Click On Title To Link To YouTube's Newsreel Footage Of A tribute To The British Coal Miners And Their Families
Guest Commentary
20th anniversary of an historic battle: the British miners strike
by Kjell Pettersson
The following article is translated from the April 8 issue of Internationalen, the weekly newspaper of Socialist Action’s cothinkers in Sweden, the Socialist Party, Swedish section of the Fourth International. It commemorates the great British coal miners strike of 1984-85, the opening battle against the worldwide capitalist and imperialist offensive known as neoliberalism, which has since worn away many of the historic gains of working people and sent millions of workers into chronic unemployment and misery. In several Latin American countries and Indonesia, it has led to recent mass uprisings. But the first fight came in the oldest country of capitalism, and it already demonstrated the new aggressiveness of capital in the age of economic decline that began with the recession of the early 1970s.
The British working class and especially the British coal miners have their pride. They have a strong self-consciousness and an acute awareness of their historic importance for the British energy supply. They struck in 1925. They broke the Heath Conservative government in 1973. Politicians, whether they come from the British Labour Party or the Conservative Tories, had to think more than once before they took a decision that did not suit this section of the British working class.
The coal miners and their families live in British working-class row houses where life tends to be hard and unrelenting. A cave-in, a badly laid dynamite charge—there are always risks. And those who have to live with death have to harden themselves.
But not even the coal miners, with their collective strength as their foundation and a mutual solidarity pact against the expected results of the Tory victory in 1979 for their own cause, were prepared for the fight they would have to face. Nor could the other British unions in their wildest imaginations grasp the scope of the open class war that was launched the same day that Margaret Thatcher took office as prime minister.
Thatcher, also called the "Iron Lady," with her icy gray eyes and her nimble tongue, was more neoliberal than neoliberalism itself. She was a reactionary fanatic, a dangerous visionary, who understood that one of the prerequisites for the capitalism of today and tomorrow is to sweep away all the obstacles on its path. For Thatcher that meant tearing down the public sector, the state monopolies, job security, wage bargaining—and not least of all, the counterpower, the hated trade unions.
This not something that she and the other members of her government and her advisors first thought of in 1979. It had been in the works before the Tory government came into office in 1979. It was to develop into an open crusade against the coal miners in the year-long strike that started at the end of January 1984.
Already in May 1978, the British magazine The Economist had ferreted out the future government’s strategy for fighting the unions. The outlines were drawn up by the Conservative parliamentary Policy Group under the leadership of MP Nicolas Ridley. This group was perceptive enough to work with the entirely likely hypothesis that, a year or two after the Tory election victory, the unions would start to recover from the shock. A challenge would come either over wages or layoffs.
Having learned from their previous experience, they feared that the fight would start in a so-called vulnerable industry, such as coal, electricity, or the docks, with the support of what they called "the full force of the Communist troublemakers."
After a day’s work, the Policy Group came to the conclusion that the most likely and the most favorable battleground was the coal industry. Out of sheer self-preservation, the coal miners and their militant leader, Arthur Scargill, had to fight back when the government announced that at least 20,000 jobs were going to go, and in the longer term talked about 70,000 jobs.
If the government could break the hard nut of the coal miners, it would be much easier for it to tame the weaker and more yielding sections of the trade-union movement.
But to win they needed a strategy. The Policy Group, or more correctly, the general staff of the Tory government, thought there several prerequisites for winning the fight. They needed a series of cards to win the fight. The hand they played had at least six. Before the government launched its war, it had to: Build up the maximum coal stocks. Make plans for the eventual importation of coal. Promote the recruitment of unorganized truck drivers to help transport coal when necessary. Introduce parallel coal and oil firing at all power stations as soon as possible. Cut all benefits for strikes and force the union to finance the strike. Have a mobile police force equipped and ready to enforce the law against strike pickets. "Good unorganized drivers should be recruited to drive through strike picket lines under police protection." The government was playing a loaded game. It held the aces. The war could start, and it started a few months into 1984.
Before it got underway, the British National Coal Board got a new chief, Ian McGregor. He did not mince any words: "Behave yourselves and you have a future, don’t behave yourself, and you have none. " Later on, it turned out that there was no future for any coal miners.
