Miners' strike - 25 years ago

[Rabelais]

25 years since the miners strike. I was listening to a debate about it on Radio 5 Live this morning and on the evidence of that alone it seems that the strike's legacy is almost as bitterly contested as the strike itself.

Although in Belfast and only just a teenager at the time, the strike is probably the event that really politicised me. One thing in particular sticks in my mind and that is a news report around Christmas that showed young conservatives (Oxbridge-types) singing songs revelling in the poverty that the miners were suffering at that time. The songs were disgusting and even today I never meet a Tory but I recall that news report. Perhaps as a consequence I have no hesitation in endorsing Nye Bevan's remarks about the Tories being vermin. They were then they are now. Who knows, some of those student Conservatives may be in Parliament now.

I was wondering does anyone have any reflections on the period?

[Brigg57]

Memories a-plenty from hackney Support Group to the big demonstartions in London where, for the only time in my life, I felt that the met were a bit cowed by the demonstrators. The last big demo turned nasty, and I lit a quick retreat before the big violence began. I had foolishly brought my young boy on the march, and felt the violence in teh air, so took him out of it. One of my friends was badly beaten during that march.

Its importance is undoubted - it kicked the teeth out of the trade union movement. The govt threw everything they had to beat that strike, and I'll never forgive that cur Kinnock for his half-support. After the strike's defeat, the employers had a gun to the head of every worker in the country. They still do.

What amazes me is the universal opinion now that somehow a ballot would have made the difference. I was agin a ballot at the time, along with virtually every supporter of the strike I met, and for good reasons. I rarely mention it now because it's a dead issue, but the failure to hold a ballot and the defeat of the strike is blamed on Scargill. I don't have any time for Scargill's Stalinism, but on that strike his instincts were right all along - the ballot made no real difference, and wouldn't have done.

[Rabelais]

In retrospective, doesn't the issue of a ballot need to seen in the context of everything else that has happened and also how Scargill and the striking miners we're substantially right to fight the government for their jobs, to defend their industry and their communities and in the interests of trade unionism? Is the absence of a ballot something that is used by people like Kinnock to excuse their own political dereliction at that time?

[CharlieMcMenamin]

Here in Lambeth you couldn't move for miners: every time I left my front door there seemed to be another lot of them at this or that meeting, or just collecting at one of our many tube stations. About £1000 a week ( probably about £2.5K in today's terms) in  donated coppers was being taken at Brixton tube alone. I also remember the big demos, mainly with fondness - I never saw any trouble.  There are some funny memories that remain as well: one young South Welsh lad complaining he had been billeted with me and my mate in the hard to let council flat we lived in then, rather than in the posh Clapham house his mates were in; stories of miners refusing to go home from their comfy university billets ( and, ahem, university girlfriends, comfy or otherwise...) after the strike had ended

It was perfectly possible to support the strike and still think, on balance, the odds on winning would have been better with a ballot. That was my position at the time. It might have made it more difficult for the press to present the Nottinghamshire miners as heroic resistors of mob pressure, and made it a bit easier to lobby for solidarity action from other unions.

 But even back then I didn't think the ballot question was decisive in the battle. I was always amazed that Kinnock even gave it half -hearted support and I don't think having a ballot would have increased his support one iota. The key was always the Ridley plan - the Tories had meticulously prepared for the fight for a long time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ridley_Plan

I also remember thinking the strike was lost after about six months. It was almost impossible to openly discuss this view on the Left back then - we were all so strongly committed to the struggle which was undoubtedly the biggest and most intense moment of class conflict I ever experienced, albeit at second hand as it were. Even quietly suggesting it was perhaps time to think about limiting the losses would have been seen as an act of gross betrayal. So I kept quiet (not that anyone would have bothered about the opinions of some 25 yr old South London voluntary sector worker from a non-mining family anyway).  But I do now wonder if the defeat would have been quite so total if the strike hadn't gone on for quite so long....if there is a potential criticism to be made of the NUM leadership this is the one I'd focus on, not the tired old issue of the ballot. Did they keep the miners out for so long out of pride, or because they genuinely thought it was still winnable in the winter of 1984/5?

