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The strike ended with the defeat of the National Union Of Mineworkers (NUM) by the Conservative government, which then proceeded to consolidate its Free Market programme. The political power of the NUM was broken permanently and some years later the Labour Party moved away from its traditional socialist agenda. The dispute exposed deep divisions in British society and caused considerable bitterness. HISTORY A strike nearly happened in 1981, when the government had a similar plan to close 23 pits, but the threat of a strike was then enough to force the government to back down {Link without Title} . It is interesting that support for a strike in 1981 seemed to extend to areas that opposed it in 1984. It was widely believed that a confrontation had only been averted in the short-run and the Yorkshire miners passed a resolution that a strike should take place if any pit was threatened with closure for reasons other than exhaustion or geological difficulties. In 1983, the Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher appointed Ian MacGregor as head of the National Coal Board. He had previously been head of British Steel, where he had halved the workforce in two years. This reputation raised expectations that jobs would be cut on a similar scale in mining and confrontations between him and the Marxist leader of the miners, Arthur Scargill , seemed inevitable. In 1984 , the National Coal Board (the UK Public Body which controlled coal mining) announced that an agreement reached after the 1974 Miners' Strike had become obsolete, and that they intended to close 20 Coal Mine s because they were uneconomical. 20,000 jobs would be lost, and many communities in the north of England and in Wales would lose their primary source of employment. Unbeknown to anybody outside the upper echelons of the executive, the government had been preparing for tortuous industrial action by secretly stock-piling coal for a number of months in order to enable the country to keep running throughout the winter of 1984. Sensitive to the impact of the proposed closures in their own areas, miners in various coal fields began Strike Action . In the Yorkshire coal field strike action began when workers at the Manvers complex walked out over the lack of consultation. Over 6,000 miners were already on strike when a local ballot led to strike action from March 5 at Cortonwood Colliery at Brampton, South Yorkshire , and at Bullcliffe Wood colliery, near Ossett . What had prompted the March 5 action was the further announcement by the Coal Board that five pits were to be subject to "accelerated closure" within just five weeks; the other three were Herrington in County Durham, Snowdon in Kent and Polmaise in Scotland. On the next day pickets from the Yorkshire area appeared at pits in the Nottinghamshire coal field (one of those least threatened by pit closures). On March 12 , 1984 Arthur Scargill, President of the NUM declared that the strikes in the various coal fields were to be a national strike and called for strike action from NUM members in all coal fields. The issue of whether a ballot was needed for a national strike was very complicated, after previous NUM leader Joe Gormley had ignored ballot results on wage reforms and his decisions had been upheld by courts on appeal. Scargill did not call a ballot for national strike action, perhaps because of uncertainty over the level of support amongst members. The official line was that each region was to decide by itself; the 1972 and 1974 strikes were over pay, and a ballot was appropriate to an issue that affected all miners, but closures affected some regions more than others; it was felt that 'safe' regions should not be allowed to ballot other regions out of jobs. This decision was upheld by another vote five weeks into the strike. {Link without Title} Many miners, especially at the five threatened pits, were also opposed to a ballot as they take some time to organise and campaign for, and there was some urgency due to the programme of accelerated closure within five weeks. There was a fear that strike supporters would refuse to take part in a ballot. Scargill claimed that the government had no claim to take away the union's right to conduct internal affairs, and complained that no associations other than unions were being forced to hold ballots on all decisions. Critics point out that his policy of letting each region decide seemed inconsistent with the threatened expulsion of the Nottinghamshire branch after 20000 out of 27000 miners in the county voted against the strike. The Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher enforced a recent law which required unions to ballot members on strike action. On 19th June, 1984, Thatcher said in Parliament that giving in to the miners would be surrendering the rule of parliamentary democracy to the rule of the mob; she referred to the striking miners as "the enemy within" who did not share the values of the British people. The strike was ruled illegal, and the NUM's funds were seized on October 24 , 1984 by order of the High Court. As a result of this decision, miners were not entitled to