[The following article is the text of the talk given on 7 April 2024, to mark the 40th anniversary of the miners' strike]
As everyone in the room probably knows, this strike, which lasted a full twelve and-a-half months, all out, ended in a catastrophic defeat. Not because it rang the death knell for coal mining, which it did, but because of its demoralising effect on the whole of the working class at the time. It was a watershed. Workers said that if the miners could be defeated, they had no chance of winning. And this was precisely what the government of the day under Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had intended.
That was the purpose of the huge national police mobilisation - the armed bodies of men of the state - which Thatcher threw into action against the striking miners. It was to be a test of strength, pitting Thatcher as the "chief of staff" of the capitalist class against the working class's strongest battalion.
This strike is said to have been the most violent strike in British history. In total, 72 miners and 51 police suffered serious injuries. 11,291 strikers were arrested. Out of these over 200 were sent to jail, to serve sentences of up to 4 years. Two striking miners were killed on picket duty. A taxi driver was killed while driving a non-striking miner to work in South Wales after 2 strikers dropped a concrete post onto his car from a road bridge. They were convicted of manslaughter.
This level of attrition doesn't usually happen in strikes in Britain.
The concerted class war which Thatcher waged against the miners wasn't because she was an especially vicious politician. In fact, she represented precisely the kind of leader which the capitalists needed at that moment in time. An unruly working class which had, less than 10 years before, mounted a highly successful strike wave, had to be taught a very harsh lesson. Indeed, the so-called "Winter of Discontent" which broke the government's policy of pay restraint was a wave of strikes across private and public sectors, unprecedented since the 1926 general strike.
We have to remember the context. The 1970s heralded the worst economic recession since the 1930s Depression. The Labour government which preceded Thatcher's, had implemented all kinds of policies to try to help out the profits of the capitalist class - including wage restraint. Workers were told they could not get pay rises, despite inflation racing ahead to almost 27% in May-June 1975. That's almost double what we have seen, at its worst, today, and is precisely why the 1977-78 strike wave happened.
And by the way, this was a global economic contraction, and it was not going to go away. We are, after all, in an end-stage of declining capitalism. All the capitalist class worldwide can do is to find ways to try to squeeze more from less and less.
The rolling back of the state
In the 1980s however, the way chosen to rescue the British capitalist class was through selling of all of the state's enterprises. Following the systematic industrial closures of the 1970s a massive state privatisation agenda began in the 1980s and carried on into the 1990s, as a way to provide the capitalist class with new means to make profits - and this time out of the services which were formerly provided by the state and the industries it used to run... The large state workforce was due to be cut to shreds. And don't forget, at the time both steel-making and coal mining were state industries. The mines were only finally privatised in 1994 by John Major's government.
So the working class needed to be tamed beforehand. And that was the function of Thatcher's confrontation with the striking miners. Some even argue that she actually provoked the strike and there is even some evidence for this, which we won't go into here, but can discuss later, if anyone is interested.
On the other hand, we have always argued that the miners' defeat was not inevitable, and that it was the isolation of the miners' strike which was the primary cause of its defeat. And by the way - when it comes to the defeats of today, like that of Royal Mail's postal workers, we can point to similar cause and effect - even if the context has changed.
In fact, 20 years ago, in 2004, we presented an assessment of the miners' struggle which details what actually happened - we don't have time to do that today. But we argued at the time that what had been missing from the miners' agenda was a class policy - that is a working class strategy to counter-pose to the class strategy which Thatcher had prepared and which she actually implemented.
Obviously what we mean by this is that other sections of workers who were confronting the same attacks against their jobs and conditions - in the railways, on the docks, in the steel industry and in local municipalities (like for instance Liverpool council workers who were striking against job cuts in the spring of 1984) could have joined consciously with the miners and struck together tor commen demands - and for working class control of their industries against the policy of attrition which was coming.
Was this possible? For sure it was. But certainly not under the leadership of the union officials - that is, the bureaucracy which had been doing as many deals as possible behind workers' backs with the Tory government. In fact at their conference in 1983, the TUC leadership had embarked on a policy of so-called "new realism". It argued that the reason Labour had lost the 1979 election was due to the desertion by workers in new industries whose needs were not caterad for by the trade union movement. Presumably they meant those workers opposed to strikes! What this meant however, was that these leaders were prepared to cooperate with all the anti-working class measures to come... and they did.
