From 1984 until 1985, a major miners' strike shook the British coal industry in response to proposed closures of uneconomic pits. It was led by Arthur Scargill of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) against the National Coal Board (NCB), a government agency. Opposition to the strike was led by the Conservative government of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who wanted to reduce the power of the trade unions.
The NUM was divided over the action, which began in Yorkshire and Scotland, and spread to many other coalfields nationally. More than a fifth of mineworkers, especially in the Nottingham area, continued working from the very beginning of the dispute; by late 1984 miners increasingly returned to work. Few major trade unions supported the NUM officially, though many of their ordinary members set up support groups raising money and collecting food for miners and their families. The absence of a national ballot by the NUM to support the national strike weakened wider official support from other trade unions. Violent confrontations between flying pickets and police characterised the year-long strike, which ended in a decisive victory for the Conservative government and allowed the closure of most of Britain's collieries (coal mines). Many observers regard the strike as "the most bitter industrial dispute in British history". The number of person-days of work lost to the strike was over 26 million, making it the largest since the 1926 General Strike. After a strike was narrowly averted in February 1981, pit closures and pay restraint led to unofficial strikes. The main strike started on 6 March 1984 with a walkout at Cortonwood Colliery, which led to the NUM's Yorkshire Area's sanctioning of a strike on the grounds of a ballot result from 1981 in the Yorkshire Area, which was later challenged in court. The NUM Executive Council relied on their Rule 41 to support strikes called by NUM regions; in some cases, the regional NUM executive declared a strike official after a regional ballot had returned a majority against striking. The NUM strategy was to cause a severe energy shortage of the sort that had won victory in the 1972 strike. The government strategy, designed by Margaret Thatcher, was threefold: to build up ample coal stocks, to keep as many miners at work as possible, and to use police to break up attacks by pickets on working miners. The critical element was the NUM's failure to hold a national strike ballot.
The strike was ruled illegal in September 1984 in England and Wales, as no national ballot of NUM members had been held. The High Court of Scotland ruled that the strike was legal in Scotland: the case of Fettes v NUM Scottish Area found that the Scottish Area of the NUM had followed their rules for calling a strike.
The national strike ended on 3 March 1985. It was a defining moment in British industrial relations, the NUM's defeat significantly weakening the trade union movement. It was a major victory for Thatcher and the Conservative Party, with the Thatcher government able to consolidate their economic programme. The number of strikes fell sharply in 1985 as a result of the "demonstration effect" and trade union power in general diminished. Poverty increased in former coal mining areas, and in 1994 Grimethorpe in South Yorkshire was the poorest settlement in the country.
Background
thumb|350px|Coal mining employment in the UK, 1880–2012 (DECC data)
While more than 1,000 collieries were working in the UK during the first half of the 20th century, by 1984 only 173 were still operating and employment had dropped from its peak of 1 million in 1922, down to 231,000 for the decade to 1982. This long-term decline in coal employment was common across the developed world; in the United States, employment in the coal-mining industry continued to fall from 180,000 in 1985 to 70,000 in the year 2000.
Coal mining, nationalised by Clement Attlee's Labour government in 1947, was managed by the National Coal Board (NCB) under Ian MacGregor in 1984. As in most of Europe, the industry was heavily subsidised. In 1982–1983, the operating loss per tonne was £3.05, and international market prices for coal were about 25% cheaper than that charged by the NCB.
By 1984, the richest seams of coal had been increasingly worked out and the remaining coal was more difficult and more expensive to reach. The solution was mechanisation and greater efficiency per worker, making many miners redundant due to overcapacity of production. The industry was restructured between 1958 and 1967 in cooperation with the unions, with a halving of the workforce; offset by government and industry initiatives to provide alternative employment. Stabilisation occurred between 1968 and 1977, when closures were minimised with the support of the unions even though the broader economy slowed. The accelerated contraction imposed by Thatcher after 1979 was strenuously opposed by the unions. In the post-war consensus, policy allowed for closures only where agreed to by the workers, who in turn received guaranteed economic security. Consensus did not apply when closures were enforced and redundant miners had severely limited employment alternatives.
National Union of Mineworkers
thumb|[[Blackhall Colliery in County Durham in 1970]]
The mining industry was effectively a closed shop. Although not official policy, employment of non-unionised labour would have led to a mass walkout of mineworkers.
