Twenty years ago this month, the heroic twelve-month long struggle
of the British miners to defend their jobs and their communities came
to an end. This was the most important battle fought by the British
working class since the Second World War. The whole period is rich in
lessons for a new generation which has been starved of the truth. It
was never enough for the ruling class to defeat the miners’ struggle,
they insist furthermore on trampling on its memory, lest it serve as an
inspiration for a new generation.
The first casualty of war is always the truth, and the Miners’
Strike was a war, a class war, with the workers on one side and on the
other everything the ruling class could muster: the courts, police, and
not least the lies and distortions of the media, exemplified by the
distilled poison and venom poured into the outrageous Channel Four
documentary broadcast last January to mark the twentieth anniversary of
the outbreak of the strike which began in March 1984
That tawdry rubbish was meant as a warning to a new generation of
workers: the miners lost and so will you if you try to fight, you will
be beaten – in both senses of the word.
The ruling class is preparing through its media, just as surely as
it is through new legislation designed to further curtail workers’
rights, for new battles. We must prepare too.
In the titanic struggles of the working class to come in Britain, a
thorough study and understanding of past struggles is of decisive
importance. Alongside the general strike of 1926 today’s new generation
must also study the great miners’ strike of 1984-85.
To commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the end of the strike we
were presented with a far superior television programme. The BBC drama Faith
broadcast on Monday February 28 was like a breath of fresh air, an
antidote to that earlier filth masquerading as an ‘impartial
documentary’.
For the first time in the national media the role of the state – its
specially created national police force, its media, its secret
services, and all the weapons employed by the ruling class to fight the
miners – was vividly exposed. As Engels explained, in the last analysis
the state can be reduced to armed bodies of men in defence of private
property. However, it rarely is reduced to just that, particularly here
in apparently sleepy Britain. Between 1984 and 1985 the masks of
Democracy and Legality, behind which the ruling class usually hides,
were stripped away, revealing the true, ugly face of the state
apparatus, and its role in preserving the capitalist system.
At the same time the filmmakers tell their story not with the
left-wing bias now being claimed (without any sense of irony) by the
Tories and their mouthpiece the Daily Mail, but with sympathy for the miners and an equal measure of antipathy for the brutal treatment they endured.
In the telling of history there is no such thing as the spurious objectivity the Mail
and co. so hypocritically demand. There are indeed two sides to the
history of this struggle, theirs and ours; the lies and fictions we had
to endure during the struggle and for all the years since, and the
truth which we rarely see a glimpse of, making its appearance in this
programme all the more important.
Thatcher infamously denounced the miners as ‘the enemy within’,
horned devils fighting to overthrow the system. This is the image which
has persisted in the mainstream media ever since. All miners were
dangerous reds under the bed. What we find in Faith is the
reality of ordinary working people and their families desperately
struggling to defend their livelihoods and their communities. Through
their experience of the lies of the press, the cruel activities of the
police and the courts, many began to draw profound political
conclusions. As Marx long ago explained conditions determine
consciousness. The film’s central character, Michele, is a living
example of that process of politicisation through experience.
For the miners this was a struggle to defend jobs and communities.
For the ruling class, however, this was about a lot more than pit
closures. It was about their right to hire and fire, their right to
close, sack, drive down wages and conditions without the troublesome
interference of the trade unions.
Back in 1984 Britain had 170 collieries in production employing over
170,000 miners. Today there are just 9 working collieries employing
about 3,000 miners and even those pits and jobs are constantly under
threat. The coal industry like so much of British manufacturing has
been decimated. In the case of coal however, this was more than just
the short sightedness of the British capitalists chasing a quick profit
through privatisation and speculation. The attack on the miners was
political as well as economic.
When Thatcher’s Tory Party came to office in 1979 they were still
smarting from their humiliation at the hands of the miners’ strikes of
1972 and 1974, which brought down Ted Heath’s government. Although
revenge coloured many aspects of the dispute it was not the fundamental
cause of this orchestrated attack on the miners and their communities.
For the ruling class confronting and defeating the miners – seen as the
vanguard of militant trade unionism – was the vital prerequisite for an
all out assault on the working class as a whole. Reforms aimed at
placating the working class could no longer be afforded. There was no
longer any room for consensus. The response of the ruling class to the
decline of British capital was to attempt to restore profitability at
the expense of the working class, just as they had done in 1926.