Not following their leaders
Were the more militant workers following union leaders down this path? Not at all. While it was not the policy of the leadership of the National Union of Mineworkers to spread the miners' strike in its first weeks, after 6 March 1984 - it was the famous flying pickets ~ both in Yorkshire and Wales who did this solely on their own initiative. It was also militant workers in other industries, of which there were many, in the railways, docks, etc., who, throughout the 13 months of the strike took action to help the miners - and against their own union leaderships.
We can give a few examples.
From 3 April 1984 to the end of the strike, railway workers: from the Coalville rail depot in Leicestershire successfully prevented trains getting out of the Leicestershire pits, except at the few occasions when the bosses managed to get strike-breakers to drive trains and operate signal boxes.
Half of Leicestershire's coal production was held up for 35 weeks, including supplies bound for Power Stations. But when, by September 1984, British Rail managers tried to victimise the Coalville workers and they appealed to their union, they were told that they should not escalate their action to fight this!
In fact train drivers and signal workers in many other areas took action to black coal movements. LSLEF, the train drivers' union showed its support by paying drivers' wages whenever they were sent home, off pay, for refusing to move coal.
Spontaneous solidarity even came from print workers at the Sun newspaper, who refused to print a picture of the miners leader, Arthur Scargill, with his hand raised - which then editor Kelvin McKenzie captioned "Mine Fuhrer"! They also went on strike for 3 days when McKenzie refused to print a half-page missing of support for the miners from the South East Region TUC.
Even in the steel industry, despite the hostility of the steel union's leadership towards the miners' leadership, at plant level, workers were willing to help the miners in whatever way they could. For instance, in South Wales, miners allowed coal to be delivered to Llanwern steelworks in return for which the workers limited production to 75% of output. As a result, the Llanwern steel workers actually lost their bonus (which at the time comprised up to 40% of their earnings), but these workers still raised £4,000 at plant gate collections for the striking miners.
But what had the NUM to say to these workers who acted in solidarity with the miners? Nothing, except that they should help to "black coal", including at the cost of risking their wages or jobs, and charity work on behalf of the miners, by organising collections and fund-raising events. At no point did miners' leader Arthur Scargill turn to these workers to offer them a fighting objective for which they could have rallied in a joint fight with the miners.
The other union leaderships proved as lacking in any kind of class outlook - if not worse. For instance there would have been good reason to call a national railway strike in 1984. This same year as many as 30,000 voluntary redundancies were proposed - to be implemented over the next 4 years. But instead of saying "a job cut is a job cut", whether voluntary or compulsory, Jimmy Knapp leader of the National Union of Railwaymen, not only agreed these job cuts, but boasted about the so-called "productivity gains" which they would achieve.
And so the dockworkers came out
The case of the two dock strikes - which lasted, respectively for 13 days at the beginning of July and for 35 days from the end of August 1984 - is even more of an indictment of the NUM leaders' catastrophic policy.
The dockers, together with steelworkers and rail workers, were on of the sections of workers that the NUM had called upon very early on, to help with the blacking of coal. The spark for their dock strikes was the dock employers' attempt to retaliate against their sympathy action by bringing in non-union members to replace them.
Despite its so-called "left-wing" credentials, at the time, the dockers' union leadership did not want a fight. All it wanted was to retain the status quo and get the employers to respect the existing agreements against employing non-union workers. There was never any attempt by these leaders to propose to all dock workers (union and non-union) to embark on a fight aimed at consolidating the Dock Labour Scheme as it was called, and extending it to the newer harbours where it did not apply. Had the miners' leaders been determined to strengthen the class-side of the miners - by seeking allies in the rest of the working class - Scargill and the NUM would have certainly have had the political weight to call on the dockers to join the miners in a common fight against the threats on jobs and conditions. After all, the dockers had been blacking coal and iron ore actively on behalf of the miners for months!
Instead, the NUM had a deliberate policy of keeping the miners' pickets out of the docks as long as the docks were on strike.
So in the end, the miners found themselves isolated, despite the considerable sympathy they enjoyed in the working class!
Of course, Scargill issued plenty of general and abstract calls to the working class to support the miners. But in terms of active support - which can only be based on jointly organised action for a common objective - he always avoided infringing on the territory of other union leaders. This reflects a deep sectionalism which we can recognise in the union leaders of today.