In the more militant mining areas, strikebreakers were reviled and never forgiven for betraying the community. In 1984, some pit villages had no other industries for many miles around. The dominance of mining in these local economies led Oxford professor Andrew Glyn to conclude that no pit closure could be beneficial for government revenue.
From 1981, the NUM was led by Arthur Scargill, a militant trade unionist and socialist, with strong leanings towards communism. Scargill was a vocal opponent of Thatcher's government. In March 1983, he stated "The policies of this government are clear – to destroy the coal industry and the NUM". Scargill wrote in the NUM journal The Miner: "Waiting in the wings, wishing to chop us to pieces, is Yankee steel butcher MacGregor. This 70-year-old multi-millionaire import, who massacred half the steel workforce in less than three years, is almost certainly brought in to wield the axe on pits. It's now or never for Britain's mineworkers. This is the final chance – while we still have the strength – to save our industry". On 12 May 1983, in response to being questioned on how he would respond if the Conservatives were re-elected in the general election, Scargill replied: "My attitude would be the same as the attitude of the working class in Germany when the Nazis came to power. It does not mean that because at some stage you elect a government that you tolerate its existence. You oppose it". He also said he would oppose a second-term Thatcher government "as vigorously as I possibly can".</blockquote>
Scargill also rejected the idea that pits that did not make a profit were "uneconomic": he claimed there was no such thing as an uneconomic pit and argued that no pits should close except due to geological exhaustion or safety.
National Association of Colliery Overmen, Deputies and Shotfirers
No mining could legally be done without being overseen by an overman or deputy.
Most pits proposed for closure in 1981 were closed on a case-by-case basis by the colliery review procedure, and the NCB cut employment by 41,000 between March 1981 and March 1984.
Thatcher's strategy
thumb|upright|Margaret Thatcher in 1983
Thatcher expected Scargill to force a confrontation, and in response she set up a defence in depth. and allocated funds from the highly profitable electrical supply system to stockpile at least six months' worth of coal. Thatcher's team set up mobile police units so that forces from outside the strike areas could neutralise efforts by flying pickets to stop the transport of coal to power stations. It used the National Recording Centre (NRC), set up in 1972 by the Association of Chief Police Officers for England and Wales linking 43 police forces to enable police forces to travel to assist in major disturbances. Scargill played into her hands by ignoring the buildup of coal stocks and calling the strike at the end of winter when demand for coal was declining.
In 1983, Thatcher appointed Ian MacGregor to head the National Coal Board. He had turned the British Steel Corporation from one of the least efficient steel-makers in Europe to one of the most efficient, bringing the company into near profit. Meanwhile, the Thatcher government had prepared against a repeat of the effective 1974 industrial action by stockpiling coal, converting some power stations to burn heavy fuel oil, and recruiting fleets of road hauliers to transport coal in case sympathetic railwaymen went on strike to support the miners.
Picketing
right|thumb|Miners' strike rally in London, 1984
The strike was almost universally observed (leaving aside the NUM's cokemen and clerical workers) in South Wales, Yorkshire, Scotland, North East England and Kent, but there was less support across the Midlands and in North Wales. Nottinghamshire became a target for aggressive and sometimes violent picketing as Scargill's pickets tried to stop local miners from working. The 'Battle of Orgreave' took place on 18 June 1984 at the Orgreave Coking Plant near Rotherham, which striking miners were attempting to blockade. The confrontation, between about 5,000 miners and the same number of police, broke into violence after police on horseback charged with truncheons drawn – 51 picketers and 72 policemen were injured. Other less well known, but bloody, battles between pickets and police took place, for example, in Maltby, South Yorkshire.
During the strike, 11,291 people were arrested, mostly for breach of the peace or obstructing roads whilst picketing, of whom 8,392 were charged and between 150 and 200 were imprisoned.
From September, some miners returned to work even where the strike had been universally observed. It led to an escalation of tension, and riots in Easington in Durham In September, for the first time, NACODS voted to strike with a vote of 81% in favour.
In 2009, Scargill wrote that the settlement agreed with NACODS and the NCB would have ended the strike and said, "The monumental betrayal by NACODS has never been explained in a way that makes sense." Although Nicholls did not order the NUM to hold a ballot, he forbade the union from disciplining members who crossed picket lines. Kent NUM leader Jack Collins said after the decision to go back without any agreement of amnesty for the sacked men, "The people who have decided to go back to work and leave men on the sidelines are traitors to the trade-union movement."
