Miners Strike 1984

Scargill made key strategic errors. He should have called for a national ballot, which he likely would have won, and broken the divisions within the minors that existed on a county by county level. He also persisted beyond a rational point, in effect turning a bad loss into an existential movement scuttling defeat.

However, it really isn't a simple issue. Scargill was correct in terms of the big picture and the direction of travel: for him it was an existential issue and history has proven him 100% correct on that point. A National Strike that could bring the National Coal Board / Government to the table so that a deal could be cut around ring fencing pit closures was the only way to slow the loss of jobs. Sure it seems silly and counter intuitive in retrospect, but the writing was on the wall already and drastic action was needed. Entire communities and lives were due to be destroyed, and it was only a matter of *when*. In that sense, once Scargill had the lads out he deduced that they could never go back in without a deal. You can say his mistakes hastened the demise of the miners and their unions, but that demise was coming anyway. Pit volume and mining employment was ever decreasing so they really didn't have anything to lose.

In any case, as the documentary summarises, no matter what approach Scargill chose the reality is that he and his union would have been portrayed incorrectly in media. This was the era of McKenzie at the Sun and class based editorial decisions within the BBC and ITV current affairs rooms (it was also an era influenced by the ongoing conflict in the North and the continuing censorship directed by Government). Media coverage was doctored, one eyed and deeply biased with facts changed and footage sequenced as necessary to support an anti Union narrative. It is therefore hugely naïve to think that Scargill had a path to victory, even if it is correct to point at strategic errors that made the life of Government / Media easier.

It is important to underline that the bias in media is historical fact. South Yorkshire police fabricated statements and evidence and media spliced footage in a way that supported an unlawful narrative discordant from reality. A similar effort was employed after the Hillsborough disaster. In this light, what people who lived through the time experienced is deeply distorted. Those working away in London and reading their paper / listening to the BBC - no matter how open minded - were being fed pure Government propaganda. Mining could not have survived, but a serious national conversation around how to ramp it down fairly, with retraining opportunities and replacement of jobs never happened. Instead the Conservative apparatus went to war on the miners, correctly deducing that it was to their political benefit to do so.

The big thing that came through the individual stories covered by the documentary is the crippling loss of identity experienced on both an individual and community level. Generations of working men "down pit" left with no job, no future, no hope. Their identity could not have survived of course, mining was always going to become obsolete. But it didn't have to become a class war by proxy, where "victory" for the Conservative Government meant abject poverty and desolation for mining communities.

the imported coal was actually often low grade, not to mention used slave labour to dig it out of the ground.

low grade coal is generally more polluting then some of the british stuff that came out of the ground which was often high grade, of course some of it was low as well but quite a lot of it was quite decent.

welsh coal as an example is said to be among the best in the world if not the best.

I remember them looking for the NUM's money and tracing a stash to a Bank of Ireland account in Dublin. I don't know if Thatcher's crowd managed to get their hands on it.

The only union that Thatcher ever supported was Solidarity in Poland, but people in the UK standing up for rights was a definite no no.

posters tagging parts of the culture wars on to a discussion about the miner's strike.

quite strange she supported solidarity in poland when she was backing the government there also.

obviously some falling out with the polish government or something.

more a backer then a supporter, as in she was happy to use them when it suited her.

oh yeah it's great the soviet union is no more, it was a brutal regime that is no loss to anyone TBH.

nobody because what closed before she came to power were small pits that could not be modernised, she on the other hand closed profitable pits that were ripe for modernisation and imported coal at multiples of the cost which was dug out of the ground using brutalised slave labour.

she put the police in to break up the strike and beat up workers, this has been admitted to even indirectly by her.

there was no point in having a ballot because the strike had enough support to justify it and carry it.

The miners were there own worst enemy. The whole of the 70s they were on strike every five minutes and the owners of the mines were also in on it as the government had no choice but to bail the mine out

also remember the miners were very prone to violence too and I believe scargill made huge mistakes in how he managed the union.

thatcher had no choice but to bite the head off the snake

But instead of getting off their asses and going where the work was, like the Irish did, they just stayed. Could never understand that.

the tabloids are racist against anyone they can be and hate anyone they can.

they are generally one of the biggest problems britain has and why it can't move forward and build a working country.

problem is the evidence shows otherwise.

almost everything she did had a very high price either in the short or long term in return and effected more then it benefited.

thatcherism is an ideology that is like giving you a quid with one hand but taking your house with the other.

because there would have been no point given there was no suitable reasonably payed work for them, and the work available elsewhere was poorly payed and had to much competition.

not to mention they either owned their houses which they couldn't sell, or were in social housing which they would have then had to go on a long list in a new area.

but remember this was all by design as the plan was the city of london and enough workers to service that, and north sea oil.

Coal mine closures had been going on since the 1960s. Thatcher sped up the process, but the coal mines would not have lasted another decade. Any attempts to re-open coal mines have been bitterly resisted by modern Labour on the grounds of Climate Change.

with all the hand-wringing about the Miners Strike, it’s easy to forget that Thatchers dogged Monetarism in the early 80s had a bigger impact on job losses and de-industrialisation - which disproportionately affected the north of England.

“replacement jobs” are never easy to produce, e.g. Obama’s promise of green tech jobs boom which never materialised. Or Biden telling coal miners in 2019 to “learn to code”.