But in the end, the miners on their own
Leaving aside the unions directly related to coal, the NUM made no formal request for assistance to other unions or to the TUC during the first six months of the strike, in fact, not until the TUC conference, in September 1984. All Scargill then got, was a resolution inviting all affiliated unions to "consult with the NUM" about how they could help in the blacking of coal. And with it came a condemnation of "all violence" on the picket line by the TUC general secretary, Len Murray.
This, however, did not prevent Scargill from hailing the TUC conference decision in a Sunday Times article, as a "historical turn" of the labour movement "toward a united and determined fight back".
Of course TUC leaders who were actually seeking the government's favours were hardly likely to want to be seen doing anything to help the miners. Scargill knew this as much as anyone else. But that did not stop him from later blaming the defeat of the miners on the lack of support of the TUC!
By 7 January, 10 months into the strike, up to 5,000 miners had returned to work. In fact some of them had taken up the Coal Board's offer of a £1,400 Xmas bonus. That was a lot of money at the time. But 110,000 miners still remained on strike, the vast majority!
However now, the NUM's strategy, which aimed at picketing out working miners from their pits, meant that strikers were de facto picketing their own pits against a handful of strike-breakers who could not do any work anyway. They felt, and were, more isolated than ever.
A Derbyshire striker said later that the NUM strategy had made "scabs out of good union men - because the strike went on too long. You can't call a man a scab who's been out of work ten months".
By February 1985, the Court orders to take over NUM funds, to ban picketing and to back the sacking of striking miners all began to pile up. But worse, on the ground the strikers were reaching their limits. A Yorkshire branch official said "the men have given everything for a year, and now they are saying "for god's sake, lead us out of this mess".
As some areas were talking about organising a return to work, and the strike was evidently crumbling, on 3 March, the union formally called off the strike. A special conference voted by a narrow margin - 98 votes to 91 - to return to work without an agreement with the Coal Board, exactly one year after the strike began.
The Kent miners stayed out on strike for a few more days, in a vain attempt to get sacked miners an amnesty, but also returned to work on the 8 March.
So the strike was over and the way was now open for the government to close virtually as many pits as it wished. Thatcher had made the demonstration she wanted to make in front of the entire working class - that there was no point in resisting the turn of screw that the capitalist was demanding.
The need for a class policy
So let's look more closely at the reasons for the defeat. Of course, Scargill and the NUM leadership were reformists. As are today's union leaders.
And there is no point in blaming them for this. But this means that, for all their radical language, at the end of the day, they do not want to sink the boat of capitalism. With no choice but to oppose some of Thatcher's cuts, union leaders like Arthur Scargill were unable to propose a policy which would threaten the capitalist class enough for it to call a halt to its attacks.
In fact, the pit closures could only have been be fought successfully as part of a general challenge against the austerity policy that the capitalists were aiming to impose on the working class. First, because the capitalist class itself saw the battle against the miners as an offensive against the whole of the working class, with Thatcher as its chief of staff. The miners were the working class's strongest battalion after all.
But there is another point to make - and that is that stopping pit closures wasn't necessarily the best objective for the miners themselves. Why hang on desperately to working in deep and dangerous pits with all the accompanying health hazards, if other, decent, healthier, jobs could be made available? The real problem, which was posed at the scale of society, was the problem of jobs for all.
Objectively, therefore, the miners were challenging the plans of the entire capitalist class with their strike. They could just as well have taken this to its logical conclusion and seen their fight as part of a general fight of the working class as a whole, against the collective plans of the capitalists and their state. Instead of a sectional dispute to stop pit closures - for "coal not dole" as the slogan went - it would have become a political strike, openly directed against the policy of the state.
Whether the miners would have succeeded in overcoming the deep sectional divisions, which are fuelled by the trade-union machineries to protect their respective patches, remains an open question, since it was not tried. But armed with a fighting programme, there was no objective reason why the miners should not have been able to win over to such a collective fight, at least some sections of workers who were directly and immediately threatened by Thatcher's policies in the same way as they were - whether dockers, local government workers, steel and railway workers, etc...
The issue of the working miners in Nottinghamshire, the small minorities of strike breakers in other parts of the country and the fact that coal was being produced and transported - all these issues would then have been relegated to the second place where they belonged. Because the miners' real weapon would have become their capacity to create a snow-ball effect, bringing out on strike a constantly growing number of workers in as many different sections of the working class as possible, so as to reach the point where the capitalist class felt that the threat to its profits was sufficiently serious to get rid of Thatcher and her plans and make concessions, before a real socia explosion did far more damage.
What analogy with today?
Today the economic landscape is actually quite similar to the 1980s. And the strikes of workers might be token strikes, rather than real all-outs as they were in the 1970s and 1980s. But they need to win just as much.
However, yet again the working class is suffering from sectionalist isolationism imposed by union leaderships. And these leaders know better. Of course they do. It's common sense that the more out on strike, the merrier, and the more likely to win. In other words, this is conscious defeatism by the union leaderships.
Is there a law to prevent an all-out strike? Or a law to prevent different sections of workers being called out on strike by the union leaderships on the same days? No there isn't.
As a direct result of this conscious defeatism on the part of the leaders, not one section of workers can be said really to have won a dispute as a result of the 2022-23 strike wave. The postal workers have suffered a terrible defeat. Workers on the railways, organised in the RMT, are under a de facto no strike ban until the end of this month (April). Their national strike which for the first time in 40 years represented a united front against the train operating companies and government, was called off to allow individual company council reps to negotiate away their working conditions, company by company.
And the one section of workers with the industrial muscle to stop the trains completely, that is train drivers in the ASLEF union, are now in their 21st week of strike but had only had 14 one-day strikes in all this time, gaining nothing.
Let's describe their strike picket which took place this last Friday at Euston. ASLEF is supposedly fighting 16 train companies for a pay rise, but drivers for each company are called to strike on different days. So, on Friday only drivers from Avanti West Coast Midlands Trains and CrossCountry struck. Trains were stopped, so their strike could be said to have been as solid as ever, despite this ridiculous drawn-out strike agenda. Bit that morning not one striking driver turned up for the picket. It was manned by 4 full-time union officials and General Secretary Mick Whelan who was there to tell the media - who far outnumbered the pickets - that the strikes would go on unless someone from the government spoke to him.
What is our point? It's an obvious one that an opportunity is being lost, because of the same simple problem, the the degeneracy and bankruptcy of union leaders stuck in blind sectionalism and pursuing their own interests. An opportunity was lost in 2022. When the so-called strike wave began the RMT's Mick Lynch had announced that "the working class was back". And by that December almost every single category of workers had voted for strike - including nurses and other NHS staff - some of whom struck for the very first time.
This would have been the occasion for workers to come together collectively and co-ordinate their fight in order to at least halt the bosses' offensive, since everyone shared the common demand for wage increases after the unprecedented fall in living standards. But this did not happen, thanks entirely to the union leaderships who justified themselves by claiming deceitfully that it would have been illegal to have the general strike - which workers were suggesting.
In fact, a general strike could have resolved the situation then and there - especially for NHS workers - including junior doctors who are now in their 16th month of strikes, in splendid isolation.
So yes we can say that 40 years later, lessons have not been learnt. The more workers on strike together the more effective the strike - that's A-B-C. And going further and developing a class policy - that would inevitably have to be the next step. The need for this today is even more urgent than it was in 1984-85. Because today, the world economic recession is even deeper and more dangerous in every respect. We can say that the bosses - along with the government - have a collective policy in order to survive at all of our expense.
The only policy which can get the working class out of this current situation is for workers to actively bring down the sectional barriers which separate them from other workers, themselves, and go on strike together. They will have to go physically to the others and bring them out with them, foot by foot, hand by hand, as it were!
It is the hardest task. It means bypassing official channels - and the law. And its effectiveness would be all the greater because it would take the bosses - and the union burocrats completely by surprise.
If the 1984-85 miners' strike teaches us anything, it is that we cannot expect anything from the existing union leaderships - and if we do, we will definitely lose the fight. Our fellow workers on the ground are our only and best allies.
But this time round, given the depth of the economic and social crisis, nationally end internationally, if we want to win, we are going to have to prepare to do much more than fight for better wages and conditions - we will need to think about how to take on the system itself. In other words what we will need to prepare for, is a working class revolution.
17 April 2024