The Left still prefers myth to reality 40 years on from the miners’ strike

The very people who attack Thatcher today for closing the mines back the death of coal for green reasons

In The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell said “our civilisation ... is founded on coal, more completely than one realises until one stops to think about it”. He captured that ambivalence the rest of the country felt for the men who dug it from the ground, a mix of fascination and suspicion. “In a way it is even humiliating to watch coal miners working. It raises in you a momentary doubt about your own status as an ‘intellectual’ and a superior person generally. For it is brought home to you … that it is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior.”

When that was published in 1937, the mining industry employed more than one million men and powered the nation. Coal had fuelled the Industrial Revolution and underpinned an empire. Yet a mythology developed, especially on the Left, around miners and their communities that belied the dangers and wretched nature of the job. Disasters down the centuries claimed the lives of thousands of pitmen, a death toll far greater than in the nuclear power industry.

Production peaked in 1913, when more than 1,500 pits extracted some 290 million tons. By 2013, that had fallen to under four million. The last deep pit in the United Kingdom, at Kellingley in Yorkshire, closed two years later and the remaining few open cast mines have also shut. Approval has recently been given for a new coking coal mine in Cumbria to supply the steel industry; but with the latter switching to cleaner electric arc furnaces, there is now a question mark over that, too.

King Coal is dead; and if you believe the propaganda, it was killed by Margaret Thatcher in a murderous attack on the working classes on behalf of plutocracy. The anniversary of the miners’ strike, which began 40 years ago today, will doubtless perpetuate these old canards. Arthur Scargill and his National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) cohorts were the vanguard of a proletariat fighting the forces of capitalist darkness. This was no dispute over pay and conditions but a fight for the very survival of a way of life.

The Daily Telegraph’s front-page story for March 6 1984 reported how the Coal Board planned 20,000 redundancies from a workforce of around 120,000. This prompted a walk-out at Cortonwood Colliery in South Yorkshire, the first of a series of wildcat stoppages. Mrs Thatcher was facing the same nightmare that toppled her predecessor Edward Heath.

She, however, was ready. The government had averted a potential flash point the previous year by bowing to an NUM wage demand and then spent months building up a stockpile of coal at the power stations in anticipation of a strike to follow the expected closure of pits.

These were hardly new. Mines had been shutting ever since nationalisation in 1947. Clement Attlee’s Labour government closed 101; the Conservatives under Harold Macmillan closed 246; Labour, led by Harold Wilson, closed 253 in his two terms in

Labour, led by Harold Wilson, closed 253 mines in his two terms in office – twice as many as Mrs Thatcher did

office – twice as many as Mrs Thatcher did. Yet from recent retrospectives, you would imagine that she was uniquely brutal in her approach to the miners. The difference is that she was not cowed by the NUM, unlike Heath. Indeed, the reason she was prepared was precisely to avoid what had happened 10 years earlier.

The miners first went on strike in January 1972, triggering a state of emergency as electricity supplies ran low. Planned blackouts were used to manage the supply crisis, but it didn’t stop severe industry disruptions and thousands of people losing their jobs. By the end of February, the government and NUM reached a compromise and the strike was called off.

However, over the winter of 1973/74, in the midst of a global oil crisis, the miners went on strike again. Heath imposed a three-day week with only services deemed essential, like hospitals and shops, exempt. Television went off the air at 10.30pm and power cuts meant households were without electricity for hours every day. I can remember revising for exams by candlelight. Eventually, after the miners rejected a pay offer, Heath called a general election on a “who governs?” ticket, only to lose his majority.

Mrs Thatcher was determined not to be caught out in the same way but the NUM made it much easier for her. The strike was called in the spring when demand was falling, even though the leadership knew there was enough coal stockpiled to see the country through the year. On top of that, Scargill refused to call a pit-head ballot as required by NUM rules, thereby dividing the miners against each other. The Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire coalfields carried on working. The rift caused by the absence of a vote plagued Scargill since no other union would come out in support.

The sentimentalisation of this period has deepened over the years. In popular culture it has been captured in films like Billy Elliott and Pride. What is undoubtedly true is that, as the pits closed – by the mid-1990s just a handful were left – the communities that relied on them collapsed. Even though mining was a grim and dangerous occupation, it was a job. Without it there was nothing else to do.

Neil Kinnock, who as Labour leader and a south Wales MP found himself in an unenviable position, sympathising with the miners but opposing the NUM’S refusal to hold a ballot, said this week that the great failure was not to do enough to rescue the villages left behind. That is true but it is not entirely the Tories’ fault, since there was a Labour government for 13 years and most of the local councils are Labourrun.

Indeed, the biggest political surprise of recent years is that many of these old mining areas like Ashfield, Bolsover, Mansfield and the rest voted Conservative in 2019 (even if they probably won’t next time).

The greatest irony is that those who most eulogise the miners for seeking to preserve their way of life have been in the vanguard of those demanding the removal of all carbon from the economy. Had the pits still been open today, the net-zero zealots would insist on their closure.

It so happens that Mrs Thatcher was the first world leader to warn about the dangers of global warming in a speech in 1988, but do not expect the Left to give her any credit for doing so. In socialist demonology, she is still the prime minister who killed the pits, whatever the truth of the matter.