1984–1985 United Kingdom miners' strike

The miners' strike of 1984–1985 was a major industrial action affecting the British coal industry. It was a defining moment in British industrial relations, and significantly weakened the British trades union movement. Coal was a nationalised industry and, as in most of Europe, was heavily subsidised. Supporters of the government claim that coal was a dying industry that could not be supported indefinitely. Critics point out that mining productivity was higher in Britain than anywhere else in Europe or America and that the industry was only troubled because other governments subsidised their coal industries by much more than Britain did.

The strike became a symbolic struggle, since the Miners' Union was one of the strongest in the country. The strike ended with the defeat of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) by the Conservative government, which then proceeded to consolidate its free market "neo-liberal" programme. The political power of the NUM was broken permanently and some years later the Labour Party moved away from its traditional socialist agenda. The dispute exposed deep divisions in British society and caused considerable bitterness, especially in Northern England and in South Wales where several mining communities were destroyed. Ten deaths resulted from events around the strike, which is exceptional in the history of British industrial relations (although lower than accidental deaths in the mines in a typical year in the 1970s). The contrast with the widespread observance of the miners' strikes in 1972 and 1974, and the support that the rest of the trade union movement had given to the NUM in those strikes, suggested that the Tory anti-union laws undermined the traditions of solidarity amongst the working-class.

History

A strike nearly happened in 1981, when the government had a similar plan to close twenty-three pits, though the threat of a strike was then enough to force the government to back down[1]. Support for a strike in 1981 interestingly, seemed to exist beyond areas that opposed the strike in 1984. It was widely believed that a confrontation had only been averted in the short-run and the Yorkshire miners passed a resolution that a strike should take place if any pit was threatened with closure for reasons other than exhaustion or geological difficulties. The strike had been planned by leading conservative politicians some years earlier, as detailed in the Ridley Plan of 1974, written by a founding member of the Selsdon Group a free market radicals, Nicholas Ridley. In 1983, the Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher appointed Ian MacGregor as head of the National Coal Board (the UK Public Body which controlled coal mining). He had previously been head of the British Steel Corporation, which, according to one of Thatcher's biographers, he had turned from one of the least efficient steel-makers in Europe to one of the most efficient, nearly bringing the company into profit. However, this was achieved at the expense of a halving of the workforce in the space of two years. This reputation raised the expectation that jobs would be cut on a similar scale in mining, and confrontations between MacGregor and the Marxist leader of the miners, Arthur Scargill, seemed inevitable.

Pit closures announced

In 1984, the National Coal Board announced that an agreement reached after the 1974 miners' strike had become obsolete, and that they intended to close 20 coal mines because they were uneconomical. 20,000 jobs would be lost, and many communities in the north of England and in Wales would lose their primary source of employment. Unbeknown to anybody outside the upper echelons of the executive, the government had been preparing for tortuous industrial action by secretly stock-piling coal for a number of months in order to enable the country to keep running throughout the winter of 1984.

Action begins

Sensitive to the impact of the proposed closures in their own areas, miners in various coal fields began strike action. In the Yorkshire coal field strike action began when workers at the Manvers complex walked out over the lack of consultation. Over 6,000 miners were already on strike when a local ballot led to strike action from March 5 at Cortonwood Colliery at Brampton, South Yorkshire, and at Bullcliffe Wood colliery, near Ossett. What had prompted the March 5 action was the further announcement by the Coal Board that five pits were to be subject to "accelerated closure" within just five weeks; the other three were Herrington in County Durham, Snowdown in Kent and Polmaise in Scotland. On the next day pickets from the Yorkshire area appeared at pits in the Nottinghamshire coal field (one of those least threatened by pit closures). On March 12, 1984 Arthur Scargill, President of the NUM declared that the strikes in the various coal fields were to be a national strike and called for strike action from NUM members in all coal fields.

