class royalty.’
The 1984-85 strike has since been embedded in the folklore of the cultural landscape: in the 2000 film Billy Elliot followed by its stage version, in 2014’s Pride, about the inspirational campaigners Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, and latterly as a haunting backdrop to playwright James Graham’s TV drama Sherwood.
Forty years on, more articles, books and dramatisations are reflecting on the longer-term outcome of this epic struggle.
Hardly surprising, since this country’s industrial landscape was forever reshaped by Thatcherism’s overbearing strategy to impose employer dominance across the whole labour market and industrial sector, which resulted in a broadly weakened trade union movement.
This weakness has lasted in spite of a spike in strike days recently as Labour unrest has bubbled up in other ways.
In the 12 months to May 2023, 3.9 million working days were lost to strikes, more than at any point since 1989, with this unrest spreading through sectors including education, healthcare, transport, legal and postal services. Worker dissent is always simmering rather than extinguished.
Furthermore, there have been repeated attacks on the welfare state, combined with the rising phenomenon of insecure work – zero-hours contracts and non-unionised gig work best reflecting the increased casualisation of the less-skilled workforce.
The Labour Party once considered Britain’s coalfields its home turf and election campaigns frequently started from this rock-solid power base. Union-sponsored MPs had seats as safe as houses and the coal reserves they were built on.
But the strike triggered a lengthy and slow separation of the Labour political class from some of its oldest trade union roots. This severing of cause and representation together with the battle-ground overlapping of a largely two-party political system has helped to deliver some unexpected political outcomes in recent years – the shock of Brexit, the rise of the SNP in Scotland, and then the Conservatives’ seizing of ‘red wall’ constituencies thought to be safe Labour seats.
This all began with the Tories’ dismantling of Britain’s organised working class and removal of legal protections around industrial action, especially secondary picketing, effectively outlawing any strike spreading or general stoppages.
This reshaping of the mining regions also adjusted the world of work for many who were then forced to turn to less stable jobs instead of following the father and son pattern of jobs for life in their local pits. One commentator said these poorly-paid largely unskilled jobs resulted in a general uptake of work in semiskilled roles such as caretakers, refuse collectors, milk and delivery men, taxi drivers, warehouse or callcentre operators. Many had two or more jobs sometimes with other side-hustles. My cousin employed striking miners on his farm in south Yorkshire to get the harvest in.
Other unstoppable industry-wide factors behind the fate of coal-fired power stations which lined major waterways include the effects of global warming and concomitant rise of alternative energy sources, together with the efficiency improvements of fuel burning and renewable technologies. Coupled with the flawed geology of coalfields overmined for centuries which added to extraction costs and extraction risks, then there was an unwinnable fight against closure of uneconomic pits.
Thatcher and her supporters, after such a vicious clash with the miners, then failed to provide economic support for the ravaged communities left behind which only isolated them further. This ducking of responsibility continues with successive governments refusing to this day to allow a public inquiry into the brutal policing strategy or into what tragically happened at the Orgreave cokeworks at the height of the strike.
Against these odds, the former coalfields, home to nearly six million people, still harbour community spirit, borne out of shared adversity, and social activism even in the areas where the strike proved bitterly divisive, probably adding to the sense of forgotten political backwaters spurred on by the current government backing away from ‘levellingup’ objectives. Indeed, the Tories dismantled the foundations of an entire social order and its contract without a plan B to fill the jobs gap that resulted.
The outlook remains grim in these communities. Before the pandemic a report commissioned by the Coalfields Regeneration Trust exposed the continuing bleak position of former mining areas, where there were only 55 jobs per 100 residents of
working age, compared with a national average of 73. Median hourly earnings in such places were 8-10% below the national average, and more than a third of adult residents reported health problems lasting more than a year. The homes of once multi-generational ‘working class royalty’ who doubled their wage with bonuses are now occupied by an isolated underclass.
To recap, the miners’ strike began on March 6, 1984, when Ian McGregor, head of the National Coal Board, announced plans to cut production by the equivalent of 20 pits or 20,000 jobs. Scargill, the firebrand leader of the National Union of Mineworkers, called on miners to strike, as they had done with success in 1972 and 1974.
This time his refusal to agree to a ballot lost him the support of wavering rank-and-file members and other trade unions.
Digging in for the long-haul, the Conservative government refused to back down, and implemented its plan of closures while coal was imported and stockpiled at railheads and power stations.
The dispute also took on an overseas dimension – the NUM appealing to comrades (including workers in Russia) abroad while the government imported cheap brown coal or lignite from Poland to add to reserves.
Meanwhile, a National Reporting Centre was set up to co-ordinate Britain’s regional police force. This allowed officers to be deployed quickly to trouble spots to tackle flying pickets, sent all over the country to persuade workers to down tools.
