Mike Phipps reflects on the significance of the year-long miners’ strike which began on March 6th 1984 and whose defeat changed the face of Britain.
MARCH 5, 2024
Channel 4’s recent three-part documentary Miners’ Strike 1984: The Battle for Britain revived memories of the National Union of Mineworkers’ historic strike and perhaps brought some of its flashpoints to a new audience. Its strongest segment was the one devoted to the mass picket at Orgreave and how the police meted out unprovoked, deliberate and brutal punishment against NUM pickets.
The Ridley Plan
The third part dwelt at length on the role of David Hart, the businessman and Thatcher advisor who funded various initiatives to break the strike. Perhaps a better focus would have been the Ridley Plan, the strategy devised by the Tories in opposition a decade earlier to ensure that never again would they be humiliated by a miners’ strike, as Ted Heath’s government had been – twice in three years.
This proposed that a series of measures be put in place to minimise the impact of a future strike, including building up coal stocks in advance of any dispute; laying plans to import coal from non-union foreign ports; using non-union lorry drivers to transport coal rather than relying on unionised rail workers; installing dual coal-oil firing generators; training a large, mobile squad of police, ready to employ riot tactics against striking miners; and ending state benefits to strikers.
This last point was amplified in BBC2’s recent Miners’ Strike: A Frontline Story. A striking miner recalls how his newborn boy died at just one week old. Striking workers weren’t eligible for funeral grants, so the man, penniless after two months without pay, was unable to bury his child.
I remember the Daily Telegraph, the day the strike ended, featuring a large spread on how the Ridley Plan, not widely known about at the time, had been successfully implemented. The implication was that the events in the dispute had never really slipped out of the government’s control. However, this was very far from the truth.
Of course, at the time Thatcher claimed not to be intervening directly in the conflict. Few believed it then and the much later release of Cabinet papers revealed quite the opposite: Thatcher was involved in the detailed calculation of contingency plans to move more coal by road, including using British troops.
These papers also highlighted two moments during the struggle when the government “stared into the abyss”, in July and October 1984. Neither of these episodes were really dwelt on in Miners’ Strike 1984: The Battle for Britain, yet thy were critical turning points in the dispute, which deserve further consideration.
Solidarity action
The Channel 4 series was happy to magnify the many supposed errors of the leadership of Arthur Scargill in the strike, but failed to address the more interesting question: could the strike have been won? In particular, it paid little attention to the one thing that could have made the strike successful: solidarity action.
‘Unity is strength’ has long been a key watchword of the labour movement. But achieving it has proved notoriously difficult. On paper, there was a Triple Alliance between the mining, rail and steel unions. In practice, it was never activated during the 1984-5 strike and attempts at rank and file level to forge unity in action were quickly stamped out by moderate trade union leaders.
On May 9th Arthur Scargill appealed to railworkers, then due to start an overtime ban on May 30th: “If ever there was a time to join with this union, to come out on strike… now is the time.”
In the event the rail union leaders settled for a 4.9% rise. Paul Foot later published documents in the Daily Mirror showing that Thatcher had instructed British Rail bosses to make whatever concessions were necessary to avoid a “second front” with the railworkers.
There were real attempts at solidarity action at the grassroots. Some rank and file railworkers who refused to transport coal were sent home by the employers while union leaders stood by. Thousands of lorry drivers who supported the miners risked being laid off if they refused to move coal. Their union – the Transport and General Workers Union – could have issued an instruction to boycott coal. They refused.
The TUC could have coordinated solidary action, but worked instead to keep the miners isolated. They argued that such action had been made unlawful by the Thatcher government, which was true. Yet by the summer of 1984, most anti-union legislation had yet to be deployed. Only when it was clear that the TUC would not act and solidarity action would not be called did a legal action start that would mobilise these laws and lead to the NUM’s funds being sequestrated.
There were moments when real cross-union solidarity became a reality. In the summer of 1984, there were two dockers’ strikes within six weeks of each other. Some 25,000 dockers took part in the first stoppage. A second front had opened, around the same issue of job security.
This was the first moment of panic for the Tory government. It takes only a few weeks for a dock strike’s effect to be felt in terms of shortages of basic goods. What then? For ministers to deploy soldiers to unload ships would constitute a major escalation of the dispute and could lead to widespread generalised action. The alternative was surrender.