The question of a pre-strike ballot

The issue of whether a ballot was needed for a national strike was very complicated, after previous NUM leader Joe Gormley had ignored ballot results on wage reforms and his decisions had been upheld by courts on appeal. Scargill did not call a ballot for national strike action, perhaps because of uncertainty over the level of support amongst members. The official line was that each region was to decide by itself; the 1972 and 1974 strikes were over pay, and a ballot was appropriate to an issue that affected all miners, but closures affected some regions more than others; it was felt that 'safe' regions should not be allowed to ballot other regions out of jobs. This decision was upheld by another vote five weeks into the strike.[2] Many miners, especially at the five threatened pits, were also opposed to a ballot as they take some time to organise and campaign for, and there was some urgency due to the programme of accelerated closure within five weeks. There was a fear that strike supporters would refuse to take part in a ballot. Scargill claimed that the government had no claim to take away the union's right to conduct internal affairs, and complained that no associations other than unions were being forced to hold ballots on all decisions. Critics point out that his policy of letting each region decide seemed inconsistent with the threatened expulsion of the Nottinghamshire branch after 20000 out of 27000 miners in the county voted against the strike.

The Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher enforced a recent law which required unions to ballot members on strike action. On 19 July, 1984, Thatcher said in Parliament that giving in to the miners would be surrendering the rule of parliamentary democracy to the rule of the mob; she referred to the striking miners as "the enemy within" who did not share the values of the British people. "We had to fight the enemy without in the Falklands. We always have to be aware of the enemy within, which is much more difficult to fight and more dangerous to liberty". On the day after the Orgreave pickets of 29 May which saw 5000 pickets engaged in violent clashes with the police, Thatcher said in a speech:

"I must tell you that what we have got is an attempt to substitute the rule of the mob for the rule of law, and it must not succeed. It must not succeed. There are those who are using violence and intimidation to impose their will on others who do not want it...The rule of law must prevail over the rule of the mob."[3]

Arthur Scargill's response to the incident was "We've had riot shields, we've had riot gear, we've had police on horseback charging into our people, we've had people hit with truncheons and people kicked to the ground... The intimidation and the brutality that has been displayed are something reminiscent of a Latin American state." [4]

In August two miners from Manton colliery who protested that the strike was not "official" without a ballot took the NUM to court. In September the High Court ruled that the NUM had breached its own constitution by calling a strike without first holding a ballot. Scargill was fined £1,000 (which was paid for him by an anonymous donor) and the NUM was fined £200,000. When the union refused to pay its fine, its assets were ordered to be sequestrated but they had been transferred abroad. By the end of January 1985 around £5 million of NUM assets had been recovered.

As a result of this decision, miners were not entitled to state benefits, thus forcing the majority of miners and their families to survive the strike on handouts, donations from the European "food mountain" and other charities. Being without benefits had more serious consequences for the miners and their families. Their children were not entitled to free school meals or social security help with school uniforms. Poverty and hunger became rife in the mining heartlands. This forced many miners into a dilemma - return to work, and be viewed as a scab - or maintain support and live primarily on donations, which is what the majority did.

A wide network of several hundred miners' support groups were set up, often led by miners' "wives and girlfriends groups". These support groups organized thousands of collections outside supermarkets, communal kitchens, benefit concerts etc. in an attempt to help the miners to win the strike.

The Trades Union Congress (TUC) did not support the NUM, seeming to support Thatcher's call for a secret ballot. Solidarity action was taken, however, by railworkers and by dockers, who were both threatened with dismissal if they refused to handle coal. The EETPU, an electricians' union, actively opposed the strike; Ian MacGregor's autobiography detailed how its leaders supplied the government with valuable information that allowed the strike to be defeated. Steelworkers' unions did not support the strike, which was widely resented by the miners, after the support that they had given the steel strike in 1981 and after concessions were made by the NUM on deliveries of coke to steel works during the strike. The National Association of Colliery Overmen, Deputies and Shotfirers (NACODS) nearly went on strike in September; this was one point where the balance seemed to be tipping in favour of the miners, but Scargill's subsequent contempt of court orders caused the union to be fined and lost wider support. MacGregor later admitted that, had NACODS gone ahead with their strike, a compromise would probably have been forced on the Coal Board. Files later made public showed that the Government had an informant inside NACODS, passing them information about the negotiations [5].