The NUM had held three ballots on national strikes: 55% voted against in January 1982, and 61% voted against in October 1982 and March 1983.
In ballots in South Wales on 10 March 1984, only 10 of the 28 pits voted in favour of striking, but the arrival of pickets from Yorkshire the next day led to virtually all miners in South Wales going on strike in solidarity.
Area ballots on 15 and 16 March 1984 saw verdicts against a strike in Cumberland, Midlands, North Derbyshire (narrowly), South Derbyshire, Lancashire, Leicestershire (with around 90% against), Nottinghamshire and North Wales.
Thatcher on 19 July 1984 delivered a speech in which she spoke to backbench MPs and compared the Falklands War to the strike:
She claimed that the miners' leader was making the country witness an attempt at preventing democracy.</blockquote>
Neil Kinnock supported the call for a national ballot in April 1984.</blockquote>
At the Battle of Orgreave on 18 June 1984, the NUM pickets failed to stop the movement of lorries amid police violence and subsequent retaliation by the pickets, with the footage controversially reversed by the BBC on their news broadcast. The violence was costing the NUM public support in the country as a whole, as a Gallup poll showed 79% disapproval of NUM methods. While it was now clear that the government had the equipment, the forces, the organisation, and the will to prevail against pickets, the strong pro-strike solidarity outside of the Midlands and the possibility of extended strike action by other trade unions, especially the NACODS which could shut down every pit in the country if NACODS members went on strike, was a constant threat for the government and had the outcome of who would be likely to win the miners' strike dispute hanging in the balance for many months.
The number of miners at work grew to 53,000 by late June.
|-
! Area / Groups
! Members (approx)
! % for strike action, national ballot of January 1982
! % for strike action, national ballot of October 1982
! % for strike action, national ballot of March 1983
! % for strike action, area ballots of March 1984
|-
| Cumberland || 650 || 52 || 36 || 42 || 22
|-
| Derbyshire || 10,500 || 50 || 40 || 38 || 50
|-
| S. Derbyshire || 3,000 || 16 || 13 || 12 || 16
|-
| Durham || 13,000 || 46 || 31 || 39 || —
|-
| Kent || 2,000 || 54 || 69 || 68 || —
|-
| Leicester || 2,500 || 20 || 13 || 18 || —
|-
| Midlands (West) || 12,200 || 27 || 23 || 21 || 27
|-
| Nottingham || 32,000 || 30 || 21 || 19 || 26
|-
| Lancashire || 7,500 || 40 || 44 || 39 || 41
|-
| Northumberland || 5,000 || 37 || 32 || 35 || 52
|-
| Scotland || 11,500 || 63 || 69 || 50 || —
|-
| Yorkshire || 56,000 || 66 || 56 || 54 || —
|-
| North Wales || 1,000 || 18 || 24 || 23 || 36
|-
| South Wales || 21,000 || 54 || 59 || 68 || —
|-
| Colliery Officials || 16,000 || 14 || 10 || 15 || —
|-
| Cokemen || 4,500 || 32 || 22 || 39 || —
|-
! National Average || || 45 || 39 || 39 || —
|}
Mobilisation of police
The government mobilised police forces from around Britain including the Metropolitan Police in an attempt to stop pickets preventing strikebreakers from working. They attempted to stop pickets travelling from Yorkshire to Nottinghamshire which led to many protests. On 26 March 1984, pickets protested against the police powers by driving very slowly on the M1 and the A1 around Doncaster.
During the strike 11,291 people were arrested and 8,392 were charged with breach of the peace or obstructing the highway. In many former mining areas antipathy towards the police remained strong for many years. Bail forms for picketing offences set restrictions on residence and movement in relation to NCB property. banned the dependents of strikers from receiving "urgent needs" payments and applied a compulsory deduction from the benefits of strikers' dependents. The government viewed the legislation not as concerned with saving public funds but "to restore a fairer bargaining balance between employers and trade unions" by increasing the necessity to return to work. The Department of Social Security assumed that striking miners were receiving £15 per week from the union (equivalent to £49 in 2019), based on payments early in the strike that were not made in the later months when funds had become exhausted.
MI5 "counter-subversion"
The Director General of MI5 from 1992 to 1996, Dame Stella Rimington, wrote in her autobiography in 2001 that MI5 'counter-subversion' exercises against the NUM and striking miners included tapping union leaders' phones. She denied the agency had informers in the NUM, specifically denying its chief executive Roger Windsor had been an agent.
