Printer FriendlyThe Tories wanted to smash the NUM
The 1984/5 miners' strike played a very significant role in my life because when it started I was the union Secretary at one of the biggest collieries in Britain, Wearmouth Colliery in Sunderland, which at that time employed nearly 3,000 men.
The strike was really inevitable: the Thatcher government had prepared for a number of years a strategy to take on the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) because the Tories had to smash organised labour in order to bring in the free market economy they so desired. Unions had to be seriously weakened in order to drive down wage costs for the UK to compete on a global scale, and obviously, as the NUM was at the forefront of the trade union movement in Britain, it was the major target.
The dispute was not merely an industrial one, it was a battle against the Thatcher ideology and the Tory party who were prepared to close down the whole of the British coal industry in order to beat the NUM.
The National Coal Board (NCB) under the 'hatchet man' McGregor, who had recently been appointed by Thatcher, was closing collieries at an alarming rate. There was little or no consultation with the union over these closures and nearly all the agreed consultation processes were totally ignored. The NCB was steamrolling ahead with its closure programme and a conflict was unavoidable.
After much provocation the large Yorkshire coalfield was called on strike in early March 1984 and other areas including Durham soon voted to join the strike. There really was no alternative: we either resisted the closures or allowed the Tories and the NCB to butcher our industry and our communities.
The strike took off but to their eternal shame the Nottinghamshire miners refused to join the dispute and played into Thatcher's hands by dividing the union. This action, which was very similar to the betrayal of the NUM by the Nottinghamshire miners following the General Strike of 1926, gave the perfect excuse to the leaders of the TUC and Labour Party not to support the miners. Both Norman Willis, the General Secretary of the TUC, and Neil Kinnock, the leader of the Labour Party, played thoroughly dishonourable roles during the dispute. Kinnock never appeared on a picket line until the strike was nearly finished, despite being a Member of Parliament for a Welsh mining constituency, and it would only have taken a call from Willis to levy the millions of members of the TUC to force Thatcher to the negotiating table. Alas, this did not happen.
Despite the actions of these so-called leaders of the working class, there was a tremendous amount of working class support for the miners and a lot of trade unions risked the wrath of the law by lending money to the NUM when our funds were sequestrated.
In hindsight it is obvious now that the miners would never have been allowed to win this battle. The whole state system was to be used against the miners, really commencing in June at the Orgreave coking plant where thousands of police were used in a paramilitary fashion to charge and beat picketing miners. Horses, dogs, truncheons, shields and real vicious brute force were thrown at defenceless miners, the whole incident filmed by the media. Yet not one police officer was ever charged with violence. Could this have been because the BBC television coverage showed miners throwing stones at the police lines on the six o'clock news, when in reality, as the BBC admitted a number of years later, they inadvertently got the footage wrong? It was really the mounted police who made the first charge in to the pickets. Surely this was state control that would have been fully approved by any dictatorship or eastern bloc regime?
The attacks on the miners continued, the pickets were arrested on all manner of trumped up charges, with magistrates then used to put severe restraining orders on these pickets. Many were jailed using archaic and obsolete laws and charges. The mining communities and villages were under police siege, a ring of steel was put around the county of Nottingham to stop pickets getting to their fellow miners to seek their support. There was phone tapping, surveillance, intimidation. The state used every conceivable method, some strictly illegal, to defeat the miners.
The manipulation of the press was also a disgrace, with false tales of Libyan and Russian money supposedly being sent to Scargill and the issue of not holding a national strike ballot being raised time and again. This latter point was a complete red herring: in 1977 the NUM had held two national ballots on the introduction of incentive schemes, both rejecting the introduction of these divisive schemes. When a right wing area challenged the validity of these national ballots to overrule area decisions approved by the NEC, Mr Justice Watkins ruled on 21st December 1977 that 'the result of a ballot, nationally conducted, is not binding on the National Executive Committee in using its powers'. If this was so, what use would a national strike ballot have been if areas were able to ignore it? But in a case brought by a strike breaker against the Durham Mechanics, Kenneth Jones J held on 12th November 1984 that the area strike called precisely in accordance with area rules and approved by the NEC was not lawful because it was part of a national strike which required a national ballot!
However, despite all of these and many other fabrications, the vast majority of British miners held firm in their resolve to fight for the future of their industry, their communities and families.
This fight has proven to be right, because here today even the Tories are agreed we as a nation need to utilise the millions of tonnes of coal that lie beneath our shores. Because we need security of energy supplies coal will be mined again in Britain.
We have witnessed the result of Thatcher's vindictiveness: our communities have been devastated, our youngsters are nearly all employed in meaningless jobs, unemployment in our villages is at obscene levels, there is no job security, no dignity and drug substance abuse is at alarmingly high levels.
The saddest thing I believe is the way the British public were conned by the propaganda of Thatcher. She even told lies to Parliament along with many of her ministers, and sadly the British people bought it. They were conned into not supporting the British mineworkers at our time of need.
If we had been successful we may not have seen so many of our young men and women having to be maimed and killed in what probably was an illegal war for oil in Iraq. Perhaps the current financial crisis may not have occurred because the Tories would not have relaxed control on the banking system. We shall never know.
However we cannot change the past - I believe that history will prove us correct.
I can only say that I have been privileged to have been a coal miner and I believe that the 12 month dispute has made me a better person, certainly a more determined and enlightened person and hopefully many more people who experienced it will feel the same.
I have had the great honour of representing miners, their families and a great Union which still survives today some 25 years after the state, Thatcher and the Tories planned to destroy it.
David Hopper, General Secretary, Durham Miners Association