NACODS

The fact that NACODS did not strike, created an even worse situation in the mines themselves - with NACODS deputies being labelled as 'scabs' - a particularly gruesome disphemism for a miner found to be ignoring the strike and working. The fact that the NACODS deputies were actually not involved in the dispute led some to fear for their lives, such was the hatred towards those 'betraying' the strike at the time. On 23rd October, 1000 pickets attempted to prevent a sole bath attendant from entering the threatened Emley Moor colliery[6]. Some of the engineers felt that going on strike would actually work against the cause, as geological problems could develop which would prevent the pit from reopening and defeat the whole goal of opposing closures; however, hardline strikers were not always sympathetic to this line of argument. The first two pits to close in 1985 were Barrow colliery at Worsborough Bridge and Acton Hall colliery at Featherstone, and they were both closed not due to being "uneconomic" but due to being unsafe for the miners to return to work.

"Scabs and blacklegs"

The refusal of some miners to support the strike was seen as a betrayal by those who did go on strike. As Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire share a boundary, and as the former was generally observing the strike and the latter generally opposing it, the scene was set for many bitter confrontations in the area. Instances of violence directed against working miners by striking miners were reported. In some cases, this extended to attacks on the property, the families and the pets of working miners[7]. Many miners were also very hostile to any journalists or reporters who came near pitheads. The Sun newspaper took a very anti-strike position during the strike, as did the Daily Mail, and even the Daily Mirror became hostile as the strike went on. Only the Morning Star and other left wing papers such as Militant, Socialist Organiser and Socialist Worker were constantly supportive of the striking miners.

Government action

The Government mobilised the police in huge numbers (including Metropolitan Police squads from London) to deal with picket lines on the grounds that they represented illegal intimidation and violence against those miners who wanted to go to work. During the industrial action 11,291 people were arrested and 8,392 charged with offences such as breach of the peace and obstructing the highway. Former striking miners and others have alleged that soldiers of the British Army were dressed as policemen and used on the picket lines. While concrete evidence of this has not been produced (although film footage exists of "policemen" wearing tunics without any identifying numbers on their lapels) it remains a point of contention today, and in many former mining areas antipathy towards the police remains strong. The Government was criticised[8] for abusing its power when it ruled that local police might be too sympathetic to the miners to take action against the strike, and instead brought in forces from distant counties. Occasions where private aeroplanes were hired to fly policemen to tackle pickets was considered by some to be a waste of public money. The MPs for Doncaster North and Castleford and Pontefract both raised concerns in Parliament over suggestions that the police had asked miners held in custody about their political allegiances.

Observation of the strike

At the beginning, the strike was almost universally observed in the coalfields of Yorkshire, Scotland, the North-East and Kent. Lancashire had originally been lukewarm on the strike, but its leaders announced on 22nd March that the strike was official[9]. South Wales contained many miners resentful over how their previous attempts to launch strikes in support of the steel workers and health workers had been largely unsupported, but there were enough pits in the region under threat of closure to gain momentum for the strike in the area. Support was less strong in the Midlands and North Wales. In Nottinghamshire most of the pits had modern equipment and had large coal reserves; most of the Nottinghamshire miners remained at work and the Nottinghamshire NUM disagreed with the decision to launch a national strike without a ballot. The 1977 industry reforms had given Nottinghamshire miners larger salaries than workers in any of the other counties and they were unwilling to give up their daily pay. Many within the NUM condemned them as strikebreakers, and the Nottinghamshire branch, heavily aided by the Thatcher government, eventually broke away to form the core of the Union of Democratic Mineworkers. Since the end of the strike the UDM and the NUM have been involved in numerous court cases concerning financial irregularities.

Orgreave and other confrontations

A widely reported clash during the Miners' Strike took place at Orgreave near Sheffield on June 18 1984. This confrontation between striking miners and police, dubbed by some 'The Battle of Orgreave', was the subject of a TV re-enactment in 2001, conceived and organized by artist Jeremy Deller and recorded by Mike Figgis for Channel 4. Violence flared after police on horse-back charged the miners with truncheons drawn and inflicted serious injuries upon several individuals. In 1991, South Yorkshire police were forced to pay out half a million pounds to thirty-nine miners who were arrested in the events at the Battle of Orgreave[10].

Other less well known, but equally bloody riots also took place, for example, in Maltby, South Yorkshire[11]

The strike fades

Events that prompted the end of the strike included a loss of public support following a severe beating of a working miner in Castleford in November, the manslaughter of a taxi driver escorting a working miner to work in South Wales in December (Hancock and Shankland were originally convicted of murder but this was reduced on appeal to the House of Lords) and the distraction of attention to the famine in Ethiopia. A report that Scargill had met with officials from Gaddafi's regime in Libya[12] to negotiate support for his cause was never verified. There were also serious allegations that Arthur Scargill stole money donated by Russian miners during the strike, which were seen by not just the NUM to be politically motivated rumours spread by the right wing press. The fact that they were also broadcast by the ITV programme "The Cook Report", also lent credence to some of the allegations. The NUM received payments from the trade unions of Afghanistan (which was Soviet-occupied at the time). Soviet miners who sent money to the NUM would not have been able to attain convertible currency without the support of the Soviet government and Thatcher claims she has seen documentary evidence that suggests that Soviet-leader Mikhail Gorbachev authorised these payments.

The hint of a link obviously tarred Scargill and yet trust in him amongst striking miners never seemed to wane, and created much debate and accusations of a smear campaign. Scargill was perceived as a militant hero to the unions[13],and vilified by some of the mainstream press. Scargill always denied these accusations and accused the government of fuelling this smear campaign, this was later recognised by the ex head of MI5 Dame Stella Rimington, cryptically in her autobiography ‘We in MI5 limited our investigations to those who were using the strike for subversive purposes.’[Rimington, Stella (2001). Open Secret: The Autobiography of the Former Director-General of MI5. London: Hutchinson. ISBN 0-09-179360-2.].The union's funds had also run too low to pay for pickets' transportation and many miners had been unable to pay for heating over the winter, miners and their families, scavenging for coal on slag heaps, a futile task as most of the "slag" was fools gold and mining effluence, found themselves arrested for trespass and theft at times. There were moments of fun at times however, as broadcast on Calendar News [Yorkshire TV] that winter: A crowd of miners and policemen huddled around a burning bin for warmth - both shouting "scabs" as the coach arrived delivering the strike breaking workers drove past.

The formal end

The strike ended on March 3 1985, nearly a year after it had begun. Some workers had returned to work of their own accord, a symbolic victory for the Government, although ministers later admitted that the figures of returnees were inflated. In order to save the union, the NUM voted, by a tiny margin, to return to work without a new agreement with management. In the special conference that ended the strike, only Kent voted to carry on. Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire and South Derbyshire did not send any delegates to the conference.

The end of the strike was felt as a terrible blow to loyal NUM members, though many understood that the extreme poverty being suffered after a year without wages was difficult to hold. Indeed, in many areas striking miners made a distinction between those who had returned to work after only a couple of months strike, and those who felt forced to return to work for the sake of their children, many months later.

In several pits, miners' wives groups organized the distribution of carnations at the gates on the day the miners went back - the flower which symbolizes the hero. Many pits marched back to work heads high behind brass bands.

Consequences

David Wilkie was a British taxi driver killed on 30 November 1984. He had been taking a non-striking miner to work in the Merthyr Vale Colliery in Merthyr, South Wales when two striking miners dropped a concrete post onto his car from a road bridge above. He died at the scene. The two miners served a prison sentence for manslaughter.

Six pickets died during the strike and three young men - all less than 16 - died from picking coal in the winter. The deaths of pickets David Jones and Joe Green continue to this day to be viewed with suspicion; some have claimed that their deaths were caused by the police, but reports at the time conflicted. The NUM names its memorial lectures after the two.[14]

During the strike many pits permanently lost their customers. Much of the immediate problem facing the industry was due to the economic recession in the early 1980s. However, there was also extensive competition within the world coal market as well as a concerted move towards oil and gas for power production. The Government's own policy, known as the Ridley Plan was to reduce Britain's reliance on coal; they also claimed that coal could be imported from Australia, America and Colombia more cheaply than it could be extracted from beneath Britain[15]. The strike subsequently allowed the Government to accelerate the closure of many pits on economic grounds.

MI5 "counter-subversion"

Dame Stella Rimington (MI5 Director General, 1992–1996) published an autobiography in 2001 in which she revealed MI5 'counter-subversion' exercises against the NUM and the striking miners, which included the tapping of union leaders' phones. However, she denied that the agency had informers in the NUM, specifically denying that then chief executive Roger Windsor had been an agent. [16] Documents later showed that Special Branch had a highly-placed mole codenamed "Silver Fox", with one officer saying the information "beat the strike, there's no doubt about that". [17]

Public opinion

Public opinion during the strike was divided, with the government generally having more support than the miners. When asked in a Gallup poll in July 1984 whether their sympathies lay mainly with the employers or the miners, 40% said employers; 33% were for the miners; 19% were for neither and 8% did not know. When asked the same question in December 5–10 1984, 51% had most sympathy for the employers; 26% for the miners; 18% for neither and 5% did not know. 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 in December 5–10 1984, 7% approved; 88% disapproved and 5% did not know. In July 1984, when asked whether they thought the miners were using responsible or irresponsible methods, 12% said responsible; 78% said irresponsible and 10% did not know. When asked the same question in August 1984, 9% said responsible; 84% said irresponsible and 7% did not know.

Variation in observing the strike

Levels of Solidarity in the 1984-85 strike by area From Miners on Strike, Andrew J. Richards, 1996.

Area	Manpower	% on strike 19/11/84	% on strike 14/2/85	% on strike 1/3/85
Cokeworks	4500	95.6	73	65
Kent	3000	95.9	95	93
Lancashire	6500	61.5	49	38
Leicestershire	1900	10.5	10	10
Midlands	13000	32.3	15	23
North Derbyshire	10500	66.7	44	40
North-East	23000	95.5	70	60
North Wales	1000	35	10	10
Nottinghamshire	30000	20	14	22
Scotland	13100	93.9	75	69
South Derbyshire	3000	11	11	11
South Wales	21500	99.6	98	93
Workshops	9000	55.6	-	50
Yorkshire	56000	97.3	90	83
NATIONAL	196000	73.7	64	60

No figures available for the 1000 N.C.B. staff employees.

After the strike

The coal industry was finally privatised in December 1994 to create a firm named "R.J.B. Mining", now known as UK COAL. Between the end of the strike and privatisation, pit closures continued with a particularly intense group of closures in the early '90s. There were 15 former British Coal deep mines left in production at the time of privatisation [18], however by March 2005 there were only 8 major deep mines left [19]. Since then, the last pit in Northumberland, Ellington Colliery, has closed whilst pits at Rossington and Harworth have been mothballed. During the strike, Scargill had constantly claimed that the government had a long-term plan to reduce the industry in this way. The miners' will to resist deteriorated rapidly and there was a very apathetic response to the intensive period of closures in the early 1990s, despite evidence that there was much more sympathy for the miners then than in 1984.

Nottinghamshire miners had hoped that their pits were safe, but they too were mostly closed in the 1985-1994 period. This was widely resented as a betrayal of the promises that had been made to working miners in the strike; they had been told that their jobs were safe and their industry had a future. The subsequent behaviour of the Conservative government was seen by most on the left and in the "heavy" industries to confirm fears about how they had been used to divide the miners' union.

