This year will mark 40 years since the 1984-85 miners’ strike. One of the most remarkable aspects of this anniversary is that this occasion has been marked by very little fanfare.
There have been two TV documentaries, one for the BBC and one for Channel Four, and a Radio 4 documentary series called The Miners’ Strike: Return Journey. But there has been no actual political discussion of the strike’s legacy, leave alone any discussion of making the aspirations of the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign a reality.
Unwanted transition from industrial to service economy
The miners’ strike makes Britain an outlier in the world. There is simply no other example, in the world, of a parliamentary government using the powers of the state to purposefully run down its own energy sector. Margaret Thatcher’s government had a long-term plan to impose its ideology on the country. The government aspired to transform Britain from an industrial economy to a service economy, complete with American levels of homeownership and a similar culture of aspiration, low taxes, and ‘conditional’ welfare state.
To this end, when the confrontation with the National Union of Mineworkers finally came in 1984, the Thatcher government had prepared for it with almost military thoroughness. The 1979 Ridley report had prepared the government for a protracted industrial dispute by recommending that the government accumulate large coal stocks to keep the strike going through the winter of 1984, draining the morale of the miners and their families.
Miners’ strike: underhand strategies
The Thatcher government also resorted to extra-parliamentary means to defeat the miners. Metropolitan police officers were drafted into South Yorkshire to break the striking miners, despite their having no business being there. When officers were bussed in from the capital, they waved five-pound notes in front of striking miners to brag about the money they were earning from the overtime. It’s little wonder that in 2015, a retiring senior police officer in Manchester described the role of the police in the strike as being more akin to an occupying force.
In spring 1985, the miners voted to go back to work. Many miners were exhausted, their families demoralised, and effectively left with no option but to return to the pit. This marked the end of one of the most bitter and protracted industrial disputes in British history, at least since the general strike of 1926. For the miners, it was a humiliation. For them the bright new tomorrow promised by the Thatcher government didn’t arrive. Within twenty years, over 90% of mining jobs had vanished.
40 years on from the miners’ strike: a divisive legacy
The miners’ strike is a spectre that haunts Britain, like a ghost from a Victorian novel. Aside from being an anomaly in the developed world, the miners’ strike has had an unusually wide-ranging legacy.
The strike marked a turning point in industrial relations in the UK. With the most militant section of the working-class movement left comprehensively defeated, Britain’s transformation into a free-market economy was unstoppable. 40 years on, Britain has arguably the worst public services in the whole of Europe.
The demise of trade unionism as a political force has resulted in permanently declining living standards, rampant inequality and a vast, flexible workforce which is overburdened, overworked, and overstressed. All this has been documented thoroughly elsewhere, in books such as The Spirit Level by Richard Williamson and Kate Pickett, Affluenza by Oliver James and Inequality and the 1% by Danny Dorling.
Defeat of the miners has impaired our growth in green industries
Without a genuinely domestic energy sector, Britain has become wholly reliant on imports. In consequence, Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine resulted in extortionate energy prices in the UK. It was key to Thatcher that the miners were seen to be crushed. They were therefore defeated without being offered a long-term plan to transfer their labour to new green industries. This lack of foresight, the inability of the Thatcher government to consider there may be any way to reconcile the interest of capital and labour, has meant our green industries are behind what’s needed to be fully renewable.
Societal impact of the miners’ strike
Outside of energy and politics, the legacy of the strike can be seen in communities around the country. In the absence of the mines, communities across the North and the Midlands of England, in Scotland and Wales, have declined. Where once communities were held together in a common bond, long-term unemployment, chronic drug abuse and other vices have entered the towns and former pit villages.
These ‘left behind’ communities have become acutely vulnerable in the decades following the strike to the cynical opportunism of politicians like Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson. Their promises about Brexit, ‘levelling up’ and absurd visions of Britain as a ‘Superman’ heading boldly into a new libertarian future of entrepreneurial initiative, have done nothing to arrest the decline of ‘left behind’ Britain.
Orgreave: a new legacy
The Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign has been battling for nearly 40 years for a public inquiry into policing methods during the strike. The coalition of ex-miners, trade unionists and people affected by the strike, say the policing of the Orgreave coking works during the strike amounted in effect to a paramilitary police attack on striking miners and their families.
The campaign has been operating for years, and in 2015 met with then home secretary Amber Rudd to discuss the possibility of a Hillsborough-style public inquiry. Rudd led the campaigners to believe that talks were constructive, only to quash any hopes of a public inquiry any time soon.
Time, at last, for a public inquiry
With the Conservatives in disarray, probably facing defeat at the next election, and with the Brexit project largely abandoned, there is no better way than to mark the fortieth anniversary of the strike than to announce a public inquiry into the exact nature of the battle of Orgreave. The miners’ strike has cast a long shadow over public life in Britain, far in excess of an ordinary industrial dispute. The time has come to turn the page.