[Rabelais]

As a bit of an aside, watch out for the start of the Red Riding trilogy on Channel 4 tonight, based on the novels of David Peace, Yorkshire author of GB84, a novel about the miner's strike (well worth a read). Link below:

http://redriding.channel4.com/

David Peace was interviewed by Red Pepper around the time of GB84's publication. You might find it if you're a bit of an archivist like me in your back issues. I can't find it on the web site anywhere, though.

[Rabelais]

Something else that may be of interest if you missed it the first time round, reconstruction of the battle of Orgreave

http://www.channel4.com/fourdocs/archive/battle_of_orgreave.html

[Editor]

No need to dig through the archive, here's the interview with David Peace about his novel GB84
http://www.redpepper.org.uk/No-redemption

[Free Radical]

It brings back many memories. Of campaigning in London with Kent miners and Labour party comrades, collecting food weekly outside supermarkets, and of travelling down to visit a Kent pit village with a load of food in a bus.

It's easy to criticise Scargill. Perhaps a ballot might have been narrowly won and it would have undermined opposition - if the ballot had been won Nottinghamshire might well have come out on strike too. But it's easy to be wise after the event. A ballot would also have been a risk, and Scargill certainly didn't want to tell striking miners to go back to work.

Let's not forget that Scargill was right factually. The Tories picked a fight at the most opportune time of the year. Scargill was right about pit closures.

The most telling criticism of Scargill I came across was in one of Tony Benn's volumes of his autobiography, when a former senior TUC man said that Scargill was not political enough. This I think was correct. He was a great barrel thumping orator, but not much of a politician - he failed to construct the alliance necessary to win, so he failed tactically, and the miners failed, and the whole Labour movement failed.

Naturally I and most Labour Party comrades were enraged at the lack of support from Kinnock and the leadership. It was a terrible betrayal by Labour's leaders and by some other trades unionists.

The other thing that was so notable was how the state was suddenly acting in concert to defeat the NUM - judges sitting on a Sunday morning to give legal backing to anti-union measures. Traffic lights switched to green along the entire route for lorries carrying coal. The BBC almost entirely a government mouthpiece - odious - the Nine O'Clock news on BBC1 a piece of government propaganda. It was class war, and the establishment acted in a united way that I had never before seen.

But what was heart-warming was the response and generosity of ordinary people - poor people, middle class people, people of all colours and backgrounds who would donate money or food for the miners and their families. It was almost impossible to predict who would do this - a complete cross-section of ordinary people who saw the miners struggle as important and who saw the injustice of their treatment.

[Brigg57]

Thanks, ed. Quite a powerful drama. Maybe that archive should be made available to more people, now that there's probably a wider interest.

If Scargill and the NUM Exec had called a ballot, the miners would have torn them limb from limb. That was the comment of John Lloyd at the outset of the strike. You don't call a referendum on war once you've been attacked - the conditions in which a ballot would have been held would have been very strange indeed, with the newspapers going all out and demands that everyone go back to work. It was an illegal and unofficial strike, and it was held at the wrong time because you can't control wildcat action - you kill it or ride it.

The Notts miners may have refused to come out if their local ballot had voted no strike - they'd accepted local pay deals against the rest of the union in the late 70s. Worse - they may have come out and led a campaign for a new ballot every two months, wiht the threat of going back if their calls weren't met. As FR said, easy to be wise after the event. Benn and the CP wanted a ballot, but had the  sense of solidarity to keep quiet while the strike was on - I'll never forgive certain 'left' groups who were openly campaigning for a ballot during the strike.