The effect of the strike has been long and bitter for many areas that depended on coal. Enduring a year without strike pay (it had never been NUM policy to make payments to its members engaged in strike action) and their being denied social security benefits as a result of a new law that made such benefits unavailable to illegal strikers (whilst at the same time new laws passed by the Thatcher government in preparation for a confrontation with the NUM assumed that any benefits that were available to strikers' dependents would take into consideration strike payments paid to strikers by the union) forced many miners into debt. The closure of pits also affected engineering, railways, electricity and steel production, which were all interlinked with the coal industry. Unemployment reached as high as 50% in some villages over the next decade. Suicides rose significantly; the year 1984 had seen an extremely high increase in suicides. Migration out of old mining areas left many villages full of derelict houses and earning the reputation as ghost towns. The tensions between those who had supported the strike and those who had not, lasted for many years afterwards; "scab" was a word passed down generations, eroding the strong sense of unity that had previously existed in such communities.

The 1994 E.U. enquiry into poverty classified Grimethorpe in South Yorkshire as the poorest settlement in the country and one of the poorest in the E.U. The county of South Yorkshire was made into an Objective 1 development zone and every single ward in the City of Wakefield district in West Yorkshire was classified as in need of special assistance. In, Merseyside, the Knowsley district, which had contained the "Cronton" and "Sutton Manor" pits (although Cronton had been closed just prior to the onset of the strike and was undergoing salvaging operations during the early months of the strike, at the end of which operations Cronton miners, having been transferred to neighbouring collieries, mostly joined the strike), has constantly been named amongst the most deprived areas of both Britain and Europe, as has the neighbouring St. Helens metropolitan borough of Merseyside in which Sutton Manor and Bold and Parkside collieries were situated.

Other areas have recovered and now boast a good standard of living. Recovery was quickest in areas where the economy was more diverse, such as in Kent or the West Midlands. Brodsworth boasted the largest mine in the country and is also enjoying relative affluence. Old colliery sites have often been turned into new industrial parks or retail parks. Xscape is built on the former site of Castleford's Glasshoughton colliery. The Miners strike continues to divide former miner communities, resentment and bitterness often running very deep and even across generations. A murder in the former mining town of Annesley, Nottinghamshire in 2004 was a result of an argument between former members of the NUM and the UDM, an indication of how high feelings still run.

While the strike was on, public opinion in the Home Counties [except Kent] was very against the miners, whereas in the Welsh valleys, Yorkshire and other areas actually affected by the strike, support was high. As time has gone on, more people have felt sympathy with the poverty inflicted on mining areas by job losses. It has even gained something of a cult status as a symbol of the perceived indifference that the Tory Party has to problems of unemployment and poverty. The Daily Mirror, which had been hostile towards the strike at the time, began a campaign to raise awareness of the social deprivation in the coalfields. The film Brassed Off has been much more successful than was expected, having even gained recognition in America. The Coalfields Regeneration Trust is an organisation that donates money to investment within the old mining areas.

Although mining is now only a very small industry in Britain, it is more productive than in France, Germany or in the United States[20]. This serves as an exception to the usual "productivity gap" that exists between Britain and those other countries.

Andrew J. Richard's book Miners on Strike dedicated a chapter to how unusual it was in 1984 for a large-scale strike to be launched in protest at job cuts. In Britain, trade unions had traditionally launched strikes for claims on wage rises and rights at work, but strikes in defence of jobs had been very rare. Since the example of the 1984-5 miners' strike, union leaders have been much more likely to call for action in defence of jobs. Coincidentally, 1984 was the year when Harvard economists Richard Freeman and James Medoff published the book "What do Unions do?", where such a strategy was seen as good for productivity and less of a pressure on inflation.

Strike in artistic depictions

The UK miners' strike was the background for the critically acclaimed 2000 film Billy Elliot. Several scenes powerfully depict the chaos at the picket lines, clashes between armies of police and striking miners, and the shame associated with crossing the picket line.

It is also involved in the background to the plot in Brassed Off, which is set ten years after the strike when all the miners have the lost the will to resist and accept the closure of their pit with resignation. Brassed Off was set in the fictional "Grimley", a thinly disguised version of the hard-hit ex-mining village of Grimethorpe, where some of it was filmed.

The satirical Comic Strip Presents episode The Strike (1988) depicts an idealistic Welsh screenwriter's growing dismay as his hard-hitting and grittily realistic script about the strike is mutilated by a Hollywood producer into an all-action thriller starring Al Pacino (played by Peter Richardson) and Meryl Streep (played by Jennifer Saunders). The 1984 episode of the 1996 BBC television drama serial Our Friends in the North revolves around the events of the strike, and the scenes of clashes between the police and striking miners were re-created using many of those who had taken place in the actual real-life events on the miners' side. In 2005 BBC One broadcast the one-off drama Faith, written by William Ivory and starring Jamie Draven and Maxine Peake. It viewed the strike from the perspective of both the police and the miners.

A 2005 book called "GB84" by David Peace combines fictional accounts of pickets, union officials and strike-breakers. Graphic details are provided of many of the strike's major events. It also suggests that British intelligence was involved in undermining the strike, including in the alleged suggestion of a link between Scargill and Gaddafi.

The strike has been the subject of songs by many music groups. Of the more well known; the band Pulp recorded a song "Last day of the miners' strike", Funeral for a Friend wrote a song called "History", the folk-rock band Steeleye Span recorded the song Blackleg Miner, and Ewan MacColl wrote the song "Daddy, What did you do in the strike?". The folk song The Ballad of '84 contains the view that David Jones and Joe Green died as a result of the police's handling of events. Folk singer Billy Bragg wrote several songs dealing with the strike as a current event, namely "Which Side Are You On?" U2's song "Red Hill Mining Town" from their Joshua Tree Album is about the strike, according to lead singer Bono.

Chumbawamba recorded a song called "Fitzwilliam", which described the Yorkshire village after the strike. The village eventually saw around a third of its housing stock demolished due to the dominance of derelict properties. They also made a song called "Frickley" about the football club Frickley Athletic, which referenced the continued distrust of the police by those in mining areas after the strike.

As mentioned above, in 2001, British visual artist Jeremy Deller worked with historical societies, battle re-enactors, and dozens of the people who participated in the violent 1984 clashes of picketers and police to reconstruct and re-enact the Battle of Orgreave. A documentary about the re-enactment was produced by Deller and director Mike Figgis and was broadcast on British television; and Deller also published a book called The English Civil War Part II documenting both the project and the historical events it investigates (Artangel Press, 2002). Involving the reenactors, who would normally recreate Viking battles or medievals wars, was a way for Deller to situate the recent and controversial Battle of Orgreave (and labor politics themselves) as part of mainstream history. See http://www.artangel.org.uk/pages/past/01/01_deller.htm

G.Mckie's poem Ode to Heseltine was written after the announcement to close 31 collieries in 1992, which betrayed previous promises to miners who had worked on during the strike.

http://www.strike84.co.uk An online collection of photographic images taken during the dispute.

See also

• UK topics
• Mick McGahey
• Peter Heathfield
• Betty Heathfield
• List of collieries in Yorkshire 1984-present with dates of closure

References

• Lyddon, D. TUC History Online: The 1984-85 Miners' Strike (Retrieved 2nd December 2004)
• Towers, B. Posing larger questions: The British Miners' Strike of 1984-85. Industrial Relations Journal, (1985) Vol. 16 (2), pp.8-25.
• http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3514549.stm Map showing location of pits in 1984 and the closures each year since. Note that Leeds is on the wrong place on the map; the area pointed to seems to actually be Grimethorpe.
• http://www.shu.ac.uk/cresr/downloads/publications/2-New%20coalfield%20article_final%20draft%20Feb%202005.pdf University paper on the slow recovery of ex-mining areas following the shock of the closure programme.

Further reading

• Seamus Milne, The Enemy Within - The Secret War Against the Miners, Verso, London, 1994. See pages 18-19 for details of the 1991 payouts to miners from the Battle of Orgreave.
• 'The Great Strike' by Alex Callinicos and Mike Simons
• Northern Mining Research for pit closure dates
• David Peace, GB 84, Faber and Faber (3 Mar 2005), a novel.

External links

• Miner's Advice - website providing help and information to ex-coal miners
• The official NUM website
• A look at present day mining