Nottinghamshire always held the key to the strike’s success or failure. Coal from its 25 working mines kept the nation’s lights on through winter with the Trent Valley power stations always online. The traditional independence of the county’s miners and their determination to defend their right to work undermined national unity.
Nottinghamshire had been blessed with rich and profitable mines, its workers therefore with high productivity bonuses, a sense that they did have a future and always put their own interests first.
The region had a defiant history. A six-month miners’ lockout had followed the 1926 General Strike but the Notts men, led by MP George Spencer, negotiated their own return to work and formed a breakaway union. To some extent the early targeting of its pits by violent interlopers only galvanised the general resistance to taking action. It then became a battle over the rights to democratic choice and Notts miners effectively became independent when they struck from their rulebook the part that gave the national union the final say in any matter of dispute between them.
When NUM leaders voted down the idea of a national ballot over strike action, on April 19, it only cemented the opposition to action in the moderate county.
So, of the 31,000 Notts miners there were never more than 6,000 willing to take action despite running the daily picket-line gauntlet of bricks and brickbats – ‘scab’ was the familiar cry along with ‘the workers’/miners’ united, will never be defeated, or ‘coal, not dole.’
The dispute took a sinister turn after this ballot rejection, with rumours spreading like wildfire of flying pickets and police raids.
I witnessed some of the fiercest clashes in Nottinghamshire, including a newspaper delivery van being upended and set alight, and thousands of out-of-county flying pickets swarming through north Nottinghamshire fields and forests to gain access to the working pits, advancing along side roads to avoid the motorway blocked by police cordons – many with out-of-county officers.
The back-to-work movement gathered pace steadily and the Green Dragon pub in Oxton became the focal point of working miners’ solidarity meetings.
Along with a legal campaign to enshrine in law their right to work, following two judgements in the spring 2,000 Notts miners gave up the strike and returned to their workplaces. It was widely argued at the time, though, that despite the resistance to striking this did not mean that there was general support for the Coal Board or the government. In more practical terms many miners earned bonuses that were 100% of their basic pay.
In those days, my daily reports included an estimated tally of the miners remaining at work and articles for the local evening newspaper included local intelligence gathered by colleagues as well as situation reports of the dispute from all over the county. I would sit behind a VDU in the Nottingham Evening Post newsroom and type a story that weaved the local and national news into a report of the general state of play in the dispute, with claims and counter-claims from both sides about the numbers involved – both the miners working and the quantity of coal being produced. The truth lay somewhere between the two and was vital propaganda for both sides.
On Mayday I attended a back-towork march in Mansfield that was besieged by pickets. I was following the march through the town with the thin blue line of police separating marchers and protesters as the insults and weapons flew. A police horse in front of me was hit by a brick and stepped back, onto my foot.
There were hundreds of arrests.
The Nottinghamshire moderates kept on working and eventually decided to go their own way by forming the Union of Democratic Mineworkers. I was kept up to date with developments with calls to the office and out of hours to my mother’s home in Southwell from UDM leaders and local union officials including a mysterious informant known as Silver Birch. I would be told in cryptic whispers where the pickets were headed or where a concerted effort to breach their lines was likely to be made.
On one occasion I turned up at Blidworth Miners’ Welfare where Scargill found himself locked out of the building. Undaunted, he used an upturned beer crate to deliver his defiant message through a megaphone. At some point his leatherjacketed minder was told I was from the (then non-union) Post and I was greeted with a chanting chorus of ‘scab, scab, scab,’ but then allowed to report the gathering to help fuel the NUM propaganda machine.
My efforts that day culminated in a treasured page one headline ‘Way ahead: Durham backs new union,’ with an inside set of miners’ interviews headlined: ‘We’re better off without you!,’ capturing that go-italone spirit.
The strikes’ defeat quickly led to the closure of most mines, a more general deindustrialisation of the economy, privatisation of nationalised industries as part of ‘popular capitalism,’ the dismantling of organised labour and rising unemployment, and hollowing out of many communities. It paved the way for Thatcher’s free market economy in which deregulated financial capitalism would be unleashed by the 1986 Big Bang reforms.
The strike also saw a new appreciation of the power of women in society. Miners were powerfully backed by their wives, who knew that without the pits there was little hope for their families’ and children’s future, scant protection of their lifestyle or the viability of their community. They set up support groups to run soup kitchens and put together food parcels for striking miners’ families, raising money from local pubs and clubs.
What it left behind was an increase in social inequality in Britain, making way for a general acceptance of speculative capitalism, further removal of worker protection and the rise of the non-unionised gig economy.
It left the economies of the coalfields isolated and hollowed out – with little work to replace the ‘golddust’ jobs that workers and their families still enjoyed. In the death of an industry the only real winners were miners’ wives who found empowerment and renewed purpose in their support networks, it has been argued.
As collective memories fade this 40th anniversary may be one of the last chances to look back and remember the cathartic events of that year.
The fate of an entire industry was sealed by this last great industrial battle of the 20th century.
Simon Greaves