The 1984/5 great miners' strike was the biggest controntation between the trade union movement and the British state since the 1926 general strike. Why was it defeated.... and what are the lessons of that defeat for socialists fighting the advance of new realism today? ALAN THORNETT explains.
Twenty years after the start of the trade union movement in Britain still lives in the shadow its defeat. The antitrade union laws consolidated by the defeat of the strike are still there. While the unions have begun to regenerate with the arrival of the 'awkward squad' who are challenging new realism and social partnership ideas, much of the damage done to the movement has yet to be repaired. The question of who bears the responsibility for the defeat of the miners therefore remains an important discussion if lessons are to be learned for the future.
The strike still evokes powerful memories. There was the naked class hatred of the Tories, who wanted revenge for their defeat at the hands of the miners in 1974. There was the tenacity and courage of the 160,000 miners out on strike for a year. There were the massive confrontations and mass pickets. There was the police trap and the burning barricades at Orgreave.
State repression was unprecedented.
During the strike 7,500 miners were arrested and 40 imprisoned. The latter included two young miners from South Wales jailed for life and Terry French from Kent jailed for
five years. Davey Jones was killed whilst picketing out
Nottinghamshire. behind the coffin of Joe Green, killed while
on picket duty at the Ferrybridge power station in Yorkshire. The state took Joe's home
(he was single with his own house) and
refused to pay his funeral expenses out of the
proceeds.
The strike is remembered, too, for the
tremendous class struggle leadership by
Arthur Scargill and Peter Heathfield of the
National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and
the historic Women Against Pit Closures
movement that mobilised 10,000 women
from the pit villages to march through
London in June 1984. They represented
something new and important in the class
struggle in Britain.
The strike was triggered by the announcement of the closure of the Corton Wood col-