This was never solely an economic question, however. Billions of
pounds were squandered over a period of decades on nuclear power and on
oil demonstrating the anxiety felt by the ruling class at the
dependence of the British economy on coal, and the power this
concentrated in the hands of militant miners.
The Tories had been preparing for this fight since the mid 1970s.
Having avoided a false start from a weaker position in 1981, by 1984
they felt ready and began closing pits on so-called ‘economic’ grounds.
The National Union of Mineworkers warned that it was the Coal Board and
the Tory government’s intention to wreck the industry and destroy
thousands of jobs. ‘No, no,’ Thatcher and the Coal Board promised,
there were no such plans. Here the long litany of lies that
characterised the bosses’ propaganda throughout the strike, and ever
since, began.
The NUM’s website quotes an extract from a letter sent to miners and
their families in 1984, 14 weeks into the strike, by the then
Thatcherite Chairman of the National Coal Board, Ian McGreggor.
”This is a strike which should never have happened. It is based on very
serious misrepresentation and distortion of the facts at great
financial cost. Miners have supported the strike for 14 weeks because
your leaders have told you this. That the Coal Board is out to butcher
the coal industry. That we plan to do away with 70,000 jobs. That we
plan to close down around 86 pits. Leaving only 100 working collieries.
If these things were true I would not blame miners for getting angry or
for being deeply worried. But these things are absolutely untrue. I
state that categorically and solemnly. You have been deliberately
misled.”
Indeed, in one sense he was telling the truth. They did not destroy
70,000 jobs but far more. Striking miners received letters like this
regularly. Nevertheless this combination of threats to their jobs and
pensions on the one hand, and bribes and inducements to return to work
on the other, failed to break the resolve, the militancy and the
solidarity of the miners which permeates every scene of the film Faith.
This was a powerful drama which cannot have failed to stir the
emotions not only of those who remember the events of 1984-5 – not
least those who participated in that immense struggle – but also a new
generation who until now will have seen nothing but distortions and
falsehoods about this most important period in the history of the
struggle of the British working class.
The strike was a more prominent feature here than in the film Billy Elliot,
with which this film shared a certain feel, perhaps partly due to the
fact that they feature the same actor in a leading role as well as a
setting. In Faith the strike was not merely background but dominated the drama from beginning to emotionally charged end.
In dramatic terms all the characters were thoughtfully drawn, and it
is the miners and their families, particularly the newly politicised
Michele – the film’s central character – with whom the viewer can
identify and sympathise. Michele is married to Gary, a striker, whose
frustrations at the turmoil created in his life by his experiences of
such a long struggle are realistically portrayed. Towards the end,
before his death, he explains to his wife that he doesn’t feel the same
way as she does about the strike. She has become deeply involved and is
drawing political conclusions. He on the other hand is on strike
because of loyalty, out of Faith, giving meaning to the film’s title.
Michele is drawn into activity through the local support group, and
begins to address public meetings and rallies. Her sister, Linda, is
married to a local policeman, Paul, who for many years has been Gary’s
best friend. However, as the strike progresses, and Paul begins to
relish his role as the liaison with the Metropolitan police brought in
to fight the miners on the picket lines, Paul’s relationships with both
his wife and his best friend begin to break down. Gary and Linda have
an affair which further sours relations between the two men, resulting
finally in a fight on a picket line towards the end of the strike which
leads to Gary’s tragic death.
Whilst the miners and their families are wholly likeable characters,
the police officers fighting them on the picket lines, waving their
overtime money in the miners’ faces, sending in snatch squads to pick
off individual strikers, particularly the Met officers – who advise
their local liaison to remove his numbers from his lapels, so ‘no-one
can tell tales’ – are wholly unlikeable. Yet the film does not resort
to caricature even in the case of the villain of the piece, the slimy
MI5 spy, who we are first introduced to as a ‘Labour Party activist who
works in social services.’ We will return to him in a moment.
Thus not only do we get a glimpse of the truth about important
events throughout the course of the strike, we get a sympathetic
hearing for the miners cause, with heroes and villains on opposite
sides of the barricades, and, for once, the heroes are on the miners’
side.
Remarkably, the battle of Orgreave is told from the miners’ side for
the first time on prime time television. The Tories may well prattle on
about there being two sides to the story, but – in relation to Orgreave
especially – their side, the side reported by the BBC at the time, was
pure fiction.
