It has been 40 years since the national miners’ strike of 1984-1985 – the biggest industrial dispute in post-war Britain. This strike had a huge and lasting effect on the trade union movement. And, as HEATHER RAWLING explains, it also changed social attitudes to oppressed groups in society in significant ways.
The miners’ strike became a long, bitter industrial dispute. It drew in large layers of the working class, including women, Black and Asian workers, and members of the LGBT community. They gave their time, solidarity, and money to keep the strike going.
The miners were up against not just the publicly owned National Coal Board (NCB) but, as miners increasingly realised, the Thatcher Tory government and the British capitalist state that had been mobilised against them. The miners were seen as the first battalion of the working class and had given the Conservative government of Ted Heath a bloody nose in 1974. Margaret Thatcher and her government had attacked and defeated other groups of workers like the steel workers and taken a sledgehammer to manufacturing industry. Now Thatcher, in collaboration with the forces of the state, set out to destroy the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). The NCB, pushed by the government, provocatively announced a programme of pit closures. The miners struck to defend their pits, their industry, their communities and their whole way of life.
The capitalist class has many ways of defending its system. They have the organs of the state – the police, judiciary, army, media etc. They also use the strategy of ‘divide and rule’. As long as the working class is divided over gender, race, religion, migrants etc our attention is drawn away from our real oppressors – the rich and wealthy capitalists, owners of industry, property and finance. The working class, like other layers of society, are not immune to the prejudices that have been generated and fostered by capitalist society.
Attitudes at the beginning of the 1980s were quite different from today. The outlook of women had already begun to alter because of the impact of economic and social changes. The Equal Pay and Sex Discrimination Acts, enacted in 1975, were a direct response to the greater combativity of women in the workplace. Access to the contraceptive pill allowed more women to take paid work. Around 46% of women went out to work in the 1950s. By the 1980s nearly 60% of women were working outside the home.
The effect was significant. With more economic independence and support from others at work, many women were no longer willing to tolerate the prejudice and abuse they had suffered in the past. Their outlook changed as they became part of the workforce. A popular saying at the time was ‘a woman’s place is in her union’ in response to the reactionary ‘a woman’s place is in the home’. Women organised against sexual harassment and discrimination at work. And the changing attitudes of women affected attitudes more broadly in society
Women get organised
However, the changes were not uniform around the country and in all communities. In areas where heavy industry like ship building and coal mining dominated, attitudes, particularly of the men, were a bit slower to change. Mining communities were less diverse and there was less employment for women, without travelling to the larger towns and cities. But if the ruling class thought that they could use the women in the mining communities to ‘encourage their menfolk back to work’ they were sorely mistaken.
Margaret Thatcher, with a reputation as the ‘Iron Lady’, deliberately took on the miners and the NUM to break the union and cower other workers who may have been considering striking. She appointed Ian MacGregor, a hard-nosed businessman, as head of the National Coal Board. He had been the head of the steel industry where he had butchered thousands of jobs, and she appointed him to do the same to the coal industry.
Stories of families suffering hardship began to surface and MacGregor looked to divide the community and turn the women against the strike. He famously said, “I’d like to hear from the wives”. Well, he did, but he didn’t get the response he wanted.
As Christine Sullivan, wife of a miner and a nurse active in the health union COHSE at the time of the strike, said: “Women are at home feeling the brunt of the strike. The worry of the bills etc falls a lot on the women. Because the men are out picketing, it’s not so much on their minds. Some families are facing eviction for rent arrears or because the building societies are foreclosing on their mortgages. The kids are suffering as their shoes wear out or they grow out of clothes that can’t be replaced. But the wives are solidly behind their husbands”.
MacGregor’s attempt to play the divide-and-rule card backfired spectacularly. The women were already beginning to play an active role in the strike but MacGregor’s words galvanised them. They began by organising community canteens and food distribution to sustain miners and their families. The canteens played an important role in bringing the community together to discuss issues of the day. They formed Miners’ Wives Support Groups.
The women grew in confidence. They were soon speaking at meetings up and down the country to raise support and cash for the strike: collecting with buckets on the streets, visiting factories and shops, even going on international visits. When miners were arrested on the picket lines and given court orders to stay away, the women took their place and continued to picket throughout the strike. More than one police officer was heard to say that the women were more difficult to control than the men!
