1
“THE history of all hitherto existing society,” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels declared in The Communist Manifesto, “is the history of class struggles.”
Whether or not one agrees with that compelling proposition, it is hard not to look upon the British coalminers’ strike of 1984-85 as a strikingly visceral manifestation of the class struggle, and arguably the most significant episode of industrial action in the context of late 20th century Western capitalism.
The eventual defeat of the miners had widespread ramifications, but so did the fact that they chose to resist the neoliberal onslaught.
It was 30 years ago today that Arthur Scargill, the president of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), declared a national strike following localised reactions to the official announcement that several coal pits were destined for closure on account of being “uneconomic”.
The government of Margaret Thatcher, in power since 1979, had backed down from similar measures three years earlier in the face of a strike threat — not least, evidently, because the government-owned industry’s stocks of coal would have run out within weeks in the face of sustained industrial action.
By 1984, though, Big Sister was well prepared. Sufficient coal had been stockpiled to serve the nation’s energy needs for 18 months or so. It was time to take on one of Britain’s more militant unions in the service of an agenda of economic “rationalisation” that involved not just closures but across-the-board privatisation.
Early in March that year, the National Coal Board — headed since 1983 by Ian McGregor, an American industrialist who shared Thatcher’s philosophical passions — announced that 20 pits would be shut down, entailing the loss of 20,000 jobs.
Scargill subsequently declared that the ultimate aim involved decommissioning 70 collieries. McGregor responded by sending out a letter to every miner declaring this contention to be a bald-faced untruth. However, cabinet papers released earlier this year reveal that Scargill was in fact understating matters.
The war against coal was not based on environmental concerns. The primary aim was to eviscerate the industry.
It was obvious from the start that entire communities would be devastated by the government’s actions. But they did not matter to the Thatcherites. Thatcher had advanced the absurd proposition that there was no such thing as society. If society did not exist, what could possibly be the worth of a community?
For Thatcher, the battle against the NUM — she infamously described striking miners as “the enemy within” — was part of a wider struggle against the very concept of working-class unionisation, and her ultimate triumph in this conflict had a deadening effect on organised labour.
Asked later in her life what she would nominate as her greatest achievement, Thatcher responded with two words: New Labour. She wasn’t wrong in that respect.
Her decision to take on the miners came in the wake of the Conservative Party’s devastating electoral triumph in 1983. Much of the press was also implacably hostile to Scargill and the NUM. Besides, it was a period when Eastern Europe, too, was changing. Poland, for instance, was already in turmoil — and Lech Walesa was being lionised by the very ideologues who perceived Scargill as an implacable adversary.
Cabinet documents released this year show that Thatcher was disconcerted by the half a million pounds the NUM received in donations from Soviet miners, and intelligence agencies were instructed to thwart, or at least expose, any further evidence of communist assistance. Solidarity was fine as long as it was restricted to Poland. East Germany, meanwhile, offered free holidays to hundreds of British miners’ families.
In 1984, the NUM avoided calling a national ballot of its members, on the basis that miners whose jobs were relatively safe should not be extended the right to pronounce the death sentence on pits elsewhere. Self-interest — and the depredations faced by strikers’ families — ultimately won out, though.
There were nonetheless occasions when the Thatcher regime stared defeat in the face, not least when dockworkers briefly struck work. Had they held out, the consequences may well have been very different. It has lately emerged that the Tory regime was prepared to deploy the army to break the dockers’ strike.
Thirty years after the strike, bitterness lingers. Many of the strikers still don’t socialise with those they see as scabs. And resentment towards the egregious police violence that characterised the state’s response to picketing has not withered away. Neoliberal capitalism meanwhile holds sway across much of the West (and elsewhere), suggesting that the miners’ strike in Britain was a part of the process that sounded the death knell for social democracy.
It could also be seen, though, as a valiant battle lost in a war that is far from over.
