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 grew up in a Derbyshire mining town and I was 6 during the strikes. I remember them clearly and the after effects for my community were seismic. Oddly my parents are both quite right wing-they had solid middle class jobs and benefitted from Thatchers policies. I was very left wing from a relatively young age-early teens- when I became more aware- as I could see how inequitable what she had done was and how basically she hadn't given a monkeys about towns like ours.

I know they used to wave their pay slips and sing 'Arthur Scargill pays my mortgage'. The old divide and rule worked a treat. Miners in Nottingham and Derby thought they'd be spared because their pits were profitable. A harsh lesson.

When police become political they lose a lot of support. I don't think they've ever really won it back.

The Peace Convoy people moved to 'Tipi Valley' in Wales . Some of them kept going and ended up in County Cork. I suppose they must have grand children by now? Many of them are trades people, very enterprising , the sort Thatcher was supposed to like.

Her problem was she wanted it both ways. There's ' no such thing as society ' and she hated institutions like the BBC and universities. She wanted a law of the jungle attitude to prevail ; yet she also wanted us to respect authority. Respect has to be earned though. She spent decades undermining authority , criticising teachers , social workers , writers etc. Well why should anyone respect authority if the market is all that matters?

By the same token - she was the architect of the Single Market. Surely she would be dismayed at her life's work being disposed of by her successors.

What she did was perverse. She hated state dependency but created the conditions where there was little to no employment, certainly nothing to maintain stable families, decent housing or encourage pride.

Instead her actions led to conditions that created poverty, men long term sick, families destroyed and the merit of actual work completely diminished. From this came generations of people on benefits and involved in crime, desperation.

A woman who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. Other countries managed industrial decline far better than the UK.

Scargill refused to hold a national ballot for strike action, and instead allowed local regions to hold their own. The problem with that was that some regions voted for and some against.

For example, in Wales only 10 out of 28 pits voted to strike. So Scargill sent "flying pickets" from other areas to those pits and effectively forced them out on strike through "solidarity".

The failure to hold a national ballot was the real undoing of the NUM as the government were able to take them to court and have the strike ruled to be illegal due to their being no national mandate for it. The NUM were fined £200,000 by the court.

Because the strike had been ruled to be illegal it meant the government could then use everything at its disposal to break the strike.

Prior to the court ruling, it was a private industrial dispute between employer and employee (National Coal Board v NUM).

The court ruling it to be illegal was a game changer and meant the police and other government agencies could be deployed in the name of "law and order" - hence why Thatcher often came out with the mantra of "the rule of law must prevail over the rule of the mob" when justifying the government's actions over the strike.

Thank you @TheSingingDefective That's really interesting.

@Abhannmor Tipi Valley is still going strong too.

A sensible post, @TheSingingDefective, containing much that folk have forgotten (or perhaps never knew)

Without doubt Thatcher was to blame for many of the ways this was handled, but then so were the unions - something that gets brushed aside in the sentimental "poor miners" narrative

I watched a documentary on C4 last night about the strikes and it does feel as if the miners and police officers are being blamed for the senior bosses across all sides being in cahoots with each other. Thatcher and government came down heavy on the police and conspired to create fear among people so they could charge strikers with Riot (a charge punishable by life in prison), the striking miners gathered en masse, encouraged by Scargill to get down to the front lines, and became an intimidating mob which, as one miner pointed out, typically resulted in a brief scuffle before both sides packed up and went home again.

At Orgreave it seems the man in charge purposely authorised the striking miners be kettled into a village to create fear and intimidation - a key component to being charged with riot under the Riot Act. As the miners themselves said they didn't mind the physicality of the scuffle it was the legal action afterwards that caused most upset, and from the officers in the programme they also didn't like being made to be dishonest by signing off preprepared statements and committing perjury.

It was quite interesting and I think there's another one on next week.

South Yorkshire Police in the 80s was extremely poorly led it seems!

All 3 parts of that documentary are on All4, if you don't want to wait.

Scargill is not much admired in the old coalfields.

You don't find the "sentimental" view that it's just about pitying the poor miners and blaming the bad Tories here.

There is widespread awareness that NUM tactics were a problem. Here's the thing, though. A government's duty in labour relations is not to push workers into a corner and batter them with the full power of the state when they try to fight back. A responsible government would not have aimed to emerge with the state as winner and the miners and their communities as losers, whatever the legalities of strike action.