The events which took place at the Orgreave coking plant near
Rotherham between the end of May and the middle of June 1984 led to the
most violent confrontations witnessed by the British labour movement
since the First World War.
NUM pickets assembled on one side of the plant while the police
gathered in their thousands at the front, with mounted brigades lined
up in a neighbouring field. Police with dogs, on horseback, and
thousands more in riot gear surrounded the pickets. As soon as the
lorries had entered the plant, the riot police launched their
offensive. The mounted divisions rode into the surrounded miners,
followed by truncheon wielding foot police. This was a military
operation. For all the beatings and arrests, the miners were bloodied
but unbowed.
Then, on June 18, 5000 strikers turned up to be met this time by an
even greater number of police and an unprecedented orgy of violence.
The forces of ‘law and order’ ran riot that day, beating and
bludgeoning the miners. From their experiences on the picket lines,
many ordinary miners who before the strike had respect for the law and
the police who upheld it, learned a bitter lesson from the end of a
truncheon, that the law, the courts and the police are arms of the
state for the defence of private property, that is, for the defence of
the capitalist system.
The capitalist media portrayed Orgreave as the height of picket line
violence… by the miners! It was at this moment that Thatcher
infamously denounced the strikers as “the enemy within”. In the
Falklands she said they had fought the enemy without, and now they
would fight the miners, this in other words was to be their ‘industrial
Falklands.'
Labour leader (now Lord) Kinnock was joined by Willis, the TUC
leader – both desperate to prove their respectability – in condemning
both sides ‘even-handedly’, reserving most of their venom for the
pickets. Doctored film footage was shown on the BBC – which years later
conceded that a ‘mistake’ had been made – demonstrating that the miners
attacked first.
In Faith’s version of events pickets returning by bus
bloodied and torn are asked in the local club why they attacked the
police since they would obviously retaliate. The miners are
dumbfounded. That is not what happened. The mounted police waded in to
the miners wielding their truncheons, and only then did the miners
fight back to defend themselves. On the BBC news the footage had been
shown ‘in the wrong order’. One of the wives in the club comments,
“Moira Stuart does not lie” (referring to the presenter of the BBC news
programme). How much more persuasive is a lie when the teller can
usually be expected to tell the truth. The serious press report the
truth nine times out of ten to be all the more readily believed the
tenth and crucial time. This lie would be used throughout the strike as
evidence of miners’ picket line violence. Here, in this film, for the
first time, a glimpse of the true picture has been given.
Of course this does not make up for the lies and distortions that
the BBC broadcast during the strike and ever since. We do not expect
the BBC, nor the media in general, to support the struggles of the
working class. Nor do we make any pointless appeals to ‘objectivity’.
The media is owned by the capitalists and serves their interests. It is
self-evident that the BBC is a central part of the establishment, in
this sense the media is also a part of the state apparatus. At the same
time, however, there are many independent minded film makers and
journalists who attempt to expose the truth. Occasionally they manage
to reach a wide audience with their ideas. Usually such an avenue is
blocked to them.
The Tories’ claim that this film was broadcast in support of the
Labour Party as a general election draws near holds no water. In the
first place it will not be that welcome to Blair and co. who have
repeatedly praised the hated figure of Thatcher, and are certainly not
advocates of militant trade unionism.
It is interesting, however, that such a film should be broadcast at
a time when there is much discussion about the independence of the
media and the reorganisation of the BBC by the Blair government. We
have no illusions in the independence of the media in general nor the
BBC in particular. However, what little freedom of movement they have
enjoyed is now being further curtailed by a government intent on
establishing central control. This is not a whim of Blair and co, it is
a process which has been developing for years and must be seen
alongside the strengthening of the powers of the state, the
centralisation of control away from parliament, and even the cabinet,
to Number Ten. Nor are such changes confined to Britain. A similar
process can be seen in the US and Europe. This represents preparations
by the ruling class, refining the apparatus through which they rule, in
readiness for the crises and events to come.
As well as raising many of the central issues of the strike, Faith
also portrayed its human side. The international solidarity expressed
in the food parcels and toys sent to miners’ children from workers
around the world – images of which were movingly accompanied by Band
Aid’s Feed the World – demonstrated the level of international support
that the miners enjoyed.