State Benefit s. The Trades Union Congress (TUC) did not support the NUM, seeming to support Thatcher's call for a secret ballot. Solidarity action was taken, however, by railworkers and by dockers, who were both threatened with dismissal if they refused to handle coal. The EETPU , an electricians' union, actively opposed the strike; Ian MacGregor's autobiography detailed how its leaders supplied the government with valuable information that allowed the strike to be defeated. Steelworkers' unions did not support the strike, which was widely resented by the miners, after the support that they had given the steel strike in 1981 and after concessions were made by the NUM on deliveries of coke to steel works during the strike. The National Association Of Colliery Overmen, Deputies And Shotfirers nearly went on strike in September; this was one point where the balance seemed to be tipping in favour of the miners, but Scargill's subsequent contempt of court orders caused the union to be fined and lost wider support. MacGregor later admitted that, had NACODS gone ahead with their strike, a compromise would probably have been forced on the Coal Board. The fact that NACODS did not strike, created an even worse situation in the mines themselves - with NACODS deputies being labelled as SCABS - a particular gruesome euphemism for a miner found to be ignoring the strike and working. The fact that the NACODS deputies were actually not involved in the dispute lead to some being in fear of there lives, such was the hatred towards those betraying the strike at the time. The refusal of some miners to support the strike was seen as a betrayal by those who did go on strike. As Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire share a boundary and as the former was generally observing the strike and the latter generally opposing it, the scene was set for many bitter confrontations in the area. Instances of violence directed against working miners by striking miners were reported. In some cases, this extended to attacks on the property, the families and the pets of working miners {Link without Title} . Many miners were also very hostile to any journalists or reporters who came near pitheads. Predictably, newspaper coverage of the strike was generally unsympathetic. Television coverage tended to be more balanced. The Government mobilised the Police in huge numbers to deal with picket lines on the grounds that they represented illegal intimidation and sometimes illegal violence against those miners who wanted to go to work. During the industrial action 11,291 people were arrested and 8,392 charged with offences such as breach of the peace and obstructing the highway. Former striking miners and others have alleged that soldiers of the British Army were dressed as policemen and used on the picket lines. While concrete evidence of this has not been produced (although film footage exists of "policemen" wearing tunics without any identifying numbers on their lapels) it remains a point of contention today, and in many former mining areas antipathy towards the police remains strong. The Government was criticised for abusing its power when it ruled that local police might be too sympathetic to the miners to take action against the strike, and instead brought in forces from distant counties. Occasions where private aeroplanes were hired to fly policemen to tackle pickets was considered by some to be a waste of public money. At the beginning, the strike was almost universally observed in the coalfields of Yorkshire, Scotland, the North-East and contained many miners resentful over how their previous attempts to launch strikes in support of the steel workers and health workers had been largely unsurported, but there were enough pits in the region under threat of closure to gain momentum for the strike in the area. Support was less strong in the Midlands and North Wales. In Nottinghamshire most of the pits had modern equipment and had large coal reserves; most of the Nottinghamshire miners remained at work and the Nottinghamshire NUM disagreed with the decision to launch a national strike without a ballot. The 1977 industry reforms had given Nottinghamshire miners larger salaries than workers in any of the other counties and they were unwilling to give up their daily pay. Many within the NUM condemned them as Strikebreaker s, and the Nottinghamshire branch, heavily aided by the Thatcher government, eventually broke away to form the core of the Union Of Democratic Mineworkers . Since the end of the strike both the UDM and the NUM have been involved in numerous court cases concerning financial irregularities. A widely reported clash during the Miners' Strike took place at Orgreave near Rotherham on June 18 1984 . This confrontation between striking miners and police, dubbed by some 'The Battle Of Orgreave ', was the subject of a TV Re-enactment in 2001 , conceived and organized by artist Jeremy Deller and recorded by Mike Figgis for Channel 4 . News footage of the 'Battle of Orgreave' showing the miners initiating disturbances by charging the police has since been proven to be doctored. Violence flared after police on horse-back charged the miners