But the NUM was correct about the rationale for striking - pits were to be closed faster and in greater numbers than planned, without alleviating the damage to mining communities. And the state effectively abandoned those communities, as predicted.

That rings true. You don't hear many complaints about physicality of police action here either. Different times and a quite macho culture. It's about the desolation of being effectively attacked and abandoned by the state.

The State also employed MI5 against the miners, as revealed by Stella Rimington.

The government is not your friend.

I’m so glad this thread is here. I’m glad people have long memories and that we remember how we came to be in the state (State) we are today. Sometimes I despair that people vote Tory. At least here is a reminder of why their policies are not for you. They only care about their own (a very small circle of the rich and landed). The interests of the vast majority of British people are not served by the Tories and the Miners Strike was one of the times when that was nakedly obvious.

Thatcher's vision was a country based around looking after the family and the individual. She promoted self aspiration and individualism as she believed they are conservative values. She saw togetherness and community as the enemy of this as they are socialist values and set out to destroy it wherever they were present. This included mining communities and places like Liverpool. She wanted to close them down if they weren't with her. She succeeded and her legacy of individualism and personal ambition above the wider good is now the norm. Eg My village votes for a council who thinks installing CCTV is worth closing youth clubs for. We wouldn't need CCTV if we had a strong community. with a youth service! We've had a total change of mindset thanks to her. The miners in some parts tried to fight this. And keep their jobs.

More pits had been closed BEFORE Maggie than during her reign as PM. It was a rapidly declining industry due to the increased use of electric and gas for heating and power, and the decline of the UK manufacturing industry.

Quite simply, we stopped using coal to heat our home, stopped using coal to power our trains, stopped using coal to power our mills and factories.

Closing pits was unavoidable - there was no point in digging up tons of coal when we didn't actually need it!

Have you read the thread ? This has been addressed many times

@Kazzyhoward

Even if you can't be bothered to research the difference between the manner in which the mine were closed, the chief fuel used to generate electricity up until the mid 90s was coal. It's not about steam trains and coal fires. Thatcher was just prepared to buy it from abroad in order to destroy communities that were heavily unionised.

So why do they win most elections?

This makes it sound as if the public at large had no agency/choice, were just sheep if you like

People actively want this, they wanted it then and they want it now, as another poster says, why do they keep winning then? We are not a socialistic society and have never been, thats long before Thatcher, she may have been more forceful and brazen about that as policy but I think its misjudged to portray her as developing this, inventing it, pulling unwilling participants along with it. Almost as if she had not existed it would be some sort of utopia.

The last of the one nation landscapes was before her time, the time when there was some degree of paternalism which meant that the working poor or working classes had support, jobs, housing, health care and education beause there was a recognition that this is good for society and the individual. Its bizarre that the very same people voted her in!!!

They don’t. They’ve won two out of the last four. They had no majority in 2010 and 2017.

Perhaps its more accurate to say why dont Labour overtly win more elections I suppose.

Having been severely let down over Brexit, gender issues, the focus on identity politics and 'purity of though', I cannot vote Labour now, so I will spoil my ballot. Im politically homeless. Never voted tory and never will. Lib dems are virtually Tory so they're out.

There is no one. The priority for me would be rejoining the EU but there isnt interest in that either apparently.

@soupfiend - yes all these years later and the working classes were conspicuously the losers from the whole Thatcher project. A few made good. But a lot more basically screwed the next generations over on housing, employment, social mobility. In the end it just seemed like greed and Britain is a small c conservative country. They absolutely screwed themselves really for cash in hand policies.

40 years on and I see the same residual middle classes are still doing okay, albeit that they are now paying for private services like health and schooling more often. I've never bought the "we are all middle class now" thing from Labour. Middle class life and it's expression is in assets, housing, schools, attitudes, manners, preferential access to services etc. Most of it opaque and hidden, and well resourced. It is not shopping in Marks and Spencers.

The - terminal - decline of British industry is a deliberate policy though.

Patrick Minford is one of the few economists who support Brexit. He believes all manufacturing and farming will be finished in Britain as a consequence. Tories seem quite relaxed about this prospect.

Why do they win? Many reasons: a right wing press, the fragmentation of media including social media, the demonisation of the BBC, our first past the post electoral system that translates minority votes into a government; oh, and I’m alright, Jack.