I thought it would lose from the start, I'm afraid. I kept my mouth shut and for a while in the summer the militancy and enthusiasm of the miners led me to hope against hope, but by the autumn it was all over bar the crying - I said so to friends, and was nearly attacked.

It was lost for the same reason that the Notts Miners would have acted as a Trojan horse no matter whether a ballot had been held or no. It was a genuine class war, fought in a country where class conflict was ceasing to have meaning. The lorry drivers waving packets of overtime pay at miners' pickets, the attacks on those Notts miners who had struck by their working ex-mates and the boasting of future UDM housewives as they pulled big trolleys of goodies past the houses of the minority of Notts strikers were all indications of a mood building up since the late 70s and the 'back-to-work' demonstrations by Leyland workers in 1979. The social strains of the 70s which led to the successful Miners' strikes against Heath were being resolved - by the Right- with the support of trade unionists (a majority of whom voted Tory by then). A new type of society was birthing, where solidarity was being replaced by a stakeholding in our society through home ownership, shares...

Well, we live with that now, and we have to once again argue and fight. Capitalism has visibly failed, but there is a sense of cnfusion, not direction. Many working-class women in the region I am living in are taking to prostitution to pay the loan-sharks, according to the lates BBC reports. I thought it would take a generation to overcome the defeat of that strike..well...

[Rabelais]

A new type of society was birthing, where solidarity was being replaced by a stakeholding in our society through home ownership, shares...

Well, we live with that now, and we have to once again argue and fight. Capitalism has visibly failed, but there is a sense of cnfusion, not direction. Many working-class women in the region I am living in are taking to prostitution to pay the loan-sharks, according to the lates BBC reports. I thought it would take a generation to overcome the defeat of that strike..well...

They talk of third generation unemployment in ex-mining areas. and the concept of an 'underclass', which we've referred to on another thread, has its roots in this era. That's why I just can't stand listening to people fretting about 'chavs' because invariably these are the same people who were happy to see the political and cultural organisations of the working class smashed by Thatcher and her hench men and ideologues.

I watched Red Riding last night and thought it was interesting. The brutal child murder that kicks of the plot seemed symptomatic of the extra-ordinary corruption that David Peace, the author of the Red Riding books, identifies with the period. There were some really striking sequences, like those of the young journalist, Dunford, standing amongst the ruins of the gypsy encampment, razed to the ground to make way for the property developer's new supermarket. With its burnt out caravans, smoke, blackened-faced inhabitants and ash floating in the air, I thought it looked pretty apocalyptic; representative of the levelling of society necessary to make way for the consumerists dreams of the New Right.

Urban Yorkshire actually looked like it had suffered a blitz in the film, giving force to Dawson, the vile property developer's assertion that there was a war going on against micks, wogs, uppity women and just about anybody else that didn't know their place, the gypsies being the most notable casualties in the film. It will be interesting to see how that conflict develops in the next two episodes, given that we know David Peace writes about its dramatic climax in GB84.

Dawson, the property developer makes me think of all those 'angry young men' in the northern fiction of the late 50s and early eighties. The likes of Joe Lampton and Arthur Seaton were never typical 'working class heroes; too individualist, aggressive and avaricious to fit that mould. You could easily imagine them turning into a Dawson-type  character. The sort of self-made gob-shites that fell over themselves for Thatcher and who she in turn loved. As you say Brigg, a new sort of society was emerging and in this respect I think Red Riding is an attempt to dramatise its emergence.

The local corruption evident in Red Riding, with its bent coppers, councillors, business men and media-types seemed only a Yorkshire variant of a much wider malaise. There were whispered references to the conspiracy against Harold Wilson and the assembly of private armies.

I thought this was thought provoking drama and an antidote to that other popular dramatisation of the 70s Life on Mars, which looked back fondly on a time when coppers could clip you round the ear-hole (or beat a confession out of you); before 'political-correctness-gone-mad' and the 'nanny state' began reprimanding us about our drinking and smoking habits. Red Riding has a more noirish tones; a vision of the 70s were the 60's counter-culture and permissiveness sours into cynicism and sleaze.