with truncheons drawn and inflicted serious injuries upon several individuals. Events that prompted the end of the strike included a loss of public support following a severe beating of a working miner in Castleford in November, the manslaughter of a taxi driver escorting a working miner to work in South Wales in December (Hancock and Shankland were originally convicted of murder but this was reduced on appeal to the House of Lords) and the distraction of attention to the famine in Ethiopia . A report that Scargill had met with officials from Gaddafi 's regime in Libya {Link without Title} to negotiate support for his cause was never verified. Coming shortly after a British policewoman had been shot dead outside of the Libyan Embassy in London, the hint of a link obviously tarred Scargill and trust in him amongst striking miners even began to decline. The union's funds had also run too low to pay for pickets' transportation and many miners had been unable to pay for heating over the Winter. The strike ended on March 3 1985 , nearly a year after it had begun. Some workers had returned to work of their own accord, a symbolic victory for the Government, although ministers later admitted that the figures of returnees were inflated. In order to save the union, the NUM voted, by a tiny margin, to return to work without a new agreement with management. In the special conference that ended the strike, only Kent voted to carry on. Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire and South Derbyshire did not send any delegates to the conference. In addition to the manslaughter of taxi driver David Wilkie, six pickets died during the strike and three young men - all less than 16 - died from picking coal in the Winter. The deaths of pickets David Jones and Joe Green continue to this day to be viewed with suspicion; some have claimed that their deaths were caused by the police, but reports at the time conflicted. The NUM names its memorial lectures after the two. During the strike many pits permanently lost their customers. Much of the immediate problem facing the industry was due to the economic recession in the early 1980s. However, there was also extensive competition within the world coal market as well as a concerted move towards oil and gas for energy production. The Government's own policy, known as the Ridley Plan (after its author Nicholas Ridley ) was to reduce Britain's reliance on coal, they also claimed that coal could be imported from Australia , America and Colombia more cheaply than it could be extracted from beneath Britain {Link without Title} . The strike subsequently allowed the Government to accelerate the closure of many pits on economic grounds. Dame had a highly-placed mole codenamed "Silver Fox", with one officer saying the information "beat the strike, there's no doubt about that". {Link without Title} AFTER THE STRIKE The coal industry was finally privatised in December 1994 to create a firm named "R.J.B. Mining", now known as UK COAL. Between the end of the strike and privatisation, pit closures continued with a particularly intense group of closures in the early '90s. There were 15 former British Coal deep mines left in production at the time of privatisation however by March 2005 there were only 8 major deep mines left [http://www.dti.gov.uk/energy/coal/uk_industry/index.shtml . During the strike, Scargill had constantly claimed that the government had a long-term plan to reduce the industry in this way; this was both denied by the government and dismissed by the public as the paranoid rantings of a Marxist, but his predictions have all proved true. The miners' will to resist deteriorated rapidly and there was a very apathetic response to the intensive period of closures in the early 1990s, despite evidence that most of the public felt that the government was going too far. Nottinghamshire miners had hoped that their pits were safe, but they too were mostly closed in the 1985-1994 period. This was widely resented as a betrayal of the promises that had been made to working miners in the strike; they had been told that their jobs were safe and their industry had a future. The subsequent behaviour of the Tory government was seen by some to confirm fears about how they had been used to divide the miners' union. The effect of the strike has been long and bitter for many areas that depended on coal. Enduring a year on Strike Pay forced many miners into debt. The closure of pits also affected engineering, railways, electricity and steel production, which were all interlinked with the coal industry. Unemployment reached as high as 50% in some villages over the next decade. Suicides rose significantly; the year 1984 had seen an extremely high increase in suicides. Migration out of old mining areas left many villages full of derelict houses and earning the reputation as Ghost Town s. The tensions between those who had supported the strike and those who had not, lasted for years afterwards, eroding the strong sense of unity that had previously existed in such communities. The 1994 E.U. enquiry into poverty classified Grimethorpe in South Yorkshire as the poorest settlement in the country and one of the poorest in the E.U. The county of South Yorkshire was made into an Objective 1 development zone and every single ward in the City Of Wakefield district in West Yorkshire was classified as in need of special assistance. In Merseyside, the Knowsley distict, which had contained the "Cronton" and "Sutton Manor" pits, has constantly been named amongst the most deprived areas of both Britain and Europe. The effect has still not worn off in some areas with or the West Midlands . Brodsworth boasted the largest mine in the country and is also enjoying relative affluence. Old colliery sites have often been turned into new industrial parks or retail parks. Xscape is built on the former site of Castleford's Glasshoughton colliery. When the strike was on, the home counties public was very against the miners, wheras in the valleys, yorkshire and other areas actually affected by the strike, support was high. The Sun newspaper was very anti miners during the strike, as was the daily mail and even at times the daily mirror. As time has gone on, more people have felt sympathy with the poverty that mining areas were reduced to. It has even gained something of a cult status as a symbol of the perceived indifference that the Tory Party has to problems of unemployment and poverty. Also, most of the public believed that the pit closures of 1985 were a short-term necessary measure, at the time, and did not anticipate the further decimation of the industry over the next ten years. Although mining is now only a very small industry in Britain, it is more productive than in France, Germany or in the United States. This serves as an exception to the usual "productivity gap" that exists between Britain and those other countries. STRIKE IN ARTISTIC DEPICTIONS The UK miners' strike was the background for the critically acclaimed 2000 film '' Billy Elliot ''. Several scenes powerfully depict the chaos at the picket lines, clashes between armies of police and striking miners, and the shame associated with crossing the picket line. It is also involved in the background to the plot in '' Brassed Off '', which is set ten years after the strike when all the miners have the lost the will to resist and accept the closure of their pit with resignation. Brassed Off was set in the hard-hit ex-mining village of Grimethorpe . The satirical '' Comic Strip Presents'' episode ''The Strike'' ( 1988 ) depicts an idealistic Welsh screenwriter's growing dismay as his hard-hitting and grittily realistic script about the strike is mutilated by a Hollywood producer into an all-action thriller starring Al Pacino (played by Peter Richardson ) and Meryl Streep (played by Jennifer Saunders ). The ''1984'' episode of the 1996 BBC Television Drama serial '' Our Friends In The North '' revolves around the events of the strike, and the scenes of clashes between the police and striking miners were re-created using many of those who had taken place in the actual real-life events on the miners' side. In 2005 BBC One broadcast the one-off drama ''Faith'', written by William Ivory and starring Jamie Draven and Maxine Peake . It viewed the strike from the perspective of both the police and the miners. A 2005 book called ''"GB84"'' by David Peace combines fictional accounts of pickets, union officials and strike-breakers. Graphic details are provided of many of the strike's major events. It also suggests that British intelligence was involved in undermining the strike, including in the alleged suggestion of a link between Scargill and Gaddafi. The strike has been the subject of songs by many music groups. Of the more well known; the band Pulp recorded a song ''"Last day of the miners' strike"'', Funeral For A Friend wrote a song called ''"History"'', the folk-rock band Steeleye Span recorded the song ''"Blackleg Miner"'', and Ewan MacColl wrote the song ''"Daddy, What did you do in the strike?"''. The folk song ''The Ballad of '84'' contains the view that David Jones and Joe Green died as a result of the police's handling of events. As mentioned above, in 2001, British visual artist Jeremy Deller worked with historical societies, battle reenactors, and dozens of the people who participated in the violent 1984 clashes of picketers and police to reconstruct and reenact the Battle of Orgreave. A documentary about the reenactment produced by Deller and director Mike Figgis and broadcast on British television, and Deller also published a book called ''The English Civil War Part II'' documenting both the project and the historical events it investigates (Artangel Press, 2002). Involving the reenactors, who would normally recreate Viking battles or medievals wars, was a way for Deller to situate the recent and controversial Battle of Orgreave (and labor politics themselves) as part of mainstream history. See http://www.artangel.org.uk/pages/past/01/01_deller.htm G.Mckie's poem ''Ode to Hezeltine'' was written after the announcement to close 31 collieries in 1992, which betrayed previous promises to miners who had worked on during the strike. http://www.strike84.co.uk An online collection of photographic images taken during the dispute. SEE ALSO
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