The Miner's Strike and its legacy: thanks a bundle, Nottinghamshire

Channel 4 last Saturday 24th showed a two-hour documentary on the miner's strike of 1984-5, which awoke some old feelings in me and, I hope, many others who were around at that time. It might even give some idea to the younger generation who were barely born then about how important the struggle was and why it was so bitterly fought. The documentary was more reportage and reminiscence than analysis, but none the worse for that.

Without doubt, the strike was deliberately engineered by the Tory regime of the time, and as carefully planned and prepared for as any military battle. Barely a year before the strike, la Thatcher had been forced to back down when her regime tried to force, if I remember rightly, some pit cutbacks. We foolishly celebrated what seemed like a humiliation and a bloody nose, but it became clear in retrospect that this had been a 'tactical withdrawal' by the State, which had not yet completed its preparations for the battle. By the time the State provoked the miner's strike in 1984 by proposing the closure of a shedload of pits, ostensibly for "economic" reasons but pretty obviously for political reasons, it had built up 2 years coal stocks and had readied the cops, the army, the spooks, its allies in Fleet Street, and the whole panoply of the State for the sole purpose of defeating the miners. Why? Because the miners had always been, and still were, the strongest group of workers in the country, the 'shock troops' of the working class. The Tories knew they had to take them on at some point in a decisive battle because they knew they had to take on the working class - oops, sorry, "trade union power" - and defeat it if the "restructuring" of the UK economy - privatisation, forced unemployment, "labour market flexibility", dismantling of manufacturing industry in favour of Finance Capital, lower taxation and consequent cutbacks in public services, and more - were to have any chance of success.

Of course, at the time the State and its allies were consistently peddling the line of it being an industrial dispute between the coal board and the NUM in which the State had no involvement, but that the "forces of law and order" had to step in to protect the "right to work" (at the time it was deeply ironic hearing that phrase from Tory mouths) of "working miners", enforce trade union legislation, and of course "preserve law and order". I remember Thatcher and her allies repeating this time and again, that the strike wasn't a government matter, it wasn't the government taking on the NUM but a private dispute between employers and employees, that the whole issue was that of uneconomic pits. Everyone and their uncle, including most of those on the ruling class side who were peddling the party line, knew bloody well that it was a set-piece battle between Capital (or whatever term you wish to use) and Labour. The State doesn't spend billions of pounds sending tens of thousands of cops around the country to police an ordinary strike - had it been about economics, then a fraction of the money spent on deploying the forces of the State, if spent on the coal industry, could have restored pit profitability in no time. All of us on the Left knew what the dispute was, and it wasn't NUM v NCB but working v ruling class. It was that simple, that cut and dried. But of course that was ridiculed as paranoid fantasy by the State's agents in the media, when at the same time Kelvin "Gotcha!" MacKenzie and his fellow tabloid editors knew full well what they were doing and why. They were fighting a war. A class war.

Why the militarist language to describe what was ostensibly an industrial dispute? Because the protagonists on both sides in the documentary described the dispute in militarist terms - Tim Bell, La Thatcher's faithful, and notorious, media adviser (what's now known as spin doctors, and are more truthfully known as propagandists) referred in the programme to it as a "civil war". In the years after the strike the winners gleefully and smugly boasted of their success in "defeating the miners" and how the "battle" had been a turning point in "industrial relations": Parkinson, McGregor, various spooks and cops, all happily recounted how they'd planned and executed the battle against "the enemy within". Phone tapping, road blocks, black propaganda, and of course good old physical violence (usually meted out by the notoriously corrupt and violent Metropolitan cops), were all admitted to by the winners in the years afterwards, eager to take credit for their part in the decisive battle of the class war.

An indirect, but perhaps as damaging effect of the miner's defeat has been the destruction of any serious political opposition inside and, more importantly, outside parliament. We are now probably the most surveilled and controlled population in Europe. We surely have the highest prison population in Europe, and the fewest 'civil liberties', and the State continues to pass authoritarian laws and measures with complete impunity because there's no-one to stop it. By the time the people do wake up to what's happened (rather than perversely celebrating it in Big Brother" they'll be so controlled and coerced that they'll not be able to do a thing about it. In other countries where the labour movement retains teeth, such as France and Italy, the State has to fight every inch of the way to increase its power. Here, we meekly accept it in the name of "security", because no-one argues against it (at least, no-one who ever gets on to the mainstream media) and, hey, what can you do? So, for the State and the ruling classes, the defeat of the miners has had the welcome bonus dividend of allowing it carte blanche to do as it pleases, with only a few anti-globalisation dog-on-a-string types and middle-class liberals mouthing occasional protests.

To some, the strike might seem a historical curiousity. To others, such as Neil Greatrex - leader of the Notts miners and later head of the puppet 'Union of Democratic Mineworkers' - we should let "bygones be bygones".

(Interestingly, Greatrex and his colleagues in the UDM leadership appear to have done very nicely indeed through their ownership of Vendside, a company processing miners compensation claims, making them "the best-paid trade union bosses in Britain". "Union leaders 'profit from compensation' to workers", Western Mail, 12/1/04. Indeed, a Google search for "Neil Greatrex" produces some very interesting hits...)

The reality is that the strike and its effects are very much with us, and that the defeat of the miners has led directly to where we are today, with the longest working hours, worst working conditions, and weakest labour movement in the EU. The UK now has the 3rd lowest per capita GDP in the EU, just in front of Portugal and Ireland, and it'll not be long before Ireland has it's own "sorpasso" (as the Italians called their overtaking of the UK economy some years back). The direct result of the defeat of the labour movement has been that the UK has turned into the sweatshop of Europe. This was foreseeable, and indeed planned by the ruling class. Any idiot at the time could see that the defeat of the miners would screw the whole working class, and that all of us would suffer.

Unfortunately, there were no shortage of idiots and dupes, particularly in Nottinghamshire, in 1984. It's only of small consolation that all those brave souls in the Notts coalfields who "braved the bully-boys" to fight for their "right to work" are now out of a job, as the Notts mines were closed along with all the rest once the dupes working them had outlived their usefulness. Perhaps some of those ex-miners are working as paper boys or security guards or in McDonald's, or maybe they're just on the dole - it would certainly be some late justice for what they did. Because it was obvious to them, to us, to everyone at the time that they were being deliberately used by the State and the ruling class to defeat the miner's strike. Why did they think that the Freedom Association was being so helpful in both money and advisory terms? Why did they think the right-wing press was so pro their 'cause'? Why did they think that the State was spending 00's of millions on cops to help shepherd them into the pits? Perhaps some of them were such ignorant naive cretins that they honestly believed that the State was helping them out to "preserve law and order" and for the principle, but it's difficult not to think that most knew just what they were doing, knew how damaging it would be to the NUM and the labour movement, and calculated that they'd come out of it smelling of roses and in work. The State certainly said as much at the time, that the Notts pits were safe, that the miners would be looked after and rewarded, and it's true that the Notts pits lasted longer than those elsewhere, so perhaps the 'working miners' (scab is just soooo negative, doncha think?) reckoned they'd come out on the winning side with full pockets. In the end, of course, they got it up the arse with the rest of us.

It is they, though, in Nottinghamshire who crossed the picket lines, who broke the miner's strike. Had they come out, the miners would have been in with an even chance of winning, although the State had prepared well and for the long haul so the outcome might not have been any different. But they didn't strike, and are thus directly responsible for the defeat of the miners, and the results that have flowed from that defeat. They will never, and should never, be forgiven.