No wonder the government was keen to settle as quickly as possible to keep the miners isolated. Dockers’ leaders were compliant in this too, emphasising that their dispute was quite separate from the miners’. This suited Thatcher: the dockers could be beaten into submission later, once the miners were defeated – which is exactly what happened.
Then in September, NACODS, the pit deputies’ union, voted overwhelmingly to strike. This threatened to make those pits where miners were still going to work entirely inoperable. A total shutdown of the industry loomed.
Senior civil servants drew up a secret list of “worst case” options which included power cuts and even putting British industry on a ‘three-day week’ as Edward Heath’s government had in 1974. Being reminded of his humiliating defeat in that battle would indeed have meant “staring into the abyss”.
But NACODS too settled their claim with the government, when as Dennis Skinner said at the time, “they should have doubled the number they first thought of.” Ministers made concessions over the review procedure for unprofitable pits, which was enough to persuade the union’s leaders to call off the strike – even though the review was not binding and later the National Coal Board would overrule it and close reprieved pits. But at the time, it was enough to get the pit deputies back to work and keep the NUM isolated. TUC leaders even suggested the NUM should accept this rotten deal, but no miner wanted to touch it.
General strike?
These actions alongside the miners raised the issue of a general strike. True, few called for one, but it was increasingly clear that the miners on their own could not win. On that basis, a general strike was objectively necessary – and not only for the miners. For, if they lost, who could win? Nobody, as subsequent events proved.
As one Kent miner told a socialist newspaper in early 1985, “If railway workers, the T&G and the power workers got together and said ‘enough is enough’, that would sort out the government within a month.”
The lesson from recent history was still fresh. When the miners managed to force the closure of Saltley Gates coking depot in 1972 – a historic moment in that year’s strike – it was because they had been joined by 10,000 engineering workers from across the Midlands. The Tories understood the need to stop secondary picketing and passed laws against it. They went further, using the police to greatly curtail freedom of movement, setting up roadblocks and forcing cars that were taking striking miners to picket lines to turn back under threat of arrest.
The aim at all times was to keep the miners isolated. The TUC, the Labour leadership of Neil Kinnock and other union leaders all helped in that respect. Later some of those who could have made common cause with the miners would be picked off one by one.
What of international solidarity? The Channel 4 programme made much of the NUM leadership’s links with the Gaddafi regime in Libya. A bigger issue, not touched upon, was the problem of imported coal – particularly from the ‘Communist’ bloc. Yet calls for the so-called ‘socialist states’ in Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe to solidarise with the miners did not get far. The Morning Star refused an advert by some Labour MPs that contained a public request to the government of Poland to place an embargo on coal exports to the UK.
Contrast that with the miners’ section of the independent Polish trade union Solidarność which supported the NUM unreservedly and called for an embargo of Polish coal bound for Britain. The NUM issued an explosive statement expressing its “absolute disgust” at the Polish government’s refusal to do this. Worse, the regime had increased its coal exports to the UK by 60% since the start of the strike.
Defeat and repercussions
The defeat of the miners’ strike was a bitter pill for the entire labour movement. Despite all the talk about the miners returning to work with their heads held high, it was an historic defeat. Within the decade, the industry would be privatised and over the next twenty years, deep coal mining would disappear entirely from Britian’s industrial landscape.
The jubilation among the ruling elite was palpable. Privatisation and the destruction of workers’ rights accelerated and the government moved on to intensify its attacks on local government and later public education and health. The ‘new realism’ among trade union leaders that traditional strike action was now largely unwinnable became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Labour Party too used the defeat of the miners to make an ideological turn away from solidarity and collectivism towards egotistical individualism that would infect its policy platforms for the next thirty years.
Through broader union action, local miners’ strike support committees, Women Against Pit Closures, Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners and a wide range of other activities, millions of people, sometimes indirectly, had taken part in this dispute. Its defeat was theirs too and the broader left is still suffering the consequences of that. It’s scant consolation that a great deal of what we said at the time about government interference, police violence and the sectional short-sightedness of other union leaders has been proved to be true.
More positively, there has been a huge cultural output over the last forty years – from films like Billy Elliot and Pride to musicals, songs and fiction – that have established the justice of the miners’ cause in our collective memory and challenged the pernicious role of the state in crushing the workers who championed it. We will not forget the miners, nor their historic stand.
Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.
Image: Author: Jamain, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
