The Miners' Strike 1984/85

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An account of the role of working-class women activists in the Miners' Strike Click here to download article as pdf .

A lot of the press coverage of the student struggles has focused on the “violent” aspects of our actions (smashing a few windows at Millbank, a few folk going a bit nuts and kicking in a bus-stop or two, a police van getting a little battered and spray-painted, a few others bits and bobs getting broken). barricade reckons most of this was perfectly legitimate (especially the Millbank stuff), and the stuff we wouldn’t condone (whoever lobbed the fire-extinguisher off the roof at Millbank should definitely have stopped to think first) was hardly representative of any significant proportion of...

In the small hours of Monday March 12 1984, hundreds of Yorkshire miners moved across the border from Yorkshire into Nottinghamshire. Their destination was Harworth pit, and by the evening shift they had picketed it out. Over the next few days, hundreds of Yorkshire pickets came down over the border again and spread out across the Notts coalfield. Their mission was to persuade Nottinghamshire’s miners to join them in a strike to stop the pit closures announced by the National Coal Board chief, Ian MacGregor. Their tactic was to picket Notts to a standstill. Part two here . In the great miners’...

The balance begins to shift The lack of such a rank and file movement was the basic reason for the failure to stop steel. By late June all the major steelworks were fully supplied, and set to stay that way. Click here for part one . The docks strike, the solidarity which stopped almost all coal trains, and the six well-supported regional days of action (well-supported considering the lack of official campaigning) offset the failure in steel. On 16 July the well-informed Financial Times wrote: “There is now a substantial lobby in the Coal Board — though not in the government — for a settlement...

In mid-1984, during the year-long miners’ strike, the Sunday Mirror printed an account of an interview with Solidarnosc leader Lech Walesa in which Walesa appeared to side with Margaret Thatcher against the miners. Socialist Organiser (forerunner of Solidarity ) commented. A translation of this article appeared in the underground Trotskyist press in Poland in 1984. The Sunday Mirror headlined the piece “Why Scargill is wrong — by Lech”. Quite a lot of Solidarnosc’s friends in Britain were shocked and its opponents, semi-opponents and outright enemies — of whom there are a very large number in...

In October 1992, after seven years of trade-union setbacks following the miners' defeat of 1985, hundreds of thousands of workers crowded onto the streets of London. 100,000 demonstrated on Wednesday 21 October, and 200,000 on Sunday 25 October, against Tory Government plans for further pit closures. Socialist Organiser discussed the next steps, and disputed the SWP's u-turn from its "downturn" dogma (since 1979) to suddenly demanding that the TUC call a general strike "now". Where do we go from here? The immediate focus of the movement must be defence of the miners. The Tories continue with...

Early in 1985 the miners' strike ground to an exhausted end after twelve bitter and glorious months. They were glorious months, because during them the miners and their families showed again the mind and spirit that first made the labour movement. All the courage, determination, far-sightedness and individual self sacrifice which animated the pioneers who made a great self-bettering labour movement out of suffering and downtrodden masses of workers was shown to be still alive in the mining communities - and in great abundance. The year-long strike was like an encapsulated history of the labour...