Originally posted by bezzer
I’m Just interested really, if anyone on hear, took part in the miners strike, and remembers some of the brutality that was involved or what was going on in the media at the time and ultimately why and how the pitt closures went ahead.
Only just seen this thread and haven't read all the posts, so I may just be going over ground already covered. But here are a few personal memories of the Strike...
There have been a lot of complicated arguments over whether you should have bveen for/against the miners, but I can boil it down to this: The miners had been given a raw deal by a vicious Tory Goverment, that for reasons of petty spite and revenge [for 72/74] as well as political ideology was prepared to destroy an industry and all the jobs and communities that depended upon it. Whatever disagreements you may have had about how the Strike was run etc, I think they deserved to be supported in taking the fight back to the government. When they lost, it was a blow for everyone who suffered under Thatcher at that time.
The stuff about uneconomic pits was bullshit. It was much more uneconomic to close the industry down, along with all the other ones that directly or indirectly depended on mining [everything from the factory I used to work at which made support structures for the mineshafts to the newsagents across the road from the local pit]. All those workers on the dole rather than earning wages, meaning the tax-payers having to pay them their benefits as well as their reduced spending power depressing the local economy as a whole.
My dad had been a miner and a left-wing NUM activist, but he'd died in 1980; I'm positive he would have backed the Strike 100%, but I remember that at his old pit, on the Derbys/Notts border, only 17 were out throughout the Strike. It caused a lot of bitterness and division; I had big rows with friends/relatives who opposed the strike.
As for the police, I was living in Derbys and working over the border in Notts at the time and got stopped day in day out at the border by the cops, who always searched us and the car; Once, they found a copy of 'the Miner' which I'd been given by a striking mate and took down the car's number and said that if it was seen anywhere near a picket line, we'd be arrested on the spot.
The Tories were well organized and had planned the whole thing out years in advance [the Ridley Plan]. But a major factor in why the miners lost was the lack of support they got from the rest of the labour movement - be it the unions or the Labour Party, which was already then making the move to the right to appeal to the 'moderate' floating voter and didn't want to be seen to give any support to militancy.
This was reflected to some extent in my local Labour Party branch, which had to be seen to be believed. One prominent local Labour councillor [he still is btw] was a scab at the nearby depot and the left in the branch somehow managed to get them to pass a resolution debarring him from being present when the strike was discussed; so whenever anything to do with the strike came up on the agenda, everyone would point at him and he had to go and sit in the bar until someone called him back in
.
More seriously, I remember when the Miners' Wives Support Groups were set up, a local member came to the branch to appeal for support and of course some cash for their fighting fund. She went in expecting, as you would, to get a sympathetic hearing. She looked so shocked when one right-winger after another just laid into her and the strike in general. The secretary of the branch Women's Section yelled at her to 'bugger off and not come back begging again' [this is true, really
]. The poor miners wife was so shaken - she had been talking about joining the Labour Party, but a few months later she joined the WRP instead.
There were times when the miners might have won - like when NACODS, the pit deputies' union voted 82% to come out; but there was always a reluctance by the union & Labour leadership to do anything that would make strike action look legitimate or strengthen the left.
One lasting memory is from a rally in London just after the end of the Strike. Union leader Ken Gill praised the miners and then said he was proud of the 'magnificent support they got from the working class and the labour movement'. A miner behind me shouted 'BOLLOCKS' at the top of his voice. I think many miners and their families were politicized during the Strike and had their views on such as the state/media/police altered forever, but having stood up for so long, only to be defeated caused a lot of demoralization and bitterness.
will these print on my posting? excuse the newbie pls, cheers
