The Glory and the Shame of the Great Miners' Strike: 25 Years After

Submitted by martin on 11 March, 2009 - 10:14 Author: Editorial

The year-long miners’ strike, which started 25 years ago, was one of the most glorious events in working class history. It was also one of the most shameful.

The glory lay with the miners who fought the Thatcher Tory government over its policies in the nationalised coal industry and in British society as a whole.

The shame lay with the wretched trade union leaders who left the miners to fight alone and with the leaders of the Labour Party who refused to back them.

The miners could have won. With the support of other trade unions they could have beaten Thatcher and driven her from office, as her predecessor as Tory Prime Minister, Edward Heath, had been beaten and driven from office in 1974.

If the miners had won, the whole labour movement would have won and put an end to the rampant Tory war on the working class and the labour movement that they had waged relentlessly since Thatcher won power in May 1979.

And, yes, we could have won!

At a number of turning points in that year-long social war, the miners came close to winning.

The pit deputies (overseers) were at one point about to come out on strike. Instead they let themselves be bought off at the last minute. A strike by the deputies would have stopped every pit in the country, making it impossible for the scab Nottinghamshire miners to go on working, as they did all through the bitter fight which the rest of Britain’s miners were waging.

Nottinghamshire miners thought that their jobs were secure no matter what happened to the rest of Britain’s miners. As it turned out they were wrong even about that.

Dock workers struck briefly in July and in August-September; if they had stayed out, it might have tipped the scale in the industrial war against the Tories.

The entire Liverpool labour movement, led by people calling themselves “Trotskyists” — Militant, now the Socialist Party and Socialist Appeal — came to the very edge of an outright confrontation with the government, then stepped back. That too would have added weight on the miners’ side, perhaps made the difference between defeat and victory.

The consequences of that defeat still weigh heavily on us, a generation later. What happened?

The leaders of the Liverpool labour movement backed off, did a short-term deal with the Tories and left the miners to fight on alone. The deal bought them one year’s delay in a showdown with the government. A year later, the miners beaten, the government was ready to take on Liverpool and they did.

Then the Labour leadership, Neil Kinnock and his coterie, following in the wake of the Tories like political jackals, drove the “Trotskyists” out of their positions in the Liverpool labour movement.

Not all the shame of the miners’ defeat, and the defeat of the labour movement with them, can be laid at the door of the trade union leaders and Neil Kinnock.

The miners’ strike was, indeed, as its opponents said and say still, an attempt to smash the Thatcher government. It had to be either that or a crushing long-term defeat for the whole working class.

The Tories had tremendous advantages and they used them with merciless vigour. Soon after they came to power they had put laws on the statute books outlawing solidarity strikes.

Though Thatcher prattled about lessening state interference in people’s lives, their government shamelessly used their control of the state to wage deliberate class war.

Their police created something not far from police-state conditions in the coal fields. They occupied mining villages, stopped the free movement on the roads of miners and others. They used as much force as was necessary to quell the miners.

Pitched battles were fought between strikers and police, at Orgreave coking depot for example. Battles on this scale between workers and the state had not been seen for many decades in Britain.

It was naked class war, and the government behaved like people at war. So did the miners’ leaders, in the first place Arthur Scargill and Peter Heathfield.

The whole of official society rallied to the Tories, including the leaders of the official Labour Party, then led by the “soft-left” around Neil Kinnock, engaging in weaseling double-talk about “violence” and “democracy” to hide what they were doing.

The rank and file of the Labour Party, in contrast, backed the miners fullheartedly,

The mass circulation press through its weight behind the government. They turned themselves into shameless propaganda sheets.

They campaigned relentlessly against violence. Whose violence? That of the police, of which miners and often heir families were victims? No! Miners’ violence.

They raged against those “attacking democracy”. Not against the government whose police deprived miners of the right of free movement about the country and the right not to have police batons smashing against their heads — but against the miners who dared to challenge the government’s right to do what it liked in the coal industry and to its workforce.

Within a few years of the defeat of the miners the coal industry had been more or less destroyed. The Nottinghamshire miners who had been praised to the skies by the government when they were helping it defeat the other miners got as little mercy from the Tories as the other workers of the industry. Too late they learned that they had been fools to believe the propaganda that they were an honoured part of Thatcher’s Tory nation.

Arthur Scargill, who led the strike, has already gone down in the history of the labour movement as the heroic dauntless leader of a great and prolonged working-class revolt. He belongs with labour movement figures of the past such as Jim Larkin, A J Cook and James Connolly. Nothing can take that from him, or retrospectively diminish his role at the head of the militant labour movement confronting Thatcherism in a belated all-out battle.

Scargill was, and is, a man of contradictions. A privileged and over-paid union bureaucrat, chauffeured around in a Jaguar car, he was nonetheless also a would-be revolutionary syndicalist, who looked to and fostered militant industrial action to beat down the enemies of the miners and of the working class.

An organiser of elemental working class revolt in Britain, Scargill was also a political Stalinist who called the ruling Stalinist bureaucrats in East Europe and Russia “comrades” — including those of them who ran the anti-working class police-state pseudo-unions.

In the middle of the strike he tried to set up an international trade union federation that would link the miners’ union with the police state unions of the Stalinist states, where striking workers were shot down or jailed (and whose governments, in the case of Poland, sent scab coal to Britain during the 1984-5 strike).

Scargill was an unteachable old-fashioned romantic Stalinist, who, nonetheless, fought the Tories and roused-up hundreds of thousands of workers to fight them.

The glory in working class history that attaches to Scargill’s name is in part of course only the reflected glory of the working class fighters he led. So is the lustre that attaches to the names of all working class and plebeian heroes. Yet a substantial part of it is entirely his own.

The twenty-fifth anniversary of the strike, when Scargill is long retired, is an occasion on which that should be said and remembered.

Faced with the present tremendous crisis of capitalism workers will have to defend themselves. In doing that they will rediscover the legacy of working-class militancy and solidarity, of which the miners’ strike is such a great, indeed, magnificent example.

It is the job of socialists, who must be the “memory of the class”, to bring awareness of that history, and of the fight the miners and their families waged in 1984-5, to working people today.

More: The Great Miners’ Strike 1984-5: twelve months that shook Britain: the story of the strike.

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