At the start of the strike, the Iron Lady thundered, "On the Falkland Islands [in the war against Argentina], we had to fight the foreign enemy. We have the internal enemy, and it is harder and more dangerous to freedom."
The coal miners’ strike held out for an incredible year. The odds from the beginning were not the best. By April, 80 percent of the coal miners had joined the strike.
But, and this is an important "but," in Nottinghamshire, the strike front broke from the start, when a majority of the coal miners in the district refused to join the strike. They did this in the belief that their mines were more secure. Later, after the strike, they would see things differently. Even though during the strike, the coal miners proclaimed again and again, "Miners united cannot be defeated," they were not entirely united.
Moreover, it is one thing to strike for higher wages when the economic situation is good and the enterprise is making high profits. It is quite another thing, and a much harder struggle, to strike against layoffs, when the employers want to shed labor power.
Strikebreakers and a hard fight to save jobs were already in store before the strike started. Moreover, there was a government ready to resort to any means whatever to crush the strike.
In order for the strike to have a chance, the miners had to get all the support they could; in part from the central British trade union organization, the Trades Union Council; and not least from the British Labour Party, led by Neil Kinnock.
The support from the TUC remained half hearted, and from the Labour Party not even that. On the other hand, the miners got unprecedented support from solidarity organizations in Great Britain and internationally.
Facing an almost unnatural test of strength, it was a wonder that the miners could hold out for a year before they finally were forced to lower their flag. For those arrested, imprisoned, and harassed, there was no money—nothing but their class feelings and their solidarity. They had been mocked and slandered by a more or less united British press, which loyally followed and supported the Thatcher government.
Their opponents were well organized. They had passed laws against the blockades around the workplaces, stocked coal, and when the coal stocks began to empty out in the summer of 1984 they managed to bring in the first ships of strikebreaker coal—from Poland, among other places.
Through laws, the government had stopped all local and state contributions, and that led to unions being able to pay strike support only exceptionally. The total outlay for police was around about $250 million. About 11,000 workers were arrested and treated like criminals.
They sacrificed everything. The words, "Blood, sweat, and tears," never had such a concrete meaning as during the long miners’ strike.
A description of what the miners were forced to go through comes from a miners’ community where both father and son struck. A nearly year-long strike had led to many miners’ families living on the edge of starvation. In one of these many families, the situation was more than stark. Someone simply had to go back to work and become hated as a blackleg for the rest of his life. The father took on this burden so that his son could avoid being called a "scab" for the rest of his life, because he himself had less time to live.
On Sunday, March 1,1985, a year after the strike started, two Welsh miners’ wives, Anne Jones and Barbara Edwards, were to speak at the Fokets Hus in Stockholm. An hour before the rally, they learned that the Mine Workers Delegate Conference had decided by a narrow majority to end the strike. But the two women still summoned up their strength went up to the platform.
"As the men go back to work on Tuesday," they said, "bills are going to start pouring in. For the whole strike, we did not pay rent, gas, or electricity. the bills are going to mount up in the miners' homes. Some of us have already gotten eviction notices.
"Our going back is not because the miners did not fight hard enough for their cause. The responsibility for the defeat does not lie with the coal miners or their union. The responsibility falls entirely on the leadership of the TUC and the right-wingers in the Labour Party who did not lift a finger to support the miners."
Two days later, on March 3, the miners went back to work. Over TV, I saw a union leader of a type that does not grow on trees, Arthur Scargill, at the head of his miner comrades behind a trade-union banner leading the union Golgotha march back to work in the Welsh mine where he once worked.
In 1984, when the strike started, there were 170 coal mines in Great Britain. Ten years later, in 1994, there were 17. In the same period, the number of coal miners declined from 181,000 to 11,000.
After the end of the strike, the National Coal Board chief, Ian McGregor, scolded, "Now people are finding out the price of their stubbornness and rebelliousness. And, my children, I will see that it is recognized."
Now it is 20 years since the coal miners’ strike started. It was a strike that certainly ended in a crushing defeat. A defeat that for the Thatcher government was a victory that opened the door for neoliberalism and ruinous capitalism.
The defeat was not one for the coal miners alone but for the whole international workers’ movement and not the least for its trade-union structures. They did not want, or were not allowed, to understand that the coal miners were fighting for them as well.
The coal miners lost. But one thing cannot be taken from them. They fought, and in the circumstances, they fought more than well.
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