Winston Churchill once put down the prime minister of the day, Stanley Baldwin, with the immortal words: “History will say that the right honourable gentleman was wrong. I know it will, because I shall write the history.” But history is not always written by the victors. The history of the miners’ strike of 1984-85 has been written by the losers. Popular culture has cast Margaret Thatcher and the police in the role of villains — never Arthur Scargill.
The latest example is Pride, a new British film starring Bill Nighy, Dominic West and Imelda Staunton. It tells the story of a London gay and lesbian group that decides to support striking miners in a Welsh valley.
Just as Billy Elliot and Brassed Off identified the miners’ cause with ballet and brass bands, so Pride disingenuously associates it with the campaign for gay rights — the postmodern equivalent of motherhood and apple pie.
Though Pride is based on a true story, the warm glow that it spreads over the events of three decades ago is misleading. The screenwriter, Stephen Beresford, appeared on the Today programme to glorify the striking miners, claiming they had “a lot in common” with gay people.
In fact Scargill, the Stalinist demagogue who led the National Union of Mineworkers, had no time for what he doubtless saw as bourgeois decadence. As far as the NUM was concerned, the love that dare not speak its name went unrequited.
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But in the rose-tinted account peddled by films such as Pride, all enemies of Thatcherism must have been allies. “The miners are hated by Thatcher, the police and the tabloid press,” one character tells his gay friends. “Who does that remind you of?”
Demonising Britain’s first female prime minister is a common thread in the mythology of the miners’ strike. The musical of Billy Elliot includes a song set to music by Sir Elton John with the refrain: “Merry Christmas Maggie Thatcher/ We all celebrate today/ ’Cause it’s one day closer to your death.”
The police are always depicted in this mythology as faceless brutes: at best the tools of the wicked witch in Downing Street, at worst Nazi storm troopers. In reality, the British police behaved better during the strike, under violent assault and extreme provocation, than any other force in the world would have done.
At the so-called Battle of Orgreave in June 1984, up to 6,000 picketing miners confronted a similar number of officers who were trying to safeguard supplies from a Yorkshire coking plant. After enduring a hail of missiles, the police charged, leaving 51 miners and 72 policemen injured. Years later, some miners were awarded compensation but, at the time, this nightmarish spectacle of anarchy sickened the public.
At stake, as most people understood, were democracy and the rule of law. The strike itself was neither democratic nor legal because Scargill avoided holding a ballot yet claimed it was official.
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His tactics were even worse. He used the most militant regions to coerce those who were reluctant to strike, sending “flying pickets” around the country. Those who went back to work were branded “scabs” and suffered extreme intimidation — including arson and murder.
The most notorious case took place in South Wales, where Pride is set. Two strikers dropped a concrete block from a bridge on to a taxi taking a working miner to the Merthyr Vale pit, killing the driver.
Kim Howells, later a Labour minister, was a local NUM official at the time. Long afterwards, he described his panic when he heard about the murder: “We are going to get implicated in this. I remember thinking: I’ve got to get to that office, I’ve got to destroy everything — and I did.” In other words, Howells admitted destroying documents that could have implicated the union in a murder inquiry.
Under Scargill’s leadership, some miners behaved as if they were above the law. In Nottinghamshire, where most miners were so opposed to the strike that they eventually formed the breakaway Union of Democratic Mineworkers, one miner, Neil Greatrex, recalled how mobs would gather outside his house. He feared for his ten-year-old daughter: “We didn’t want to tell Colette somebody was threatening to kill her and to burn our house down.”
After the strike ended, his father never spoke to him again — all because he had gone back to work.
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At the outset of the dispute, Margaret Thatcher instinctively grasped that not only her political survival but the rule of law was at stake. She ordered the home secretary, Leon Brittan, to tell the chief constable of Nottinghamshire police “that the government expects him to uphold the legal right of working men to go to work”. Her private secretary Andrew Turnbull recalled: “Had she not given that signal, history would have been completely different.”
For a year, she devoted half of every day to defeating Scargill. In the heat of the moment, she warned against “the enemy within” — a phrase that fed the myth of Thatcherism as a divisive creed. Yet there was truth in it and eventually it dawned on most strikers that they were being led by a man who cared more about his revolutionary ideology than their jobs.
His hubris brought a swift nemesis. Not only did the strike hasten the decline of the coal industry but it proved to be the turning point in the long power struggle between unions and successive governments to decide who governed Britain.
Thirty years later, the miners’ strike is so remote that charlatans can get away with rewriting history. When official papers were released earlier this year, Labour MPs demanded that David Cameron issue an apology for Margaret Thatcher’s handling of the strike. Rightly, he refused: there is nothing to apologise for. What happened, as she put it at the time, was this: “Marxists wanted to defy the law of the land in order to defy the laws of economics.”
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Today, unions (some still led by Marxists) are again flexing their muscles in anticipation of a Labour government. If they tried it on again, would Ed Miliband defy them — or sit on the fence like Neil Kinnock? The miners’ strike may be history, but unless our leaders learn its lessons, it is a history we are doomed to repeat.
Daniel Johnson is the editor of Standpoint