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?

Not if you’re one of the men who earn a good wage digging the stuff out of the ground. A wage which allows you to buy a house, provide for your family, buy a car & afford a summer holiday. Mining was a dirty, dangerous job, but it provided generations of working class men with status, comradeship & self-respect which made it all the more tragic that after literally keeping the lights on in this country they were thrown on the scrap heap by Thatcher.

We import all our coal now.

Expensive and not as expensive as a whole generation of people unemployed and communities decimated

That said I dont agree with the attacks on non strikers and this long term resentment about that. Each family had to make a choice to do waht they thought was best, a hive mind is not a good thing

It was like a war. All the resources of the state pitted against the miners. Scargill was a fool, but it was the sheer vandalism of these areas and the waste of men and their families that isn't forgotten.

At the time my family lived in a naice home counties house with lots of money. We were Thatchers gold rush. Except my mothers family came from Barnsley and the deprivation when visiting her family in Yorkshire was just shocking, seeing people with nothing.

I have never forgotten it; if I hadn't seen it as a child I dare say I would have been a cosy south east Tory voter like everyone else around me.

Thatcher may well have been a c&?t but the mines became too expensive to run for their return... we had to import coal to meet demand.

Demand continued to fall as people were moving away from coal for fuel.

Coal was only needed for the steel industry which was also collapsing due to much cheaper imports.

The problem at the time was that the Tories should have found alternative ways of investing in the coal communities but they didn't.
The money moved to London , for financial investment opportunities, which was the death knell for steel and mining communities.

My dad was a miner in the south east. Betsanger, Tilminstone and snowdon collieries. I was six when they went out on strike and I remember the food parcels and the sense of unity.
I also remember how it divided families and communities. My dad and brother in law still don't talk as he was a scab (brother in law)
I was also booted out of the brownies for singing anti Maggie songs and 'I would rather be a picket than a scab'.

https://hansard.parliament.uk/Lords/1984-12-03/debates/21bf59fe-d7ed-45cb-9715-5d236dde8577/MinersEarnings

https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/written-answers/1985/feb/26/police-pay

Some interesting figures from 1984. The average miner was on £9300 per year and the average PC after 4 years service £12k per year, a new recruit probably not too dissimilar from the miners. I'm not disputing the burning money story but I'm struggling to believe the average police officer of that time had that level of money spare. If they did they were an idiot.

Edit: the £12k was an inspectors salary

Mainly the Met police drafted into the area with massive overtime money. The local police who had grown up in the area were a bit more conflicted.

The burning money is an old story, as is the police officers with the army buzzcuts.

The economics of coal were one thing; the way it was done, the cruelty, and failure to rebuild these places, and the men put onto benefits as long term unemployed or sick was completely toxic.

Some officers doubled their wage with overtime.

Not to mention the 'Arthur Scargill Pays Our Mortgages' T-shirts some police wore.

Pretty sure they wanted a pay rise of something ridiculous like 36.% if it's the Netflix one it does mention it

The police officers earned vast amounts of money in overtime during the strike, which is where they got the money to taunt the miners with. Thatcher made sure her ‘soldiers’ were very well looked after.

Thanks all. Very interesting reading. I was shocked to watch in the documentary miners treating those that chose to work with such disdain, even shouting at their wives and kids in the street. Was that seen as OK at the time?

It was brutal. Families and communities, especially in the north and also Scotland were devastated (lived in the north of England at the time).

The Met police were on overtime. They boasted about paying off their mortgages with it.

The working miners were seen by the strikers as ‘scabs’. That is the worst insult one trade unionist can direct at another. A scab was a strike-breaker, and viewed as a traitor to his workmates, his union, his community and his class.

Were all miners in the unions? Were non union miners tarred as scabs too?

Lorac23 The bit of Billy Elliot I always remember is where Billy has just finished auditioning and is dismissed. Then at the last moment one of the auditioners calls his dad back "Mr Elliot, good luck with the strike."

Brassed Off is another good film to watch about the effects of strikes on the mining communities. Some very powerful moments.

I was living in a wealthy town in the south. The local supermarket could barely cope with the amount of food donations for the mining families. The support was immense even in communities unconnected with the mines.

Coal was the most used fuel
in Britain until long after the strike. It wasn't cheaper to import coal if you were going to consign whole communities to benefits for generations.

I was working in my first job at the time and mainly remember the 3 day weeks stuff and going into work at weird times to do telexes (who remembers them)? as they could only be sent when the electricity was on. My naive take on it was at the time all the unions continually went on strike for more and more stupidly big pay rises and up until then they had won their pay demands every year as the country didn't have enough stock pile of coal to ride out the union demands. I only saw the pit closures as a side to the whole thing at the time. I feel the country is going backwards now seeing the train unions demanding outrageous pay rises but as I say I was relatively young at the time so don't profess to be an expert in what happened. Maybe I'm wrong but I think as a country we priced ourselves out of so many markets in the 70's, namely the car industry and the docks which all had such a strong union/strike presence. I do remember a relative who worked in a big engineering company and they would strike at the drop of a hat.

I remember power cut protests also; you switched off the electric (coal fired) for the evening. This registered on the usage with the National Grid to show support.

Ironically it preserved Thatcher's coal pile. She learned a lot from how the miners had destroyed the Heath government. She stockpiled.

I live and used to teach in a former mining area. Some villages still have a lost generation - not so much the miners made unemployed but the younger ones who would have walked into a job at the pit after school and had no jobs to go to. Drugs became a huge problem and these people are now the grandparents in their 40s unable to give the help and support that would have been given in previous generations. Massive social problems.

If you think about how collective action works, the only way it does work is 'one out all out'. If someone is willing to do the work, the strike is over before it's begun. Union aren't that old. They were legalised in 1824 in the UK, 200 years ago. The miner's strike is 40 years ago. Before they were legalised union organisers and strikers were starved out, beaten out, killed. The ONLY thing that worked was everyone, without exception, working together.

So scabs are the enemy. They destroy the cause, they prolong the suffering of the strikers and their families. They are seen as traitors, not just to their colleagues but also to their class, community and culture. I was raised by people who would rather die than cross a picket line. When someone does, there is a reaction.

I don't condone the violence BTW, but I understand why it happened.

I had no direct connection but always tried to put a few coins or a tin into the collections despite being hard up myself.

I still have a coal not dole badge.

Ordinary people were a lot more political them, I think. I attended all sorts of rallies and demos, all peaceful, but 1000s of people.

Thatcher wanted to break the powerful unions. She also went after the printers.

This.
The devastation it has caused to generations was abhorrent

This such a boring cliche, spouted by those sympathetic to destruction of working class communities. Labour had a managed, planned closure procedure which didn't have the purely political aim of savaging communities which would never vote for you but did provide a political education, via unions and relative prosperity, which bolstered your opposition. Thatcher did the same to all of our manufacturing base, leaving us at the mercy of capitalist speculation. We've never recovered from this and, by removal of organised, well paid working class industry, have created a culture that only values middle class aspirations.