Public opinion and the media
According to John Campbell "though there was widespread sympathy for the miners, faced with the loss of their livelihoods, there was remarkably little public support for the strike, because of Scargill's methods". When asked in July 1984 whether they approved or disapproved of the methods used by the miners, 15% approved; 79% disapproved and 6% did not know. When asked the same question during 5–10 December 1984, 7% approved; 88% disapproved and 5% did not know.
Writing in the Industrial Relations Journal immediately after the strike in 1985, Professor Brian Towers of the University of Nottingham commented on the way the media had portrayed strikers, stating that there had been "the obsessive reporting of the 'violence' of generally relatively unarmed men and some women who, in the end, offered no serious challenge to the truncheons, shields and horses of a well-organised, optimally deployed police force."
The stance of the Daily Mirror varied. Having initially been uninterested in the dispute, the paper's owner Robert Maxwell took a supportive stance in July 1984 by organising a seaside trip for striking miners and meeting with NUM officials to discuss tactics.
Media reports alleged that senior NUM officials were personally keeping some of the funds. In November 1984, it was alleged that senior NUM officials had travelled to Libya for money. Cash from the Libyan government was particularly damaging coming seven months after the murder of policewoman Yvonne Fletcher outside the Libyan embassy in London by Libyan agents. In 1990, the Daily Mirror and TV programme The Cook Report claimed that Scargill and the NUM had received money from the Libyan government. The allegations were based on allegations by Roger Windsor, who was the NUM official who had spoken to Libyan officials. Roy Greenslade, the editor of the Daily Mirror, said 18 years later he was "now convinced that Scargill didn't misuse strike funds and that the union didn't get money from Libya." This was long after an investigation by Seumas Milne described the allegations as wholly without substance and a "classic smear campaign".
MI5 surveillance on NUM vice-president Mick McGahey found he was "extremely angry and embarrassed" about Scargill's links with the Libyan regime, but did not express his concerns publicly; however he was happy to take money from the Soviet Union.
Polish trade union Solidarity criticised Scargill for "going too far and threatening the elected government", which influenced some Polish miners in Britain to oppose the strike. The supply of Polish coal to British power stations during the strike led to a brief picket of the embassy of Poland in London. Property, families and pets belonging to working miners were also attacked. Ted McKay, the North Wales secretary who supported a national ballot before strike action, said he had received death threats and threats to kidnap his children. The intimidation of working miners in Nottinghamshire, vandalism to cars and pelting them with stones, paint or brake fluid, was a major factor in the formation of the breakaway UDM. Taxi driver, David Wilkie, was killed on 30 November 1984 while driving a non-striking miner to Merthyr Vale Colliery, in South Wales. Two striking miners dropped a concrete post onto his car from a road bridge and he died at the scene. The miners served a prison sentence for manslaughter. Police reported that the incident had a sobering effect on many of the pickets and led to a decrease in aggression. Two miners from Wakefield were convicted of causing grievous bodily harm and four others were acquitted of riot and assault.
Two pickets, David Jones and Joe Green, were killed in separate incidents, and three teenagers (Darren Holmes, aged 15, and Paul Holmes and Paul Womersley, both aged 14) died picking coal from a colliery waste heap in the winter. The NUM names its memorial lectures after the pickets. Jones's death raised tensions between strikers and those who continued to work. On 15 March 1984, he was hit in the chest by a half-brick thrown by a youth who opposed the strike when he confronted him for vandalising his car, but the post-mortem ruled that this had not caused his death and it was more likely to have been caused by being pressed against the pit gates earlier in the day. Wakefield Council provided free meals for children during school holidays. Fundraising for the so-called "Dirty Thirty" striking Leicestershire miners was extensive and they redirected some of their excess aid to other parts of the NUM. The ISTC donated food parcels and toys during the summer, but gave no money as they did not want to be accused of financing the aggressive picketing.
In Wales, the Welsh Language Society (Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg), a Welsh language pressure group, organised various actions in support of the striking miners. Notably, the society organised door-to-door food collections in the Welsh-speaking heartlands for donation to the miners and their families in the South Wales valleys; this was done from the second week of the strike until its conclusion the following year. The organisation also facilitated dairy farmers from rural Wales to travel to the southern valleys to distribute free milk in support of the miners. At the time, the dairy industry was struggling due to the milk quotas imposed by the Thatcher government. In another show of solidarity, members of the society in Carmarthenshire paid for a fifty-seater coach to bring the children of striking miners from the valleys to the county for their holidays, with some members even offering spare rooms in their homes for the children to stay in. In response, a group of miners' wives and girlfriends who supported the strike set up a network that became known as Women Against Pit Closures.