[Brigg57]

a good review, Rab.

While in some ways the film reflected a particular period of time - 1974-5 was the height of ruling-class and leftist paranoia, with paramilitary groups like GB75 (Colonel Stirling's ex-SAS patriots) forming, and the time when corruption scandals connected with offshore banking and Northern  local government deals with building contractors (T. Dan Smith, ex-Trotskyist head of Newcastle Council, was arrested in 1973) - it is just as relevant today.

The leading nasty (baddie is too kind), the building contractor with a "private weakness" for children, exuded power rather than character, in the way that leadership has come to be celebrated ever since. He actually lacked individual character, and that's the key to why the series is so powerful for me. It's not about bad people, it's a need in the system for people to do bad things. If one guy or gal doesn't step into the job, another will. What these people have is what they're supposed to have - power, the ability and the willingness to destroy people, utterly destroy them and all they hold dear. Psychos are attracted to the power-jobs because they do them best.  That's why there is so much 'collateral' destruction - if someone likes hurting people who get in their way, they will ensure that they can hurt anyone they feel like hurting by using their power (money and influence) to protect them while they do it.

And the victims? Powerless. Frank Nodes set up Truemid in 1975 to work with 'moderates' in key unions like the GMW and AUEW to fight against the 'extremists' who stand in the way, allegedly using dirty tricks and espionage. Peter Wright has revealed the existence of an element in MI5 which sought to 'subvert' people in the government regraded as traitors. The hunting streets of Northern Ireland were the breeding ground.

The individual victims are helpless. That came across quite sharply in the last scene where the reporter aims his car at the approaching cops and smiles at his dead lover as she sits in the seat next to him...the ultimate symbol of the powerlessness which held most of us in its grasp in the decades after  the Miners defeat. Like all good media, the power of such symbolism is because it reflects a genuine truth about our society.

[CharlieMcMenamin]

Just an aside, but Brigg's mention of ,

T. Dan Smith, ex-Trotskyist head of Newcastle Council, was arrested in 1973

...made me think of Mark Meredith, ex Militant and Labour mayor of Stoke on Trent.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/staffordshire/7927887.stm

[Rabelais]

Brigg,
I think what you said about Dawson's lack of individual character is interesting and it is one of the things that I found refreshing about the film, that it didn't personalise the corruption or reduce it to a question of individual psychology. In fact none of the characters were given any great psychological depth, which I suspect some people might have had a problem with but I thought kept the film from tipping into melodrama or psychological crime drama, which given its subject matter it could very easily have done. Instead you where forced to consider these characters in the context of a social environment, albeit one that seemed to be rendered expressionistically at times - a 'war-torn', urban Yorkshire, the apocalyptic gypsy encampment.

Charlie,
You're probably aware of the T. Dan Smith-type character in Peter Flannery's Our Friends in the North - another tale of historic corruption.

[Free Radical]

It was good to see the Guardian's story about the miners' strike today (March 7)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/mar/07/scargill-miners-strike-thatcher, and even better to see Arthur Scargill have his own say in the same edition of the paper
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/mar/07/arthur-scargill-miners-strike.

Arthur Scargill's own piece cleared up some questions in my own mind - the precise (and quite logical) way in which the NUM came to call regional strikes rather than ballot for a national strike, the way in which the miners very nearly won and struck a deal with the government on their own terms - this was pulled by the Tory government once the NACODS pit deputies' strike was unexpectedly called off, and also Scargill's tactics over Orgreave.

I thought that Scargill emerged well from this account. I remember well that it was a very close run thing indeed - the forces so finely balanced. At one point the NCB were very fearful of having insuffiicient supplies of coal to keep power stations going. The NACODS strike ballot came, as I recall, quite late on, and virtually brought victory to the miners. Just how it came to be called off at the last minute is still evidently a mystery - maybe this story will emerge one day.

