Miners Strike - One Year On

Miners Strike - One Year On 1985

The 1984–1985 Miners' Strike was a major industrial struggle between the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and the British State led by Margaret Thatcher (with its public face, the employer the National Coal Board (NCB)). 

On 6 March 1984, the NCB declared the agreement made after the 1974 miners’ strike obsolete and announced the closure of 20 collieries with the loss of 20,000 jobs. This was an assault on the primary source of employment and identity for many communities in Northern England, Scotland, and Wales.

NUM President Arthur Scargill stated that, in addition to those 20, the Government had a secret, long-term strategy to close over 70 pits. The Government and NCB Chairman Ian MacGregor vehemently denied this, accusing Scargill of deception. In 2014 released Cabinet papers revealed that MacGregor indeed sought to close 75 pits within three years - vindicating the miners' deepest fears.

The strike was solidly observed in the heartlands of South Wales, Yorkshire, Scotland, the North East, and Kent. To protect their industry, miners from these areas picketed pits in hesitant regions like Nottinghamshire, where the call to strike was weaker.

On 14 March 1984 David Gareth Jones, a South Kirkby miner from Acton Hall Colliery was killed whilst picketing at Ollerton Colliery. The 'Battle of Orgreave' took place on 18 June 1984 at the Orgreave Coking Plant near Rotherham, which striking miners were attempting to blockade. The confrontation, between about 5,000 miners and the same number of police, broke into violence after police on horseback attacked the miners with night sticks drawn – 51 picketers and 72 police were injured. Other less well known, but bloody, battles between pickets and police took place, for example, in Maltby, South Yorkshire.

As the year-long struggle wore on, the government's strategy to break the strike became clear. A breakaway union of working miners in Nottinghamshire and South Derbyshire, the Union of Democratic Miners, was fostered and recognized by the NCB and the Government and strongly supported by the right-wing popular press, deliberately undermining the NUM's unity.

After twelve months of extraordinary hardship, with families starved and impoverished, the strikers were forced back to work in March 1985. Even in defeat, regions like Yorkshire and Kent voted against ending the action, their continued pickets a final act of defiance and delaying some mines returning to work by a couple of weeks.

The subsequent decimation of the coal industry proved the miners' fight was absolutely correct: a necessary, courageous stand for their communities' future.

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Trade unions developed out of the need for workers across the world to stand together in the face of the power and wealth of the ruling class.

Modern trade unions started to take shape alongside the development of capitalism and the industrial revolution with the objective of protecting and improving pay and conditions. Some early trade unions also sought to create an alternative cooperative or communal society. In response Governments sought to suppress them both legally and physically, which often led to underground organisations with secret memberships.

Most early trade unions were solely concerned with protecting their own members and the exclusion of non-members from their trades. Over time, towards the middle of the 19th Century a new trade unionism developed which sought to develop mass movements capable of shifting the balance of power.

By the early years of the 20th Century, the trade union movement was significant enough to threaten to be an alternative centre of power in many European countries and allied to social democratic parties (focusing on establishing a presence in parliament), communist parties or anarchist organisations.

Trade unions played a significant part in both the Russian Revolution and the Spanish Revolution and Civil War.

Since the Second World War, trade union membership and correspondingly radicalism has declined. The focus of the “official” trade union movement has been more on negotiation with management, individual case work, and selling “cheap” insurance on behalf of multinational companies to their members.

Radical trade unions still exist and the Radical Poster Collective supports those.

If you are not already in a union we strongly advise you to join one (we recommend a union that is a member of the International Workers’ Association such as the Industrial Workers of the World); and if you are in a union we advise you to get active within that union.

We support workers in struggle whatever form it takes.

We advocate for a General Strike on principle.