Question about miners strike

[garlictwist]

I've just watched the channel 4 doc on the miners strikes. Very interesting as I wasn't around at the time and didn't know much about it.

What it didn't explain though was why they were striking in the first place - was it that they wanted more money? Or were the mines being closed?

And was this to do with the three day week and the power cuts?

I worked in a coal fired power station in the late 80s and it was an open secret there that they had been told to build up stockpiles of coal for YEARS before the strike so the government would be able to keep the lights on (heavily dependent on coal powered stations back in the day) and keep the miners out till they were forced back. All part of Thatcher’s grand scheme to break the unions that she hated so much.

Im another who loathes thatcher still and the damage she did to our country.

This. I've said it numerous times but it doesn't go down well in the South Wales valleys where I live.

Many of the "police" were soldiers in police uniform...the local police were much more humane...those brought in were vice to the miners and their families. That's not to say all miners were without fault. Scargull let them down badly, but Thatcher destroyed communities for generations.

Plans had been in place for years to close unprofitable mines. Coal was already a dying industry.

She wanted to destroy the unions. Any union would have suited. Coal was a perfect storm for her.

(Miner's daughter and granddaughter and went on the picket lines in late 84 and early 85 but it was never a black and white issue. These things rarely are)

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/john-prescott-margaret-thatcher-closed-1844712?int_source=amp_continue_reading&int_medium=amp&int_campaign=continue_reading_button#amp-readmore-target

Plus, the NUM was the most powerful union in the land. Possibly in the world. Thatcher HAD to defeat them to decimate the union movement in the UK. She engineered the strike. The miners made tactical errors, but it wouldn't have made a difference. She was determined to destroy the power of the unions. The NUM had to fall.

I was there. I stood with them. And I'm proud of that.

They were hard times. But we didn't have or need food banks. People could afford their fuel bills. And when some people couldn't, we had community that made sure that people didn't go without or die alone. Betrayed by the Labour Party leadership and the TUC.... welcome to 2024. We got what we "paid" for.

All mines have a natural life span - you exhaust what's viable to extract, in your economic context

Closing a mine isn't the issue. Choosing to close down an industry by sacrificing viable mines to provoke a final battle with unions is the issue.

Look at Germany (for one example) as a place where mines were closed with a great deal of investment and energy put into sustaining communities, alternative employment, planning and tapering.

Thatcher was happy to just throw miners on the dole and their communities into devastation.

I grew up in the 80s in a mining town in Derbyshire, although my family had no links with the industry.

At the time, it felt like Thatcher declared war on us, the ordinary working class people. The miners were fighting to save their jobs & their communities by ending the Tory government’s program of pit closures. She hated us, so we hated her. 30 years later I cried with joy after the announcement of her death. Apparently her old age was lonely, miserable & isolated as she suffered dementia, which is some measure of justice for the evil she did.

Unfortunately, the miners were lions led by donkeys. Scargill was a skilled rabble-rouser but a hopeless strategist. He called the strike at the wrong time, when the government had stockpiled millions of tons of coal at the power stations. He refused to have a proper ballot, which meant support for the strike was patchy from the start. He didn’t plan how to properly moblilise support for striking miners and their families, so Thatcher fought a war of attrition, forcing them back to work.

Thatcher did it to show the unions who was boss. She wanted to destroy them all - and industry along with it.

Vile woman.

Oh and the miner on miner violence was because of the “scabs” that went back to work and helped to break the strike.

Scargill warned the miners - and balloted - for YEARS before the strike. The strategic failure was not his. If miners hadn't believed the lies of their previous leadership and thought "it would be OK " then they'd have been out years before.

But why would them going on strike prevent the closure of the mines? Surely thatcher could do that anyway if she so wanted?

And why did she want to close the mines?

To destroy the unions

I was working in a supermarket summer holidays , Saturdays & I remember collecting for the Miners. This was Dublin, there was a lot of empathy.

Why did she want to close the mines?

Excellent and balanced article about the whole thing here, @garlictwist:

https://www.history.co.uk/article/how-thatcher-broke-the-miners-strike-but-at-what-cost

I was only around 5 at the time of the strike but I still remember it.
I remember how poor we were with my dad not working. I remember my mum not eating meals so we kids could eat.
My older brother was/is on disability and my Dad for some reason, didn't want the European food parcels so my mum had to try and feed us just on my brother's money.
I remember having to go in the house through the back door for weeks because my mum lost her keys and couldn't afford to get a new one cut.

My dad was at Parkside and Bold mines and I remember he didn't come home one night of the strikes. Apparently he'd been arrested. It's all so vague though with me being so young.

Thatcher and Scargill's clash of egos; the former wanting to create, pretty much, the world we have now; pits being closed with the excuse of their being loss making but nothing else put in place for those communities; the start of the unstoppable and deliberate decline of so many parts of the UK... it's part of the reason I knew the red wall had lost their marbles entirely when they voted for the Tories recently, forgetting or ignoring just how much most True Blues despise ordinary working people. Their ancestors are still spinning in their graves (especially you lot, Hartlepool and Teesside...I might have grown up in the big city with the bridges a bit further north of you but I will never understand where your heads are...)

There are some excellent podcasts out there that can help explain it, or if you'd like a taste of fiction that gives an idea of just how much it affected individuals, watch Billy Elliott and listen to the strength of emotion in the words in some of the songs or watch the episode of Our Friends in the North that touches on it.

My dad wasn't a miner but I will never stop hoping the grocer's daughter has a very, very special corner of hell to keep her warm.

The current bonfire of worker's rights and protections can be traced directly back to Thatcher's treatment of the mineworkers,

That's why any right-thinking person should be RIGHT behind unions with the cojones of the likes of the RMT.

The Tories would mince the population into dog food if they thought they could get away with it.

Fuck them all, and fuck Thatcher in particular.

Burning coal is bad though, right?

I was around at the time and I've never heard this before

It had become cheaper for the UK to import coal from places like south Africa. So Thatcher and others were able to say the pits weren't economically viable. Regardless of that, the Tories wanted to assert government power over the union movement generally, as there was a fairly widespread feeling that big union power had got out of hand in the 70s, and they were able to 'hold the government/ country to ransom'. Thatcher and that government felt that facing down opposition from the miners union, showed they could stand up to and beat union power.
They did and they achieved that aim.

This is a fairly objective account I believe!!! I remember the strike well and met quite a few striking miners and their families.

It’s an interesting one in hindsight.
I grew up in the South Wales Valleys. I remember it. It politicised me and made me deeply left wing. However, Scargill was an idiot and Thatcher reeled him in like a fish.
The communities never recovered. People talk about the pride of the Valleys but you should see them now. Shuttered kept afloat for decades by European funding and public sector jobs, but still blighted. They feature on every index of deprivation there is.
Taking the long view, we’d have to come off coal sooner or later and it hastened the transition to gas and then to renewables. However, this is what climate campaigners mean when they talk about a “just transition,” because it bloody wasn’t. People were chucked aside in their prime and never invested in or retrained; it shattered families for generations. This is how not to do it, and that was because of polical hatred - Thatcher didn’t give a fuck about the people she threw away.

I was shocked by the complete disrespect for others. Those who wanted to strike and peacefully protest should obviously have been able to without experiencing police brutality/ criminal trials based on lies. Those who wanted to work should have been free to do so, yet they faced such vitriol, it was unbelievable really. Vehicles attacked for driving people to work/ members of society shunned and their homes targeted (with young children inside). It was a real mob mentality which I find abhorrent.

@Justcallmebebes One of my earliest memories is my ever stoic Aunt sobbing at our kitchen table about “the bloody spite of it.” And my mother not telling her not to swear like anyone else would have been told.
I was considerably older when I learned she’d been on the picket with other pit wives and a police officer had burned cash in front of the women who were scratching and scraping to make ends meet.
I grew up in the shadow of the strikes and declining heavy industry in my home town. It’s a dead place now.