Kinnock's legacy was a pitiful one. Actually I believe that he faced both ways at the same time and it was rumoured that he gave substantial sums of his own money to the South Wales miners. I thought at the time that a different line by Kinnock could have been a deciding factor in the miners' favour. But my suspicion was that Kinnock, like other Labour Party leaders had no wish to encourage trades union militancy. He helped lose the strike as part of a wider battle against the left. In the end it did him no good and he went on to lead Labour to not one, but two election defeats.

The miners nearly won, but the tide was turning in other ways - against coal, and also against the kind of union militancy that marked the 1960s and 1970s. Thatcher shackled the unions, and New Labour, disgracefully, never removed the shackles. And for a period Thatchers idea of a kind of populist capitalism (no matter how hollow in reality) had a certain appeal to large sections of the population.

Nevertheless it would be a big mistake to see the miners strike as the end of trade union power and militancy - though one might see it as marking the end of a particular chapter in our history.

[Brigg57]

yes, I almost fully agree with FR. Scargill's article may be the start of a fresh look at the strike, less informed by the mythology that he was the evil mastermind who singlehandedly destroyed the strike by his tactics. The myth that the strike was one of donkeys led by lions created in its aftermath was used by all those who survived politically to attack any idea of militancy; to Kinnock, Mandelson and co, it was 'Labour's wasted year', when the attempt to purge Labour of its aspirations towards a socialist society was put back; the widespread myth was created that the failure to hold a national ballot was fatal to the strike's unity, thereby turning results into causes.

I myself don't think the strike would have been successful - the government had too much stake in the outcome, the majority of people were sympathetic to the suffering of the miners but uncertain whether the strike's aims were to save coal pits or defeat Thatcherism. If to save the pits, then for most people it drew the same sympathy as any othe group of workers fighting redundancy; if defeating Thatcherism (and I think that the latter was the motivation behind the tremendous energy that people put into that strike) then the majority of people may well have been opposed in the aftermath of Thatcher's decisive electoral victory against Labour in 1983.

The political environment had become very unsympathetic to the strike, and if you compare it with the environment surrounding the strikes against the Heath government (whose Industrial Relations legislation had been humiliated, and which had lost its sense of authority and direction) the contrast makes the likelihood of defeat greater. We can all talk of 'ifs', but if we can stand out of our own shoes for a minute, then Kinnock's position was as impossible as Ramsay MacDonald's during the 1926 General Strike - a fullblooded commitment to the strike was very dangerous electorally, and elections were and are what the Labour Party exists to fight. The strike's defeat enabled Labour to distance itself from trade union militancy without causing strains with the TUC; New Labour would have been impossible without it.

We can never know might-have-beens in history; when the Left starts saying, as Scargill did yesterday, that if only Labour had supported the strike, if only NACODS had come out, if only the Notts Miners had come out, if only a general strike had been held, if only a socialist revolution had occured back in 1926..then we have to be wary. It is a measure of exasperated frustration, because whatever might-have-been had occurred, they didn't occur; the different oppositions in government and in 'civil society'would not have sat still and done nothing.

The strike, seen from historical perspective, was a Greek tragedy, fought with great courage and endurance in an environment which had been turning hostile for nearly 10 years (since the defeat of the Left in the 1975 Common Market referendum), in which any of the might-have-beens we can moan about weren't. As the Left begins to recover from the almighty blows of the 1980s and begins - just begins to think that it may still have a mission, then the past has to stand as the past - important to argue about significance rather than might-have-beens (?), but really belonging to a very different country than the one we're in now.

[Rabelais]

There sometimes seems to be a strange fatalism around the strike and its legacy. A feeling like defeat was somehow inevitable but Scargill's account would suggest otherwise, that indeed victory was always a possiblity. Maybe. I've always been suspicious of that sort of fatalism which somehow sees Thatcher as a force of nature that the country somehow needed. You know how some people will tell you how much they disliked Thatcher but something had to be done about the state of the country and that something was inevitable Thatcherism?

