The TUC was a picture of impotence and inaction. The seven TUC leaders chosen to liase with the NUM – including Norman Willis, David Basnett, Bill Keys and Gerry Russel – even dithered over calling a meeting of the Finance and General Purposes Committee, the TUC’s inner cabinet. Wringing their hands, and ignoring the magnificent solidarity from below, they made clear to the NUM leaders that support from the Labour movement had not been forthcoming. It was like 1926 all over again. The surrender of the TUC leaders was pitiful, as they begged the government to be “reasonable” and allow “meaningful talks”.
Some leaders, like Frank Chapple and Eric Hammond, continued to denounce the striking miners. In fact, Chapple went as far as to suggest to the Tory government that McGregor, prior to his appointment, be made Coal Board chairman to deal with Scargill and the miners! Given their past role, that was perhaps to be expected of the right wing. After all, Chapple once stated that he admired Thatcher as much as anyone on his union executive. But sadly the left trade union leaders also failed to deliver their promises of solidarity.
The left-led TGWU in particular could have transformed the situation. It was facing its own legal attack in the courts with a £200,000 fine hanging over its head and the possibility of the sequestration of its funds due to the failure to hold a legal ballot at Rover. Yet the TGWU leaders limited themselves to a passive defiance of the law and to legal pleading.
The only possibility left to the NUM to obtain national action would have been for them to appeal directly to the ranks of the trade unions over the heads of the General Council and to name the day for a general strike. The NUM had built up enormous authority in the eyes of the class. Had they made such an appeal, it would have placed the TUC in a very difficult position, exposing the right wing and putting very serious pressure on the Lefts to act. “Action, not words!” would have been the central slogan to force the TUC to come off the sidelines and begin to fight. Unfortunately the NUM leaders failed to do so. The opportunity was again lost to salvage the situation and transform the course of events.
By this stage, any hope of widening the action to other sections of the movement had all but evaporated. In the absence of generalised national action, the miners were in an impossible position. Over the winter a slow drift back to work developed. By mid-January the strike began to crumble in a number of areas. By running nuclear and oil-fired power stations flat-out, and using coal as sparingly as possible, the Central Electricity Generating Board never imposed power cuts. At least so they claimed. In fact sporadic power cuts were taking place at 2 and 3 in the morning to drag out supplies. There was, nonetheless, something like 12m tonnes of coal stockpiled at the power stations, and 60 million tones at the pitheads. Ironically, the Tories had also been busy importing coal from so-called “socialist” Poland, to the shame of the Stalinist regime, to break the strike. The Polish bureaucracy was more concerned about securing contracts with Thatcher than giving support to British strikers.
All this served to embolden Thatcher. The miners’ strike represented a watershed. The Tories tried everything to break the miners as a means of breaking the spirit of the working class. The dispute had cost the country an estimated £3.75 billion. The strikers and their families had to be crushed, and seen to be crushed. But the Tories had underestimated the support, resilience, stamina and courage of the miners and their communities. They threw everything at them: the police, the laws, mass media, etc. But it was the divisions within the miners, played up and cultivated by the Tories and the press that fatally undermined the strike. This led to the formation of the scab Union of Democratic Miners (UDM) led by the renegade Roy Link. The UDM naturally had the full support of Thatcher, MacGregor and the rest of the capitalist Establishment, as did the Spencer union after 1926.
The NUM leaders made a number of tactical mistakes throughout the year-long strike, but the decisive factor in the defeat of the miners was the failure of the TUC and Labour leaders to organise effective solidarity action. The mood existed in society to help the miners, despite the orchestrated propaganda campaign by the government. The magnificent work of the miners’ support groups, which collected hundreds of thousands of pounds outside factories, offices and shopping centres, demonstrated this fact. When the miners and their families faced Christmas 1984 penniless, the workers of Britain and other countries sent them food parcels and presents, organised Christmas dinners, parties. The miners will never forget this tremendous working class solidarity, just as they will never forget how Thatcher or the Tories destroyed their communities.
The strike continued until March 1985, twelve months since the announcement of the closure of Cortonwood. On 3 March the special delegate conference of the NUM held in Congress House, the headquarters of the TUC that had let them down so badly, voted 98 to 91 to return to work with no agreement, no reprieve for the threatened pits and no amnesty for the sacked miners. Faced with the coalfield’s extinction, only Kent opposed ending the strike. By this time some 718 miners had been sacked.
The end result of this Herculean struggle was a defeat. Not like the abject humiliation of 1926, but a bitter defeat nonetheless. The return to work was a shattering disappointment to most activists. True, the proud and dignified nature of the return to work behind colliery bands and banners robbed Thatcher of the “total” victory she and her class sought. Nevertheless, the Tory government subsequently closed over 100 pits and more than 100,000 were made redundant. The pit closure programme was carried through remorselessly. It tore the guts out of the industry and out of the mining communities. In the immediate aftermath, the miners staged a whole series of guerrilla struggles in the pits, but these failed to prevent the destruction of the industry. As a final measure, privatisation was now brought forward to pick over the carcass of whatever was left.
The defeat of the miners had an enormous impact on the whole movement. Along with the extension of the economic boom, it accelerated the shift to the right amongst the Labour and trade union leaders. It further strengthened the ideas of “New Realism”, widespread in the trade union bureaucracy. The mining industry was decimated. In 1926 there were over one million miners. At the time of the 1984-85 strike there were still 181,000. By 1990, numbers had fallen to 65,000. But the private mining industry today has been almost totally destroyed with some 5,000 miners remaining, and the massive Selby coalfield, the largest in Europe, due to close soon. Ironically, the wholesale slaughter of the pits now coincides with the exhaustion of natural gas and oil reserves. By 2012, 70 per cent of our electricity would be generated by gas and 90 per cent of this would have to be imported from such countries as Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and the Yemen. Such a situation could leave Britain facing serious power cuts within the next 15 years. In fact, London has already faced a massive power cut in August of this year, where a quarter of a million people had to be evacuated from London Underground. This astonishing result of privatisation, asset stripping and under investment came only weeks after a devastating power cut in the United States. At that time, bosses at the National Grid went on record as saying that that sort of thing could never happen here. The short-sightedness of the myopic British bourgeois has now become a way of life.
The slaughter of the mining communities vindicated the courageous stand taken by the NUM in the heroic struggle of 1984-5, as much as the counter-revolution on the shopfloor that followed the defeat dammed forever the craven stand of the Labour and trade union leaders. The strike was defeated but the fighting spirit of the miners lives on. It had left behind a tradition of courageous struggle, which will be revived in the titanic struggles that lie ahead.