The miners, disunited, were soundly defeated (by tyranny)
March 06, 2024
Colin Randall writes: an anniversary worth noting is that of protracted miners' strike of the mid-1980s. For musical illustration, I have chosen Ed Pickford's lament for a vanishing trade, Farewell Johnny Miner, by Dick Gaughan, Blackleg Mining Man by Pitmen Poets and Weave and Worry by Adrienne Lovelock and Peter Day...
On this day 40 years ago - March 6 1984 – began the miners’ strike that would last for 11 months, three weeks and four days.
The immediate issue was coalfield closures. But Margaret Thatcher wanted more than to shut down pits. She had her heart set on the bigger goal of inflicting a humiliating defeat on Arthur Scargill, the National Union of Mineworkers and the trade union movement as a whole.
I have said many times that while few Conservatives would have the gall to claim that ordinary people are not entitled to withdraw their labour, I don’t recall ever hearing a Tory MP or minister defend an actual strike.
On second thoughts, there is an exception to that rule. Tories line up willingly to support their government ministers when they effectively stage their own strikes, refusing to negotiate meaningfully with essential public sector workers' unions, or resort to their refinement of secondary picketing, malign interference in negotiations between public sector employers and employees.
A 1984 London march in support of the miner. Image: sludgegulper
I was a reporter covering the West of England and South Wales for The Daily Telegraph during the miners' strike. You may wonder how I could report that social conflict fairly and in a balanced way for a rightwing newspaper. But I hope and believe that I did. The Telegraph of my era was better known as a paper of record than a shrieking vehicle of populism that is now quite comfortable with the ideology of the comment pages spreading to news coverage.
Throughout the strike, I was able to maintain good relations with National Coal Board and NUM contacts, with most of the striking miners and pit lodge officials I encountered and with one or two strikebreakers.
There was initially no great appetite in South Wales for a walk-out, without the ballot the NUM rulebook suggested was essential. No one had forgotten the union's refusal to back an earlier closure dispute specific to that region. Once out, however, the South Wales miners maintained a high degree of loyalty, never less than 93 per cent, despite a few dramatic examples of men defying the union and returning to work.
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South Wales also witnessed the solitary murder trial arising from the strike.
Striking miners lobbed a 46lb concrete block off a bridge above the Heads of the Valley road near Rhymney, killing David Wilkie, a taxi driver taking a strikebreaker to his colliery. It was clearly not the intended outcome of their act but the perpetrators but Dean Hancock and Russell Shankland were initially convicted of murder, which was very properly reduced to manslaughter on appeal, eight-year sentence replacing the original terms of life imprisonment. I cannot recall which of the two men it was that said when arrested words to effect of "we're in this hell-hole while Scargill's probably out having a steak dinner".
I naturally remember feeling much more sorry for Mr Wllkie and his family than the accused. But I also held some sympathy for two ordinary working men drawn into such desperate and let’s be honest, utterly reckless actions as an indirect consequence of their union's catastrophic handling of the dispute.
Andrew Marr, a decent enough journalist, has written words the gist of which I broadly accept and, in tthis extract, opened with a phrase that, perhaps unfairly, make me think of Scargill much as I think of his fellow Brexit fan Donald Trump:
Many found Scargill inspiring; many others found him frankly scary. He had been a Communist and retained strong Marxist views and a penchant for denouncing anyone who disagreed with him as a traitor.... Scargill had indeed been elected by a vast margin and he set about turning the NUM's once moderate executive into a reliably militant group....
By adopting a position that no pits should be closed on economic grounds, even if the coal was exhausted...he made sure confrontation would not be avoided. Exciting, witty Arthur Scargill brought coalmining to a close in Britain far faster than would have happened had the NUM been led by some prevaricating, dreary old-style union hack.
Back in the 1960s, on my first local paper up in County Durham, we had a tradition of going down the shaft to interview miners on their last shift before a pit closure.
I distinctly recall the almost unanimous view of these pitmen that the last thing they wanted for was their sons to follow them down the mines.
The difference between then and the 1980s, of course, was that there were other jobs for those sons to go to. Thatcher's war on the miners came at a time when there were few such opportunities; whole communities were reduced to industrial deserts and social despair.
In 1984 and 1985, I found myself with the miners and against their leaders, but much more against towards a cruel Conservative government that gleefully engaged in social warfare. My view has not changed in the intervening 40 years.
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