What if Kinnock had been public supportive? What if NACODS had come out? What if the Notts miners hadn't broken ranks? I don't know whether I agree with you Brigg when you say:

'As the Left begins to recover from the almighty blows of the 1980s and begins - just begins to think that it may still have a mission, then the past has to stand as the past - important to argue about significance rather than might-have-beens (?), but really belonging to a very different country than the one we're in now.'

I think the might have beens are part of the significance and for me the lessons are don't trust or seek compromise with the Tories. They've always been much more effective at waging class war that the Left has been. We can dispute tactics from here to eternity but isn't the key question: were the miner's right to fight for their jobs, industry and communities? If the answer is yes then there shouldn't have been any reservations on the broad left about throwing its weight behind the miners. I am always reminded of the United Irish leader, Henry Joy McCracken's words in the aftermath of the 1798 rebellion:

'These are the times that try men's souls. You will no doubt hear a great number of stories respecting the situation of this country, its present unfortunate state is entirely owing to treachery, the rich always betray the poor.'

[CharlieMcMenamin]

Scargill's account in the Guardian this week was thought-provoking but not completely convincing. I trust his version of events on the directly industrial matters - such as the prospective deals scuppered by Thatcher, or the strange events around the NACODS non-strike - but I'm very much less convinced by his inference that Kinnock would have ended up as PM if only he had thrown his weight behind the strike. ( Which isn't to say I think Kinnock shouldn't have come off the fence more, because I do).

The strike proved to be a life or death battle for the type of trade unionism we knew in the 1960s and 1970s. It wasn't  necessarily a life and death for the new kind of capitalism that was being born. If the miners had won, Thatcher would have been massively undermined and possibly even replaced as Tory leader. But it would have also strengthened the forces around the SDP, one of whose big themes was around the 'need to put industrial strife behind us'. David Owen could well have emerged as PM rather than Kinnock. Given I think of New Labour as the direct ideological descendant of the SDP this might have meant we got a Blairite government earlier rather than later. Or we could have had minority government, as in 1974.

Such 'might have beens' are beguiling but, I reluctantly agree, probably pointless. By now most of those pits would have been closed however the strike ended- just closed  on a more humane time scale, with more concern to provide alternative employment and sustenance for those poor communities: a windfarm at every pit head perhaps? But the NUM would, by now, be very much smaller than it was in 1984 and so would the overall political weight of the TU movement.

[Free Radical]

Brigg, Rabelais

While the 'what if' game of history is largely futile I felt at the time, and still do, that the forces ranged against one another were very finely balanced. This is I suppose self-evident since in any prolonged struggle opposing forces must be finely balanced - otherwise one would easily triumph.

Sure, the situation is dynamic and further forces might have been brought into play - but what? I recall a story told later concerning the 1972 miners strike when Arthur Scargill's Yorskhire miners were picketing (successfully) Saltley Power Station. It is said that it was suggested (I think by a fellow minister) to Robert Carr, then Employment Secretary in Heath's Tory government, that troops be sent in to keep the power station operating, and Carr is said to have responded by asking whether this person suggested sending troops in with rifles loaded or unloaded. Sensibly Carr did not wish to precipitate a massacre and potentially an insurrection in Britain.

The fact that, according to Scargill, an offer to accept the miners terms was made by the government and then withdrawn when NACODS called off their promised action, shows just how close it was to success for the miners.

But, as we have noted, a certain 'tide of history' was running against the miners and the organised working class at that time. In the coming decades manufacturing was to be reduced by around one half I think, services and banking and finance were deregulated and took an increasingly important role in the economy (along with armaments), and hence we are where we find ourselves now in 2009. In some considerable difficulty as a country. Thatcher's legacy was, as I have said elsewhere, contradictory - to purge the country of 'uncompetitive' 'old-fashioned' industries, precipitating a deep recession in the 1980s, to weaken the unions, to encourage a popular identification with capitalism. In this she enjoyed overall striking success - for a time. In the medium term, the UK (not all the people of course) was able to benefit economically from this deregulation and purging of industries that were going to be progressively undercut by emerging countries (the Far East above all). In the longer term we became highly emeshed in what is now seen to have been a bubble. The pricking of this bubble has led us to fall further than many.

But I agree with Brigg that so much has now changed that it is in some ways another country. The 'left' has some prospect of reformulating itself. It is vital, I think, that this be done not simply defensively and negatively (British Jobs for British Workers) and this is my main difficulty with the likes of the Labour Representation Committee who still seem to have difficulty shaking off the past (with apologies to my good comrades who have thrown their lot in with the LRC). It's contradictory isn't it - we need to understand the past (and often our historical perspective is too short) but we also need to face the reality of the present - the two need to go hand in hand. We can't live in the past, but we can't understand where we are now, and where we are going, without some historical understanding.

[CharlieMcMenamin]

Mind you, if like me, alternative history is one of your guilty pleasures, the Yorkshire Ranter blog does a particularly interesting version;
(http://yorkshire-ranter.blogspot.com/2009/03/alternative-yorkshire.html)

....whatever had happened in 1984, there could only ever have been a stay of execution for ten years. In 1995, the starting gun for serious climate fear was fired when the IPCC scenarios crossed the 95% confidence interval into significance; and as James Hansen says, it's the coal. Essentially lumps of carbon, with some added toxic heavy metals for laughs, and there's so much of the stuff that we won't run out before we cook the planet.

Consider the alternate history for a moment; NACODS walk out as well, the government is forced to give in. Thatcher, of course, doesn't quit, but there is either a 1922 Committee coup or else she loses the 1987 election, or perhaps there is a repeat of 1974 - she calls an election for a mandate to take on the miners again, and loses. Neil Kinnock walks into Downing Street, either in a Labour government or a coalition with the Liberals and SDP.

Where do we go from here? The TUC-driven European turn in the Labour Party hasn't happened yet, but neither has the D-Mark shadowing and ERM fiasco. The Labour Party has taken a goodly dose of the new social movements, as in the original time-line, but the prestige of the NUM on the Left would be immense.

But whatever happens in the Kinnock-Steel government, at some point in 1995 the Chief Scientific Advisor walks into the Cabinet Room, and about ten minutes later, all hell breaks loose. After all, in this scenario we've been merrily burning much more coal than in the original timeline for the last ten years, and the coal lobby is the strength of the Left.

The political implications would be more than weird. The activist Left, all other things being equal, is heavily green-influenced, so it ends up against the miners. The mainstream Labour Party is wildly conflicted. And the rightwing science-dodger ecosystem has no choice but to support the miners; Anthony Browne and friends in Doncaster, probably with bags of Exxon-provided cash. Thrill as they try to tack between screwing the government and keeping their North Sea investments.

So the strike 2.0 happens in the late 90s/early 2000s, with mobile phones and the Internet on the protesters' side (flashmobs at Ferrybridge), tasers and pervasive CCTV on the police side, and all the party affiliations surreally flipped. God knows how that would have played out.

[Rabelais]

FR you say that 'a certain 'tide of history' was running against the miners and the organised working class at that time' of the miners strike. And I appreciate what you mean but doesn't this mean essentially suggest that miner's strike was futile? That with hindsight the miner's and the working class would have been better just shuffling off the historical stage and saving the world a lot of bother? Or that really the working class and other exploited groups have no agency?

As we've been discussing on another thread how this period is remembered will be interesting and I think important. And I suspect that organisations like the BBC will, in the 'national interest', recall the miner's strike as a 'heroic' but futile struggle because of the 'tide of history' thesis. If we're just at the mercy of the 'tides of history' why would we bother?