October 18, 2024
Mike Phipps reviews Coalfield Justice: The 1984–85 Miners’ Strike in Scotland, by Jim Phillips, published by Edinburgh University Press.
In June 2022, the Scottish Parliament approved a collective pardon for public order offences committed by striking miners during the historic 1984-5 strike. The pardon was the result of a long campaign within the Scottish labour movement and more than 500 ex-miners were affected. This book analyses the injustices at the heart of the dispute, to which the Pardons Act sought to provide a partial remedy.
It still remains an injustice that no such pardon has been granted in other parts of the UK. But it should also be remembered that a disproportionately large number of victimised strikers, who were sacked after the strike – over 200 – were Scottish.
Phillips identifies three aspects of injustice facing the Scottish coal miners: “the anti-union turn in coal industry management in Scotland in the early 1980s, which culminated in the targeted dismissals during the strike; the striking miners’ entanglements with police and the courts; and the broader economic changes directed by the UK government.”
Contrary to the image of Britain’s industrial workers who are often portrayed as ‘dinosaurs’ in the modern age, one in four coal miners were under 25 years of age when the strike started. Phillips’ rather dry text comes alive when the miners speak and the selection of photographs also brings an immediacy to the struggle. As the oral testimony goes on, a shocking and lasting sense of injustice emerges.
The miners Phillips interviewed describe the tough conditions down the pit: the heat and humidity at one necessitated working in shorts and drinking a gallon of water a shift. Young men grew up quickly and worked in the shadow of life-threatening dangers and mining disasters, but said that their industry had become less dangerous with nationalisation and a stronger union voice: the rate of fatalities in Scottish pits in the 1960s was roughly half that of the 1930s.
The 1984 strike was against the closure of ‘uneconomic’ pits. But many miners were aware that the issue of profitability could be easily manipulated by the management. One miner recalled: “We were making a million-pound-a-year profit… that’s pretty economical, like, I would suggest. Well, we found they were bringing in brand-new coal-cutting machines, and pumps, and dumping them on the surface of the pit. Well, I knew what the effect of that was. The price of these things went against your books, when it comes to calculating whether you were making a profit or not. In one year the pit went from making a million-pound profit to half-a-million pound loss, which was an absolute impossibility but that’s the way they manipulated the books.”
Such false accounting was used to target for closure collieries that were renowned for their union militancy.
The Coal Board’s direct encouraging of miners to break the strike was also without precedent in the era of nationalisation and pushed the NUM and affiliated craft unions to withdraw safety cover. As Phillips notes, “Safety cover was no longer an innocent guarantor of the post-strike future, preserving coalfaces, collieries and employment from the danger of flooding. It was enabling the NCB to produce coal and break the strike.”
Mass arrests – then sackings
As elsewhere in the UK, mass arrests – often resulting in no prosecutions, suggesting no wrongdoing was committed – and heavy physical force, including mounted police, were used against strikers in Scotland.
The mass picket at Orgreave in Yorkshire was a particular flashpoint. One busload of Scottish miners was stopped by police, expecting to be turned back: instead they were escorted to the scene. They rightly suspected a trap. The subsequent police attack upon them, with dogs and horses, while they were resting at the roadside eating sandwiches, was savage beyond belief.
Activists were followed and their phones were tapped. On more than one occasion, strike organisers fooled the police by talking on the phone about a major mobilisation of pickets at a particular pit the following morning. Around 200 police turned up, bewildered, then furious, at the absence of pickets who had meanwhile been organised to go elsewhere.
Arrests that did lead to charges resulted in harsh sentences. Snatch squads were used to pick out union activists on the picket line who had been identified for victimisation, based on mugshots supplied by the Coal Board, regardless of any offence committed.
One picket who was arrested for breach of the peace was fined an astonishing £500. “A breach-of-the-peace conviction in the mid1980s typically resulted in a £30 fine,” notes Phillips. There was a strong sense that the courts were in cahoots with the police, the Coal Board and the government, wanting to maximise the costs of the strike to the union. The same miner was further penalised when he was sacked by management. Dismissal involved loss of redundancy payments, as well as unemployment. Many other miners faced the same double penalty.
As well as having a disproportionate number sacked, Scottish miners also faced a further problem. Whereas 280 of 800 miners sacked in England and Wales had been reinstated by May 1985, in Scotland all 206 of the men dismissed were still awaiting reprieve. Some of the sackings, particularly of union organisers, were on wholly spurious grounds. Phillips concludes: “The dismissals were intended to intimidate strikers and deprive them of leadership, preparing the ground for subsequent closures and intensified managerial control over production at surviving collieries.”
Three-quarters of those sacked in Scotland were either union officials or regular strike activists, targeted by the Coal Board. Its victimisation strategy was aided by the police and courts. Strikers in Scotland were arrested at the rate of 103 per thousand, double the rate in England and Wales. Claims by the police that they were acting independent of political interference have now been disproved by the belated release of relevant Cabinet committee minutes.
One impact of the strike was a transformation of gender roles. The Chair of the Cowdenbeath Women’s Strike Committee said “‘women were in like a shot,” during the strike, readily accepting opportunities to lead the defence of their communities. Sectarian distrust between Catholics and Protestants, deliberately encouraged by mine owners in the pre-nationalisation era, also broke down rapidly during the strike, as more important divisions came to the fore.
After the strike
After the strike, the pit closure programme sped up. Miners were appalled at the way salvage work was scrimped. “Much machinery was left underground,” notes Phillips. “This was an ‘absolute travesty’ on two grounds. Electrical equipment, expensively acquired with public money, could have been brought to the surface and repurposed. Abandoned in flooded mine waters, it then caused damaging toxicity, raising levels of land contamination. A common anxiety in ex-mining areas, not only in Scotland, is that above-average rates of cancer diagnoses are partly attributable to the carcinogenic environment arising from the careless management of ex-industrial sites.”
The ensuing scale of job losses in the industry was concealed by government manipulation of the unemployment figures. The benefits system incentivised people at the time to register as permanently sick rather than unemployed. But the social impact was devastating. Ex-miners with sizeable redundancy pay-offs and days without structure or purpose became vulnerable to depression, heavy drinking or drug addiction.
In Scotland, although the economic basis of many communities weakened with pit closures, in other respects some grew stronger. The strong bonds may help explain Scotland’s distinct political trajectory post-strike. Whereas in England, many former mining communities saw a fall in the Labour vote, a high Leave vote in the 2016 EU referendum, followed by a Conservative swing in 2019, in Scotland, things played out differently.
The SNP’s victory in the Scottish parliamentary elections of 2007 was based in part on gains in ex-mining constituencies, which were consolidated in subsequent elections. In the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence the Yes campaign performed above-average in areas with clusters of ex-mining communities.
It was a long road to the Bill pardoning miners for offences committed during the strike – and even this had an important shortcoming: it did not cover offences committed in the community, away from the picket lines, for example, involving striking and non-striking miners. Such offences were often trivial and clearly part of the effort to win the strike, but they were now being labelled as unpardonable. It took further campaigning to get such offences included in the legislation.
Overall, the recognition that the miners had been discriminated against collectively was a major victory. It’s time for a similar step to be taken in England and Wales.
Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.