Instead of the usual portrayal of striking miners as red devils,
here we see a picture of comradeship. In one of the most emotional
scenes in the film, an older miner is made to return to work by local
union officials, to prevent him losing his pension entitlement. Pickets
turn their backs at the man’s request, so that they do not witness his
shame. He enters the deserted colliery with tears rolling down his
cheeks, shared no doubt by many watching at home.
Similarly a man returning to work as a scab – because his wife is
seriously ill – on an empty coach, surrounded by a massed police guard,
is peacefully convinced to stay out. He leaves the coach and rejoins
his comrades greeted by cheers and the promise of the local union
official to look after him and his wife.
The Tories take great exception to the truth being revealed about
events at Orgreave. They are foaming at the mouth too at the
unsympathetic portrayal of Thatcher. Yet this is mild compared to the
real feelings of miners and their families towards the Iron Lady. She
is reviled and occupies a place next to her own hero Winston Churchill
in the gallery of enemies of the working class. The praise heaped on
her by Blair and co is a dreadful insult to the miners, their families
and all the rest who suffered at the hands of her government.
The Tories are angry about all these things, but what will worry the
ruling class more is the portrayal of the police and the security
services, especially the thugs with no numbers. Here the film pulls no
punches. There is no attempt to engender sympathy with the police, no
spurious impartiality.
The creation of a national police force to take on the miners, to
prevent them fraternising with the local police is clearly exposed.
Paul, the local policeman who grows to relish his role as liaison with
‘the outsiders’ (the Metropolitan Police, or special forces, soldiers
in police uniform etc), is virtually ostracised by his own sergeant in
the local pub as a ‘scab’. He is warned ‘we have to police this area
when these people have gone home’.
The use of surveillance cameras in a nearby house to spy on Michele,
in dramatic terms, serves to expose the affair between Gary, the young
miner at the heart of the film, and his wife’s sister. At the same time
these scenes demonstrate graphically the extent to which the state
spied on miners and their families, raiding houses, tapping phones,
etc. After all, this is not even a union leader being spied upon – bad
enough in a so-called democracy, but hardly a surprise to anyone – this
is a young woman involved in the marvellous work of the support groups
like thousands of others around the country.
Yet this is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to spying,
which brings us back to the MI5 spy, the local ‘activist who works in
social services’. This character makes a point of establishing a close
relationship with Michele, even promoting her to speak in meetings,
ostensibly because he is attracted to her, although she rebuffs his
advances. Whilst believably played the ‘activist who works for the
security services’ is, from the outset, a rather suspicious character.
When Michele confides in him that she is hiding £5000 of the union’s
funds (which could not be deposited in a bank because following the
sequestration of the union the money would be seized by the state), his
claim to have been asked to do the same thing by the union rings
hollow. His role in spying on Michele, and turning over the union money
that she was hiding to the authorities, leads to a confrontation
between the two, in which the cynical bile he pours forth – “I used to
be where you are now. I used to sell the papers and go on the demos…
it’s no use… I ‘d rather be with the people who have power” –
contrasts sharply with the honesty, integrity and character of a young
woman politicised by her involvement in the struggle. Here too we have
an explanation of the film’s title. The spy was a turncoat, a renegade,
but Michele kept her faith, just as Gary (and thousands of others) had
done. This indomitable spirit is what frightens the ruling class. It
should, in the end it will defeat them.
The film ends with Gary’s return to the picket line. He has been
agonising over what to do next. He feels frustrated and wants things to
go back to normal. Just days before the strike ends, after a heart to
heart discussion with his wife, his return to the picket line ends
tragically. He is killed beneath the wheels of the scab bus.
Following a scene at the graveside of this fictional character, the
names of those real people who died during the strike appear on the
screen; followed by the fact that the Nottinghamshire police years
later were forced to pay compensation to some 39 of those falsely
arrested at Orgreave; and the admission by Dame Stella Rimington (the
former head of MI5), that surveillance, phone tapping and agent
provocateurs were used by the secret services against the miners and
their struggle.
The ruling class threw everything they had into this fight. After
enduring this for an entire year, at the start of 1985 there was a
drift back to work. The miners and their families had fought valiantly
for 12 whole months against everything the state could throw at them.
Their solidarity and sacrifice remains an inspiration to this day. They
could have done no more.
On March 3, 1985 delegates at a special conference voted by 98 – 91
to return to work. On March 5, the day the strike ended, there were
still 27,000 miners out. All over the country miners returned to work,
their families alongside them, behind colliery bands and banners, heads
held high, proud of their tremendous struggle.
