Workers' Liberty

The SWP and the Falklands war
The fate of the pet pig: Roy Lynk and the Notts miners
Reflections on the Falklands war

By Paddy Dollard

In Thomas Hardy’s novel Jude the Obscure, there is a strange, affecting scene, in which the butchering of a hand-raised pig is described. It is told with great sympathy and empathy from the pig’s point of view.

Throughout the strike, pit villages were twinned with the labour movements in towns and cities throughout the country, and there was a constant flow of activists between the two. One of the towns the North Notts strikers were twinned with was Basingstoke, and Paul and his comrades spent a lot of time with socialists and activists from there.

Paul Whetton wrote this as a delegate to Labour Party conference in September 1984

Mrs Thatcher is tough, nasty, brutal, spiteful, single-minded and very hostile to the labour movement — but a good, tough, committed fighter for her own cause and capable of being an inspiring leader for her own side. Mrs Thatcher knows how to lead.

Jean Lane, a Women’s Fightback organiser during the miners’ strike, remembers how Paul Whetton responded to women organising.

On Friday 3 March Paul Whetton, miner, trade union militant, socialist and Workers’ Liberty collaborator, died aged 66. It was the 21st anniversary of the end of the great miners’ strike of 1984-85. John Bloxam remembers him.

Mick Duncan reviews "Faith", BBC1, 28 February

Socialist Worker, the miners and the “downturn”

By Jack Cleary, from Socialist Organiser 6 February 1985

Socialists need realism, honesty and candour in assessing the world around us. On the other hand we should have no business with unnecessary or premature defeatism. Anyone reading what Socialist Worker says could not avoid the conclusion that the strike is lost.

Christmas and unity

Christmas pressures tended to united pit communities. Socialist Organiser of 12 December reported from Kiveton Park:

“As television commercials paraded computers and spaceships before children’s eyes, Jenny Dennis had to tell her seven year old son Matthew that Santa Claus was a mere fantasy.

The last pit in the “superpit” coalfield of Selby, North Yorkshire, closed last month and with it went 1,700 mining jobs. The coalfield — which consisted of five pits and one drift mine — covered 110 square miles, an area the size of the Isle of Wight. It was started October 1976, at a time when British capitalism thought coal was a good alternative to oil. When it opened, the Selby coalfield was praised by then Labour government as a “striking symbol of the re-birth of coal as a major energy source”.

For most miners, the Notts coalfield was synonymous with conservatism and right wing domination. It was the first coalfield to return to work in 1926. The home of “Spencerism” (employer’s union) and the main area of support for the introduction of an incentive scheme in 1977.

Read on for a look at the events of October and the scabs and the law.

The Labour Party conference opened at Blackpool on 1 October. It overturned and overruled the platform line on the miners’ strike.

Continuing our timeline of the events of the strike...

The TUC congress opened on 3 September in 1984. There was still time to rally the working class to the miners.

Every day the smooth-faced pundits forecast on the box.

The miners' strike is lost, they say, and Scargill's on the rocks
Lies, defamation, misinformation, this is the testing time
He kept faith with the men who elected him, and that is a major crime.
The Media, Ewan McColl

By Mick Duncan

Beginning August: After South Wales NUM is fined £50,000 the NUM calls on the TUC and the rest of the trade union movement for solidarity action. Nothing happens. The movement begins to go into retreat, although the miners would remain, fundamentally, solid until November.

The events

13 July: Government withholds tax refunds to striking miners.
19 July: NUM/NCB talks last three days. Despite NUM willingness to negotiate, the NCB are ordered to stand firm by the government. Some of the NCB officials wanted to settle. They were later sacked or resigned.
31 July: South Wales NUM fined £50,000 and the High Court seizes South Wales NUM funds. The union had defied an injunction against picketing granted to two haulage firms. The Tories are beginning to up the stakes.

The events

1 July: Leon Brittan endorses the use of Criminal Law rather than Civil Law against the miners.
5 July: National Coal Board and NUM talks.
6 July: Management visits NUM members at home encouraging them back to work.
8 July: High Court declares NUM Annual Conference unlawful.
National dock strike called against the movement of coal.

A look back at the events of May-June and the Battle for Orgreave.

May 29-18 June: Thousands of pickets and police fight battles outside Orgreave coking plant, near Sheffield. Coke runs from Orgreave were suspended on 18 June.

Jim Denham recalls the strike support work done in Birmingham

We continue our look at the miners' strike by following the events of May 1984 and looking at international solidarity with the British miners.


The events

Beginning of May 1984: series of mass pickets in Notts coalfield. On 2 May police estimate 10,000 at Haworth and on 3 May almost as many at Cotgrave.

We continue our analysis of the miners' strike with a recap of the events of 25 April-12 May 1984 and a look at how Labour should have fought.

The events

25 April: Labour Party national executive votes to support the strike and to ask every Party member to donate 50p a week.

We continue our look at the miners' strike with a look at the events of 11-20 April 1984.


The events

11 April 1984: Pit Deputies vote to join the strike

12 April NUM Executive faces down right-wing calls for a national ballot and right wing Notts area president Ray Chadburn emerges from the meeting to tell his members: "get off your knees and support the strike."

The second in our series looking back at the miners' strike details the events up to April 1984.

21 March 1984: power unions (including the GMB) advise their members to cross picket lines. Steelworkers will also cross picket lines.

We begin our series on the 1984-5 miners' strike. We will follow the events, re-tell the story and reflect on the lessons.

The events

1 March 1984: National Coal Board announces the closure of Cortonwood Colliery in Yorkshire and a cut back of 4 million tonnes of coal in the forthcoming year with a loss of 20,000 jobs. South Yorkshire miners go on unofficial strike.

By Cathy Nugent

On 1 March twenty years ago British miners embarked on a tremendous year-long battle to save their jobs, their communities and, as it turned out, the entire industry. They also fought the Thatcher Tory government for the whole of our class. The miners were absolutely right against those union and Labour leaders who portrayed their intransigence as irrational.

BBC2

"Thus were the working-men forced once more, in spite of their unexampled endurance, to succumb to the might of capital. But the fight had not been in vain"
- Frederick Engels, 'The Mining Proletariat', The Condition of the Working Class in England

Channel 4

"Thus were the working-men forced once more, in spite of their unexampled endurance, to succumb to the might of capital. But the fight had not been in vain ..."
- Frederick Engels, 'The Mining Proletariat', The Condition of the Working Class in England