Trollheart

The pits slated for closure were dealt with singly, instead of in one go, and so by a combination of stealth and cunning Thatcher got the pit closures she wanted. Some workers were moved to the new Selby Coalfield, where conditions and wages were better, but many men were left without jobs, including an increasing number coming up to retirement age.

NACODS remained technically working but refused to cross picket lines, and when McGregor threatened to bring in blacklegs to replace them, they responded by also going on strike. A deal was negotiated – against McGregor's wishes – by the government and the North Yorkshire branch of the NCB and the NACODS went back to work. After this, pits which McGregor had been told to leave alone were closed.

On 16 July 1984 Thatcher called a ministerial meeting to consider the imposition of a state of emergency, which would have created a state of martial law, but this never came to pass. Strikers were not eligible for welfare payments but their spouses and children were, but new legislation passed in 1980 banned the receipt of “urgent needs” payments, even going so far as to take a deduction from the benefits they did receive, in an effort, said the government, to force their husbands back to work. Sounds like the argument advanced to support the Poor Law and make the workhouses even less attractive to the lower classes in the nineteenth century. Thatcher even had MI5, the British Secret Service, monitoring strikers and tapping their phone lines. Who said Britain wasn't a police state?

Although the miners had public support from the start of the strike, as the months wore on and the methods adopted by Scargill and the NUM became more militant and potentially violent, opinion began to swing away from them, until in Julyu 1984 a poll conducted revealed that 78% of people believed the miners' methods were irresponsible. This had increased the next month to 81%. Nobody seems to have taken a poll on police methods, oddly enough, or if they did, it's not mentioned. As the money began to run out for the NUM, as its assets were seized by the courts, they turned to Russia (the Soviet Union at the time) for help, which did nothing to change the public's opinion of them, communism always being a sore point with Brits. Smear campaigns by major media outlets alleged Scargill and other union leaders were trading with Libya, also another country on the no-no list, and worse, were pocketing the money. These claims were never proven, and seem to have been complete fabrications made in order to turn what remained of public support away from the strikers.

Though the police were without question completely out of control and – excuse the term – a law unto themselves during the strike, it can't be ignored that the miners used very violent and intimidatory tactics to persuade and threaten those who continued to work, or crossed picket lines. Apart from physical attacks there were threats against families, damage to houses and cars, attempts to shame the “blacklegs”, with the violence coming to a head in November when two pickets dropped a concrete post over a bridge onto a taxi which was bringing what they considered a “scab” to work. The man and the driver were killed, and the two miners convicted of manslaughter and imprisoned. Another miner was savagely beaten that same month when a gang of pickets invaded his home and beat him for five minutes with baseball bats. Two of the gang were sentenced for GBH (Grevious Bodily Harm). Although Scargill refused to condemn the violence, these two incidents served to cool tempers down.

Women of the Strike: Two Views

Although they did not picket with their men, women were also instrumental in the strike, sometimes supporting them and sometimes encouraging them to return to work. This latter attitude is of course understandable. While as wives or girlfriends they would have been anxious for their man to be paid more, or at least retain his job, in the case of projected pit closures, a lot of the women would have had to have looked at the practical side of the strike; the lack of food on the table, the absence of money coming in, even perhaps the social status of the strikers in the community, and with the escalating violence this desire for the strike to end would have only increased and become more expedient to them. On the other hand, there were the wives and girlfriends of strikers who thoroughly agreed with their men, and set up Women Against Pit Closures, who organised collections, soup kitchens and even benefit concerts in support of the strikers. Much of this was as a backlash against a protracted and concentrated campaign by the media to give the impression that the miners were striking against their wives' wishes, and that they had not the support of those who relied on them for a living. In some cases, as I said above, this was true, but in many it was not, and the women who set up WAPC wished to show that the media image of the “suffering miner's wife” was not the only one, that some women did support the efforts of their men.

Some strange alliances came out of the strike, such as the support given the miners from the LBGTQ community, when Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners held concerts to raise funds for them, cheekily under the banner of “Pits and Perverts.” The perhaps unexpected sympathy for the miners resulted in more tolerance for these groups in areas where they might not have been so eaily accepted prior to the strike. Chesterfields Football Club gave discount tickets for their matches to the miners, and even Bruce Springsteen donated money to their cause.

The strike finally came to an end on March 3 1985, not as a result of any mediation or compromises or agreements, but simply as an expedient. Miners' families were struggling, unable to pay rent or buy food, and the harsh and draconian rules of the Thatcherite welfare system made it even harder for them to make ends meet. Essentially, I guess you could say they were starved back to work, like a siege that ended when the town had no food left to eat and had to surrender. Despite fundraising efforts at home and abroad, with its assets seized the NUM had only so much in its coffers, and when that ran out nobody was going to help re-fill them. By standing firm and not giving in to very reasonable demands from men unwilling to see their livelihood taken away, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher scored possibly her government's biggest victory since the recent so-called Falklands War, though this time it was against her own people, those she described with sneering rhetoric as the enemy within.

In the end, Arthur Scargill played right into her hands by advocating, or at least not condemning, violence which attended the riots and turned public sympathy to disgust and anger. His strong links with Communism also scared and angered many Britains, who may have believed he was trying to instil those sort of values in their country, and seen him as an agitator. He certainly earned few friends with his heavy-handed, unapologetic and implacable stand, calllng anyone who disagreed with him or got in his way a traitor. He came across as a militant, unbending figure, treated by Thatcher as all but an industrial terrorist, and in the final analysis his and the NUM's efforts came to nothing. Men lost their jobs, or were allowed to resume them at reduced wages – over 9,000 miners were dismissed simply for striking – and the coal industry staggered on for a few more decades, slouching along like Yeats's rough beast, but to die, not be born. The privatisation of the coal industry ten years later resulted in UK Coal, and by 2006 there were a total of eight mines left operating in the country. The final one closed in 2016, hammering in the last nail in the coffin of the coal industry and bringing to an end centuries of coal mining in Britain as the country looked to oil, nuclear, even wind power, moving away from its previous reliance on coal.

Perhaps the darkest legacy, though, of the miners' strike, outside of the hardship and loss of livelihood, is the uncaring, almost dictatorial attitude of the government, who never, so far as I can see, even attended talks with the NUM or attempted to bring the strikes to a peaceful conclusion. Using Ridley's plan, Thatcher chose her battleground, assembled her troops, and, to use a phrase popular with a certain Springfield billionaire, released the hounds. She didn't care who got hurt - probably the more the better, as long as she and the media she controlled could turn the blame on the miners - and she was prepared to bend the coal industry to her will, before snapping it altogether and tossing it away like a child who has lost interest in a broken toy. She displayed no understanding, compassion or sympathy for the working people who had, possibly, put her in power, but even if not, who she was sworn to protect and whose interests she should have been looking after.

Thatcher would remain in power for another five years, after which Britain would experience seven under John Major, when the destruction of British industry would be all but completed, the Conservative Party would be torn apart by scandals and give rise to the "Euro-sceptics", leading inevitably and by a long road to the eventual secession of Britain from the European Union in what has popularly become known as Brexit, and allow, in the end, Labour to pull off a triumphant victory after nearly twenty years in opposition. Britain's problems, of course, would hardly end with the Blair era, but that, as they say, is another story entirely.

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018