To mark the fortieth anniversary of the miners’ strike of 1984-85, this is an extract from Alwyn Turner’s book Rejoice! Rejoice! Britain in the 1980s.
While the media and the government focused on the lack of a ballot and on incidents of violence by pickets, the NUM and its supporters saw the policing of the strike as a key issue. Stories abounded of police aggression, of unprovoked violence and of deliberate intimidation in areas where the strike was solid. ‘They were animals,’ said a woman in a mining village in South Yorkshire, after seeing police break up a picket. ‘They were hitting anyone they could find. I was once in favour of the police but there’s no way they will get any help from me now.’
This breakdown in trust was amongst the most notable effects of the strike, much of it stemming from the behaviour of officers from outside forces in what was seen as virtually an army of occupation. George Moores, the chairman of the South Yorkshire police committee talked about seeing ‘rosy-cheeked nice lads turned into Nazi storm-troopers’, and added that it would be ‘twenty years before some policemen in South Yorkshire are forgiven for what they’ve done in the pit villages and on the picket lines’. There were stories too of the police lines being augmented by soldiers.
Little of this was aired in the news media at the time. The majority of journalists, photographers and television cameras situated themselves behind police lines, a position that suggested both the sympathies of their employers and the relative safety that was to be found there – better to face a ragged shower of sticks and stones than a cavalry charge of baton-wielding police. The consequence was that most of the media coverage depicted the hostility and violence of pickets, not of police.
Nonetheless, the imagery that later passed into the collective memory of the dispute tended to show the conflict from the other side. The role of the police could be seen, most famously, in the film Billy Elliot (2000), set in a mining town in Durham during the strike, with the silent, menacing presence of the police an inextricable part of the urban setting. The issue was addressed too in Reginald Hill’s novel Under World (1988), set in a Yorkshire mining village, where Andy Dalziel ruminates on the legacy of the strike and its implications for policing by consent in the future: ‘They brought a lot of cockneys up from the Stink, but, bloody Cossacks, them lot. All they know is rape and pillage.’
Another fictional detective working in the county, Peter Robinson’s DCI Banks, sees the effect on members of the force, as he’s told about the character of an officer who’s been murdered: ‘He was handy with his truncheon, Gill was. And he enjoyed it. Every time we got requests for manpower at demos, pickets and the like, he’d be the first to sign up. Got a real taste for it during the miners’ strike, when they bussed people in from all over the place. He was the kind of bloke who’d wave a roll of fivers at the striking miners to taunt them before he clobbered them.’
The issue of overtime pay even turned up in a 1986 episode of Casualty: ‘It’s alright for you boys, innit? Every time there’s a strike, another hundred coppers start taking out mortgages,’ says an ambulance worker bitterly to a policeman. ‘If I was on your wages, maybe I could join the property-owning democracy as well.’
Amongst the few journalists trying to keep an even-handed approach was Paul Routledge, the labour editor of The Times, who wrote of picket-line violence: ‘Without equivocation it ought to be stopped. All of it, the stone throwing by miners and the baton charging by policemen who actually seem to enjoy a week away from home for a pityard punch-up. And don’t tell me they don’t because I’ve seen them at it.’
There was also Paul Foot, whose sympathies lay more squarely with the strikers; he reported in his Daily Mirror column about the excitement on Fleet Street when word arrived of a Derbyshire miner, Pete Neelan, having his car and garage set on fire and his house spray-painted with the word ‘Revenge’. Sadly, when the journalists arrived to get the full story, they discovered that he wasn’t one of the heroic working miners but merely a striker, and they all disappeared again without filing their copy.
These were isolated voices. Most of the media comment saw the strike as being a personal political crusade by Scargill and, with impressive consistency, used the imagery of the Second World War against him. ‘Scargill and the Fascists of the Left’ ran a headline in the Daily Express, while John Junor, editor of the Sunday Express, continued the analogy: ‘Hitler used his thugs to terrorize into submission people who disagreed with him. Isn’t that precisely what is happening now at night in Nottinghamshire mining villages?’
Most notoriously, the Sun obtained a photograph of Scargill with his right arm outstretched in a gesture that coincidentally resembled a Nazi salute, and proposed to run it with the headline ‘Mine Fuhrer’. The paper’s print workers refused to print the article and instead the paper appeared with a virtually blank front page, containing just a brief statement from the management: ‘Members of all the Sun production chapels refused to handle the Arthur Scargill picture and major headline on our lead story. The Sun has decided, reluctantly, to print the paper without either.’ The picture ran elsewhere, the Daily Express captioning it with a little more subtlety: ‘Napoleon of Barnsley’.
