Anniversary of historic time for the nation
Mar 5 2009 The Journal
THE miners’ strike began to gather pace when workers at Cortonwood Colliery in Yorkshire walked out in protest at pit closures on March 5, 1984.
The National Coal Board announced that 50 uneconomic pits were to shut with the loss of 20,000 jobs.
Miners around the country started to follow suit and, just a week later, half of Britain’s 187,000 miners were on strike after industrial action was backed by the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM).
A month on and the miners’ leader Arthur Scargill ruled out a national ballot, a decision upheld by the NUM executive by 13 votes to eight. Running battles between police and pickets broke out in May and the worst violence of the dispute came at Orgreave Coking Plant, Sheffield. Mounted police wielding batons to break up crowds of miners while they, in turn, were bombarded by bricks and stones from the pickets.
Police from 10 counties used riot gear for the first time against a 5,000-strong throng. The first signs of the strike starting to crumble came in December as miners began to succumb to inducements from pit bosses.
And on March 3, 1985, the NUM ended the strike, with a special delegate conference voting 98-91 to return to work.
The strike was one of the most bitter conflicts in trade union history and had left a huge mark, not only on the face of British industry. During the first week of the strike a young Yorkshire miner, David Jones was killed on a picket line at Ollerton while a few months later Joe Green, also of Yorkshire, was killed on a picket line outside Ferrybridge Power Station.
In the course of the often violent dispute, a total of 11,000 miners were arrested, 7,000 were injured and 11 killed.
Thatcher to blame, says NUM boss
THE 1984 strike was not the fault of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), but the Tory Government that saw it as the "enemy within", according to today’s NUM president.
That is the declaration of miner’s leader Ian Lavery, from Ashington, Northumberland, after former Tory Cabinet minister Norman Tebbit expressed regret for damage caused by the miners’ strike but firmly blamed the NUM.
"That is certainly Thatcherite rhetoric, which I have heard a million times up and down the country in the last 25 years, word for word," said Mr Lavery, who was on pickets in Northumberland and across the country as a young man. "It was not the NUM that caused the strike. It was the Government."
He accused Margaret Thatcher of planning for a strike, with coal stockpiled at power stations, to "attack" the NUM after it brought down Ted Heath in the 1970s.
He said: "It was retaliation and the Tories viciously attacked the miners and the mining communities.
"If as Norman Tebbit put it, someone punches you in the face you either fight back or roll down the hill and die. We chose the honourable path to fight for jobs and for communities."
He acknowledged the strike was not ultimately successful because the UK coal industry was one of the smallest in the world, but says co-operation with the Tories would have made no difference.
"If we’d had a national ballot, as Mr Tebbit suggests, would the Government have rolled over and accepted that what the union said was correct?
"Of course not, the national ballot was always a red herring.
"The Government was hell-bent on getting rid of the mining industry, not because of the economics of the coal industry but the people who mined the coal," said the NUM president.
And in rueful comments, Mr Lavery added: "The proof in the pudding is in the eating. Look at the situation we now face in terms of energy in the UK."