The strike had cost the ruling class over £5 billion. This fact
alone tells us how important this battle was for capitalism. From their
point of view this was money well spent. New anti-union legislation was
pushed through. The counter-revolution on the shop-floor to drive down
workers’ wages and conditions across industry accelerated full speed
ahead.
The miners had struggled against a constant barrage of propaganda,
the siege of their communities and violent confrontations on the picket
lines. Yet, ultimately, it was not any of these measures, nor even
their sum total, which defeated the struggle, but the betrayal of the
leaders of the Labour and trade union movement.
There will be many more struggles in the years ahead, some even more
decisive than this, yet the miners’ strike of 1984-85 will never be
forgotten, nor should it be. In the end, the real value of a strike
lies in the lessons the workers draw from it. The miners were defeated,
but those who participated in this colossal school of the class
struggle, have its lessons forever stamped on their consciousness.
The ruling class may desperately try to prevent these lessons from
reaching a new generation, but they will have as little success as old
King Canute when he tried to prevent the tide from coming in. As time
goes on, memories fade and lessons are forgotten. It is therefore all
the more necessary to remind ourselves of the real lessons of this
titanic class battle. In war, and in the class struggle, it is better
to fight and be defeated than to slink away from the struggle and
surrender ignominiously. The miners fought with great heroism. They
lost, but that was not their fault. In the crucial moment they were
abandoned by the leaders of the TUC and Labour Party. The whole working
class paid a heavy price for that betrayal. The role of leadership and
the vital importance of building both a leadership and a programme
worthy of the courage shown by the struggles of the working class –
this is the fundamental lesson to be drawn from the experience of the
1984-85 strike.
The consequences of the miners’ defeat for the working class as a
whole were profound. As the bosses launched attack after attack, the
mood of workers became “if the miners can’t win no-one can.”
In the two decades since, we have endured Tory governments,
privatisation, anti-union laws, and Labour governments who have aped
their Tory predecessors. The triumph of social partnership (class
collaboration) at the tops of the unions and Blair at the top of the
Labour Party, represented a real low point in the history of the
British workers’ movement.
The right wing always rests upon defeat and inactivity. They
consolidated their grip on the leadership of the movement for a period
as a result of the combined effects of defeat and the boom in the
economy. Their triumph, however, was only temporary. Eventually the
working class recovers from defeat, and is forced by the conditions
imposed upon them by capitalism to return to struggle once more.
Now things are beginning to change again. In time memories fade, but
wounds heal too. The pain and demoralisation of defeat is eventually
replaced by a new mood and a new generation with no choice but to stand
up and fight against the incessant attacks of the capitalist system.
It is our duty to uphold the proud memory and tradition of the
miners’ struggle, and to pass it on to the new generation that is now
preparing to enter the road of struggle. In this sense this film plays
a very positive role.
Twenty years ago Britain was at war (as the policeman Paul explains
to his wife), but that war did not end in 1985. The miners’ strike was
just one battle in this war. The enemies of the working class may wish
to bury the memory of the miners’ strike so that the new generation
will not learn anything from it. They will not succeed. We will defend
the memory of this epic struggle and pass on its many great lessons to
the new generation that is destined to continue the fight to a
victorious conclusion. In that victory we have an unshakeable Faith,
not of the mystical or religious kind, but one based on the sound
science of Marxism.
Marxists must be the memory of the movement. We remember the lessons
of the 1926 general strike, and we remember too the lessons of 1984-5.
Blair and co. will soon assume their rightful positions in the dustbin
of history where they will quickly be forgotten. They will not even
merit a footnote whilst the Miners’ Strike will always remain an
important chapter in the history of the struggles of the British
working class. It will live on, as a defeat yes, but with all its
lessons, and as an heroic struggle by men, women and children, whole
families and entire communities. This struggle is not a thing of the
past; on the contrary it is a foretaste of what is to come. No doubt
there will be other defeats too, but not one of them will be wasted if
we remember them and learn from them. As the philosopher Spinoza once
explained our task is “neither to weep, nor laugh, but to understand.” Faith
helps us to do all three. In the end learning from all these struggles
will be integral to the final victory of the working class. To the
degree that we succeed in marrying the lessons of these struggles with
the courage and determination shown by the miners, their families and
communities in 1984-85, we can have confidence, we can have faith in
the socialist future of mankind.
