25 years after the miners’ strike (1)
March 3, 2009
There’s a lot in the media at the moment about the 25 year anniversary of one of the most memorable events in the history of industrial action in the UK. The national miners’ strike began in March 1984 and lasted for a whole year. The strike started after the Government announced plans to close around 20 pits across the country, because they were no longer considered economical. This would see the loss of 20,000 miners’ jobs. The first pit to see a walkout was Cortonwood near Barnsley, followed by many more and by the middle of March half the 187,000 miners in the country had joined the strike.
The miners strike turned into a bitter battle between Margaret Thatcher’s Government, which was changing the economic outlook of the country and taking a more hands-off approach to industry, and the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), led by the infamous Arthur Scargill; described as:
a ‘fiery Marxist Yorskshireman’
The aim of the miners’ strike was to bring the country’s energy supply to a standstill in order to gain bargaining power with the Government, but this could not happen as anticipated because Thatcher had ensured large stocks of coal were kept aside at sites across the country before the strike took place.
This was in the years before the 1992 legislation on lawful industrial action: the Trade Union and Labour Relations (consolidation) Act, and there were different rules relating to industrial action which meant that ‘flying pickets’ were sent all over the country to different collieries, to persuade miners to not go to work. Another key factor in the events was that a ballot had been taken in 1981 in Yorkshire, where NUM members voted to walk out in support of any pit that was threatened with closure. This meant that when the strikes started in 1984, the NUM could argue that the decision for national walkouts in support of the mines under threat of closure had already been balloted.
… continues tomorrow.
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