Variation in observing the strike
The figures below are given in Richards (1996). The figures of working and striking miners were an issue of controversy throughout the dispute, and some other sources give figures that contradict Richards's table.
{| class="wikitable sortable" border="1" style="text-align:center" align=centre
|+Levels of participation in the 1984–1985 strike by area Other explanations include the perception that Nottinghamshire pits were safe from the threat of closure, as they had large reserves, and the area-level incentive scheme introduced by Tony Benn caused them to be amongst the best-paid in Britain. He argues that Nottinghamshire miners reacted in the same way in 1984 as they did to the unofficial strikes in 1969 and 1970, both of which saw blockading of Nottinghamshire pits by striking miners from South Yorkshire and both of which were regarded as unconstitutional under NUM rules.
Responses to the strike
The opposition Labour Party was divided in its attitude, He condemned the actions of pickets and police as "violence", which prompted a statement from the Police Federation that some officers would struggle to work under a Labour government. Kinnock later blamed Scargill for the failure of the strike.
Former party leader and prime minister James Callaghan said that a ballot was needed to decide when to end the strike and return to work. When speaking in a miners' hall in November 1984, Willis condemned the violence and advocated a compromise, which led to a noose being lowered slowly from the rafters until it rested close to his head.
The NUM had a "Triple Alliance" with the ISTC and the railway unions. Solidarity action was taken by railway workers and few crossed picket lines, The strike emboldened the NCB to accelerate the closure of pits on economic grounds.
Tensions between strikers and those who worked continued after the return to work. Many strikebreakers left the industry and were shunned or attacked by other miners. Almost all the strikebreakers in Kent had left the industry by April 1986, after suffering numerous attacks on their homes. but by March 2005, there were only eight deep mines left. Since then, the last pit in Northumberland, Ellington Colliery has closed whilst pits at Rossington and Harworth have been mothballed. In 1983, Britain had 174 working collieries; by 2009 there were six. The last deep colliery in the UK, Kellingley Colliery, known locally as "The Big K" closed for the last time on 18 December 2015, bringing an end to centuries of deep coal mining.
The 1994 European Union inquiry into poverty classified Grimethorpe in South Yorkshire as the poorest settlement in the country and one of the poorest in the EU. South Yorkshire became an Objective 1 development zone and every ward in the City of Wakefield district was classified as in need of special assistance.
In 2003, the reduced mining industry was reportedly more productive in terms of output per worker than the coal industries in France, Germany and the United States.
A murder in Annesley, Nottinghamshire in 2004 was believed to be the result of an argument between former members of the NUM and UDM, indicating continued tensions, but was subsequently found to be unrelated.
In the 2016 Brexit referendum, cities and regions at the heart of the dispute voted by a majority to leave. Scargill, a supporter of leaving the EU, said that the Brexit vote presented an opportunity to re-open closed coal mines.
In 2021 Peter Fahy, the former chief constable of Greater Manchester Police, argued the policing of the strike was politically motivated and "took policing a long time to recover" from, and warned that the proposed Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill risked drawing policing into politics once more.
Pardons
In October 2020, the Scottish Government announced plans to introduce legislation to pardon Scottish miners convicted of certain offences during the strike. The announcement, by Humza Yousaf, the Scottish justice secretary, followed the recommendation of an independent review on the impact of policing on communities during the strike. The (asp 6) was subsequently passed by the Scottish Parliament.
Historical assessments
Many historians have provided interpretations and explanations of the defeat, largely centring on Scargill's decisions.
- Numerous scholars have concluded that Scargill's decisive tactical error was to substitute his famous flying picket for the holding of a national strike ballot. His policy divided the NUM membership, undermined his position with the leaders of the trade union movement, hurt the union's reputation in British public opinion, and led to violence along the picket line. That violence strengthened the stature of the Coal Board and the Thatcher government.
- Journalist Andrew Marr argues that:
:
- In a book published by the National Coal Mining Museum for England, David John Douglass argues that too much focus has been put on the personality of Scargill and not enough on the decision of the Yorkshire NUM to invoke the area's 1981 ballot result to strike against economic closures.
: