Straight to the point

In July 1984, Margaret Thatcher gave a speech to the 1922 Committee about the miners who had been on strike since March. “We had to fight the enemy without in the Falklands,” she said. “We always have to be aware of the enemy within, which is much more difficult to fight and more dangerous to liberty.” Working men fighting to save their jobs were now a metastasising cell that must be obliterated.

I remember it well as it was my birthday, and my friends immediately started to make stickers and badges. I went back to my Mum’s house proudly sporting an “Enemy Within” sticker on my pregnant belly. A Thatcher-supporter, she said I was a reason why women should not be given the vote.

Back then, everyone I knew in London supported the miners. We hated Thatcher and understood this to be a battle between the capitalist state and the working class, an attempt to crush union power once for all. If you ever had doubts, you didn’t show them out of solidarity. This still carries for those who want to romanticise the strike as the last great civil war. War changes lives forever and the miner’s strike changed this country forever, its ghosts popping up in Billy Elliott, Pride and Sherwood.

Today, a three-part series starts on Channel 4, Miners’ Strike 1984: The Battle for Britain, and, 40 years on, it makes for essential viewing. Through interviews with striking miners and scabs, with those working in the shadows to defeat it on the government’s behalf, with the police and with reams of extraordinarily violent footage, this is intense, visceral stuff. To reckon with the defeat of the miners — and it was a huge thrashing — is to gaze on a gaping sore that some argue leads all the way to Brexit. But reckon with it we must.

In 1984, Britain was home to 173 working collieries, but the richest seams of coal had already been mined and it was becoming more expensive to reach what remained. The answer was mechanisation, which meant redundancies. Thatcher wanted three things: a confrontation with “the Yorkshire Stalin”, Arthur Scargill; to close inefficient pits in order to grow the economy; and to break the strongest union. The National Coal Board said it would close 20 pits; Scargill told his men that it would be 70. And so they downed tools.

While the strike was indeed about jobs, the documentary reveals that it was also about so much more. Going down the pit was the most money a lad with no qualifications could make. But nor was it just about wages. It was about something more intangible: a sense of self, of masculinity, of community. Or as they said 40 years ago and keep saying in these films, it was about “the future”.

In some pit villages, there was no alternative. The pit was not simply somewhere men worked but the centre of their clubs, associations, their entire world. The soot-covered nobility of the miner’s face is easy to mythologise. But this was horrible, filthy, backbreaking work. When actual miners turned up at the benefits I attended, working-class heroism became flesh with all its less noble needs, and middle-class activists gave themselves to the cause in more ways than one.

What Scargill had on his side was his ability to command flying pickets; his refusal to hold a national ballot, though, meant the fragmentation of the workforce. The Nottinghamshire miners, for instance, wanted to keep working as they considered the strike unconstitutional without a national ballot. The result was that, in some pits, strike-breakers were bussed in on coaches with grills over the windows for protection. It allowed Thatcher and the Tory press to paint the strike as nothing more than mob rule based on violence and intimidation. And so an industrial dispute became an existential one, a battle between good and evil. The revelation that NUM funds were sequestered, as part of its dodgy dealings with Gaddafi, only further undermined the cause.

The identification of miners with their own local area rather than their whole industry is what for some Marxists call the “deterritorialisation” of capital. This division was further exploited by David Hart, the sinister figure who appears as Stephen Sweet in David Peace’s fantastic novel GB84 and is often referred to as “the Jew”. This super-rich, Right-wing libertarian told Thatcher that a deal didn’t need to be struck, that the miners could be defeated. He set about funding and aiding those who wanted to go back to work. An actual enemy within? Certainly, this was the state intervening in a highly suspect manner. The government distanced themselves from him as soon as possible.

Their other shocking intervention, and one they couldn’t distance themselves from, were the new “techniques” of policing. The police were now being sent across the country, and actively and brutally working to protect the interests of “capital”. This was not a neutral peacekeeping force. They could now use roadblocks to turn away anyone they deemed to be a flying picket. They could beat up miners and then arrest them; their own police footage shows them at The Battle of Orgreave where they corralled minors into a field and then charged at them with baton-wielding mounted police. This was a battle alright, medieval and one-sided. The breaking of heads, the breaking of will, the breaking of collective action. It hurt; it clearly still does.

The strike may well have taught us something about power and the strength of people standing together, but where did that idealism go? The pits were always going to close. There are just six mines left, the rest of our coal imported. Was it a fantasy that all these men could even keep their jobs in that time of deindustrialisation?

To see the fate of those abandoned places is heart-breaking. Heroin moved in, as it always does. Oh and fancy Bang & Olufsen shops. Those with big redundancy payments like to splash out on something fancy for their homes, something they can control.

The sadness of all this was apparent when I was interviewing ex-miners in a working-men’s club in the late Nineties, and every man described himself as “retired undefeated”. They had, in other words, been made redundant after the strike. Now they were at home mostly looking after the kids, though they did not want to say that. They had turned down jobs in service industries because they were from a generation who thought that men’s work was manual work.

It was a Sunday lunchtime in the club, so there were strippers. Only a few women were there, and the men called them “pudding burners” — as they were out instead of making the Sunday lunch, as they should be. I wondered a bit about what kind of community we were all busy “protecting”, having seen the remarkable resilience of the miners’ wives during the strike. It turned out that many of the women now had two or three jobs and were getting by. They had adapted in a way some of the guys just couldn’t.

Perhaps all this has something to do with the difficulty of admitting that you were once on the losing side — and the fact that it’s still hard to understand what that even means. Something bigger than the closure of certain coal mines was at stake here. It was, after all, as much a story of demoralisation as deindustrialisation. This country lost the idea that the working man or woman could ever really win again, and that wound still weeps.

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