Industry | 2009.03.15
Seumas Milne: A generation on, the miners' strike can speak to our time
Renewed attempts to blame Scargill for the coal industry\'s demise are absurd, but it\'s about the future as much as the past
You might have thought that the passage of a quarter of a century might allow some perspective on Britain\'s greatest social confrontation since the 1920s. The miners\' strike of 1984-5, which officially kicked off 25 years ago today, was after all a social and political tipping point that has had no real parallel anywhere else in the world. And now that the free-market fundamentalism unleashed by Margaret Thatcher in the strike\'s aftermath is being so comprehensively discredited by the crisis of deregulated capitalism she championed, it should be a good time to reassess the most determined bid to resist it in the first place.
Instead, the anniversary has been the cue for a succession of former Thatcherite ministers and liberal pundits to unite in blaming not the Conservative government but the miners and their leadership for the onslaught of pit closures that tore the guts out of communities across Britain in the wake of the year-long dispute. It\'s hardly surprising, of course, that those who used a militarised police force to break the country\'s most powerful union, such as Lord Tebbit, should blame the miners\' leader Arthur Scargill and brand the strike a "war on democracy". Like Lord Lawson, who declared that preparing to take on the miners had been "just like re-arming to face the threat of Hitler" and now describes them as "great people", Tebbit regrets that closures were "very hurtful in many areas".
But this Alice in Wonderland consensus on our recent history now stretches across the mainstream media. According to such received wisdom, it was the strike itself that caused the breakneck rundown of mining, rather than the government that ordered it - and most of all it was Scargill himself. For one Guardian editorial writer last week, the intransigence of the miners\' leader and his failure to call a national ballot "guaranteed that Mrs Thatcher\'s victory would be total", while the miners were "lions led by donkeys" - even though they bafflingly continued to vote for Scargill thereafter.
The same theme can be found in Andrew Marr\'s bestselling A History of Modern Britain (withdrawn from shops this week because of libel difficulties), which dismisses the former National Union of Mineworkers president as "incompetent" for calling a strike in the spring, and holds him responsible for coal\'s early demise.
All this is to turn reality on its head. The Tory leadership was without question determined to avenge its humiliating defeats by the miners in the early 1970s and provoked the strike in March precisely because an overtime ban called the previous autumn was proving so successful in running down coal stocks. There is no evidence that more accommodating tactics, or any of the deals actually on offer, would have even slowed the rundown of the industry, as the contemptuous treatment of those areas that broke the strike later showed.
That\'s not to say the strike couldn\'t have succeeded - in fact the only time when Thatcher was prepared to settle was when she believed she was "in danger of losing" in October 1984. From that point on, only effective support from the rest of the labour movement could have tipped the balance. But the NUM\'s choice was not between humane decline and the gamble of all-out victory: it was between the certainty of rapid rundown and the possibility of halting the assault. And the claim that the miners\' leaders threw away that chance by refusing to hold a national ballot ignores the reality of the time: most NUM activists were convinced that once more than 80% of the workforce were already on strike, calling a ballot would be seen as a get-out and invite a no vote - and deny those prepared to defend their jobs the chance to do so.
The irony is that many of those who now make these kinds of arguments about the strike often accused the miners\' leaders at the time of scaremongering about pit closures; ridiculed the NUM for resisting the closure of uneconomic pits; and wouldn\'t in any case have welcomed the consequences of a miners\' victory. In fact, the full costs of the war against the miners - including the strike, closures, redundancies and economic and welfare costs - are well over £30bn at current prices and far exceed those of the more rational energy policy the Tories rejected to crush the core of organised labour.
A generation later, these debates about the strike can seem arcane. But its outcome could not matter more for the country we have inherited. It\'s not just the wreckage of mining communities, but the entire political and economic direction has been shaped by the fallout from that convulsive dispute. The enfeeblement of unions, the explosion of inequality, social atomisation, the collapse of confidence in a political alternative and Britain\'s harsh brand of neoliberalism all flow from its aftermath. Success for the miners would, by contrast, have at least seriously weakened Thatcher, reined in the government\'s worst excesses and halted Labour\'s headlong rush for the third way.
The argument about coal is now dominated by the threat of global warming, rather than the couple of thousand colliers still mining it in Britain. Paradoxically, the vandalisation of the industry played an especially damaging role in holding back the development of clean coal technology and carbon capture, in which Britain led the world until John Major\'s government closed the Coal Research Establishment in Cheltenham when it privatised the industry in 1994.
Of course, it should be no surprise that the miners\' strike remains a focus of controversy and myth-making 25 years later, because at root it was about power and class, not fuel - just as today\'s arguments about its legacy are more about the future than the past. The underlying message of those who rubbish the strike and deride its leaders is that militant trade unionism is a road to oblivion - just when industrial conflict seems likely to grow. The real lesson of the dispute is that such battles can\'t always be fought at times and in ways of your choosing.
The strike was a fight for jobs, but it was also a challenge to the market-driven restructuring of economic and social life already under way. It raised the alternative of a different Britain from the greed and individualism of the Thatcher years, rooted in solidarity and collective action. As the neoliberal order that Thatcher helped to build crumbles before us, that is a message that speaks to our times.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/12/miners-strike
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