The personalized focus on Scargill was a deliberate tactic by the government and its supporters, who knew how controversial a figure he was, though their task was undoubtedly made easier by his own self-publicizing inclinations. It was a successful ploy, and not simply amongst the more obvious readers of tabloid papers; Routledge revealed that the Queen had suggested to him the strike was all down to one man: ‘she felt that the dispute was essentially promoted by Mr Scargill.’
Many of the themes that had developed in the early weeks of the strike came sharply into focus with the confrontation at the Orgreave coking plant in South Yorkshire in June 1984. A mass picket, seeking to close down the plant, was met by large numbers of police – estimates varied between 5,000 and 10,000 on each side – and in the violence that ensued, mounted police made repeated charges. Amongst the injured was Scargill himself, briefly admitted into hospital.
The television images of the battle horrified much of the nation (with the BBC accused of misleading the public about the order of events, so that the use of horses was seen to be reactive rather than unprovoked), and Tony Benn was not alone in concluding that ‘A kind of civil war is developing; there is no parallel that I remember in my lifetime’. That was indeed how it looked: armies of strikers and sympathizers trying to impose their will by force and being prevented only by even greater force.
Even the government’s natural supporters were disturbed; the strike had been ‘bungled by both sides in the most pig-headed fashion,’ despaired actor Kenneth Williams in his diary. ‘Thatcher deserves to lose popularity over it: I’m not surprised she’s down in the polls. Governments are supposed to be competent not obdurately stupid.’
There was no consensus either in the police establishment. South Yorkshire’s assistant chief constable Tony Clement made it clear that Orgreave was not simply part of an industrial dispute: ‘If the pickets here win by force, the whole structure of industrial relations and policing and law and order and civil liberties is all gone.’ His view was certainly the majority position within the force, but John Alderson, the former chief constable of Devon and Cornwall, was prepared to sound a discordant note: ‘For the first time we have seen the police having to resort to some kind of paramilitary style of policing which we have always associated with continental police forces and always prided ourselves in having avoided having to introduce.’
While the headlines were thus occupied, the everyday reality behind the dispute was the hardship being endured by those on strike and their families. The cuts in benefits that had earlier been introduced bit deep, for there was no strike pay, just a daily allowance provided to those who did a stint on the picket-line. The DHSS also deducted from benefit payments any loans made to families by social work departments in local councils, while for single men, there was no income at all.
In the resulting desperation, Labour MP Joe Ashton noted that ‘in Barnsley market local stalls were soon selling wedding rings for £5 each,’ and Benn described the scene at the Labour Club in his Chesterfield constituency: ‘it was like a field hospital, with people crowding in to collect food parcels. There are miners’ wives who are expecting babies, and the DHSS refuse to help with money for prams or cots or nappies, and this is causing great anxiety.’ The use of the benefit system as an adjunct to the government’s industrial policy, pointed out Peter Hain, was a new and powerful weapon, turning the achievements of previous Labour administrations against the people they were intended to help: ‘Because the poor are now more dependent on state benefits than in pre-welfare days when they had to rely on community self-help, they are more vulnerable to attacks on these benefits.’
What emerged in response was an alternative welfare system, with the establishment of kitchens serving meals and distributing food parcels. A large network of support across the country, involved upwards of a million people – ‘the biggest and most continuous civilian mobilization to confront the government since the Second World War,’ according to the Financial Times – and raised an estimated £60 million and made huge donations in kind.
An endless round of benefit events was staged, featuring acts as diverse as Wham! and Napalm Death, as well as Crass’s last ever gig, and making folk-punk singer Billy Bragg a national figure. ‘It energized the entire music industry,’ observed NME editor Neil Spencer. Every Saturday for months, there were bucket-wielding activists in high streets across the country, urging shoppers to ‘dig deep for the miners’, and offering in return for their contributions a sticker calling for ‘Coal, Not Dole’.
Most noticeable about this support campaign was the fact that it was so enthusiastically embraced by the new left. It took over from CND as the single unifying issue around which a disparate movement could rally, even though the cause seemed so firmly fixed in an old Labour world of a male-only manual industry.
This was, it felt to many, not simply a strike, but a crusade against everything that Margaret Thatcher stood for, a civil war between two different philosophies who didn’t even seem to share a common language: the government talked of ‘uneconomic pits’, the NUM’s supporters spoke of ‘mining communities’. The gulf in values, in the visions of society, that lay behind those two phrases motivated hundreds of thousands who opposed Thatcherism.
Lion & Unicorn 