The miners' strike - 25 years on

Mar 1 2009 by Michael Kelly, Sunday Sun

ONE of the greatest industrial disputes this country has ever known started 25 years ago this month. It became an idealogical struggle between Margaret Thatcher’s Tory Government and her free market aspirations and the working class National Union of Mineworkers led by Arthur Scargill. A quarter of a century on the passions provoked by the year-long “Great Miners’ Strike” still run high. MIKE KELLY reports.

IT was a strike on a scale the country had never known before and, making it unique, it was not about pay and conditions but the basic right to work.

However, it also boasted one other unique aspect which many say proved to be the miners’ undoing . . . a national strike without a national ballot.

As this single fact brought the full force of the law down on the head of the striking miners, the result was never in doubt.

“We were murdered,” was the candid assessment of Dave Hopper, General Secretary of the North East branch of the NUM.

Dave Wray, who was a striking miner, was equally frank. “It was a bloody awful defeat, we got absolutely destroyed.”

But almost in the same breath Dave, now a respected university lecturer, says: “It was the best 12 months of my life.”

It began as a series of wildcat strikes after the National Coal Board, headed by Ian MacGregor, announced it was to close 20 pits, costing 20,000 jobs.

Mr MacGregor had been appointed to the post in 1983 by Mrs Thatcher having previously been head of the British Steel Corporation where he’d halved the work force in the space of two years in an attempt to make it profitable, raising concerns he would do the same to the mining industry which was heavily subsidised by the Government.

NUM president Arthur Scargill claimed this was the tip of the iceberg and there were plans to shut 70 pits in total with the loss of 70,000 jobs. Many people, including fellow trade unionists, thought he was grossly exaggerating.

Fearful of the affect it could have on their communities, strike action began in Yorkshire. More than 6000 miners were already on strike when a local ballot led to strike action from March 5 at Cortonwood Colliery at Brampton Bierlow, and at Bullcliffe Wood colliery, near Ossett.

What had prompted it was the further announcement by the Coal Board that five pits were to be subject to “accelerated closure” within just five weeks, including Herrington in County Durham, Snowdown in Kent and Polmaise in Scotland.

On March 12, NUM president Arthur Scargill declared it a national strike and called for similar action from members in all coal fields.

Dave Wray explained: “The heart of the ballot issue is why I still have affection for Scargill, because he saw it as a moral issue. How can a member in Kent or Nottinghamshire whose jobs are safe vote on the future of someone in Durham or Wales? It’s morally indefensible.”