Women in the struggle
The organisation of the women developed from women’s support groups in the pit villages to grouping together into areas and a national federation. The strong areas helped the weaker ones. They formed the National Women Against Pit Closures. A national rally of over 20,000 women took place in London in August 1984.
Supporters of Militant (forerunner of the Socialist Party) also played an important role in organising Women Against Pit Closures groups in the towns and cities and linking groups together. They also won support for the strike in the Labour Party Young Socialists (LPYS) and the Labour Party Women’s Organisations – something unimaginable in today’s Starmer-led Labour Party.
The women played a tremendous role in keeping up morale, feeding the hungry, raising money, organising and building support in the wider labour movement. The strike would not have gained so much support or lasted so long without their tireless and courageous support.
Nothing was the same afterwards and attitudes were transformed. The women had grown in confidence and expectations. Their horizons had broadened as they had travelled around the country drumming up support for the miners. The old ways of living had been overtaken by new experiences and events. Some men couldn’t adapt and some marriages didn’t survive as attitudes changed at a different pace. But others did change.
From their experiences women became more political and announced that they wouldn’t be going back to the kitchen sink. Domestic life was changed because of the strike. That is not to say that domestic abuse, prejudice and misogyny don’t exist today, but the participation of women in the miners’ strike was a turning point for transforming attitudes and encouraged more women to become active in trade unions, to fight for their rights, and to fight for socialism. A decade later, the Campaign Against Domestic Violence was launched by Militant supporters in 1991 which led to changes in the law and making domestic violence a trade union issue.
Many women continued their active participation in the labour movement long after the strike had ended. Male trade unionists recognised the essential role that women had played in the strike. However, even now, forty years later, women are still not adequately represented on the leading bodies of the trade union movement. Much more needs to be done to enable women, especially those with families, to play a more active role. Trade union meetings in worktime, properly organised creches and training aimed at women members would all help increase participation. But most important is a fighting leadership that defends jobs, wages and conditions as well as taking up issues like sexual harassment, maternity and childcare rights, and rights for menopausal women.
Common cause
Black and Asian workers and youth also supported the striking miners. They recognised that the miners were fighting against repression and exploitation, just like themselves. Black and Asian workers had higher rates of unemployment, were living in some of the worst housing, and suffered racism and prejudice on a regular basis, including from fellow workers on occasions. Many had been stopped and searched by the police using the hated ‘SUS’ laws. Asian youth groups had been set up in response to racist violence and the growth of far-right groups in the 1970s. In 1981, Black and Asian youth, alongside other working-class youth, had rioted against the system and the police.
A new threat emerged with the election of Margaret Thatcher. Her infamous phrase that “people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture”, uttered in 1978, was designed to encourage division. It gave confidence to far-right racist groups in their attacks on Black and Asian people.
Many Black and Asian people saw Thatcher as their enemy, and their enemy was attacking the miners and the NUM. They had a common cause. Many visited picket lines to offer support. They weren’t always well-received at first. But workers in struggle break down barriers and prejudices as they realise the real enemy is the bosses and not people that appear different to them.
Black and Asian people in the cities, particularly in the Asian Youth Movement (AYM), raised money for the strike fund. The AYM was possibly the largest political grass-roots movement in the history of South Asian communities in the UK up to that point. They were being used as scapegoats by the right-wing press for the problems of Thatcher’s Britain. The National Front and other far-right groups were not slow in stirring up racial hatred. According to Mukhtar Dar, a founding member of the Sheffield Asian Youth Movement: “When we went into mining communities, we recognised that they were just like us, fighting for their livelihood and fighting for their communities”.
A 1976 strike at the Grunwick film processing laboratory in North West London by mainly Asian women had become an important cause for the labour movement. They were striking against an intransigent employer for better working conditions. The women went on speaking tours around the country to build solidarity for their strike. They spoke to dockers, factory workers, miners and other workers. Twenty thousand workers stood on the picket line with them.
Arthur Scargill, then the president of the Yorkshire region of the NUM (becoming national president in 1981), organised hundreds, if not thousands, of his members on mass pickets of the Grunwick factory. This solidarity from the miners was not forgotten. Nor was the brutality of the police. When Black and Asian workers saw the miners being attacked on their television screens, it was easy to see the need for solidarity. They too had experienced the brutality of an institutionally racist police. Some Black and Asian workers were at Orgreave, the scene of some of the worst organised police brutality during the miners’ strike. Sikh temples and mosques in Birmingham and elsewhere raised money for the strikes, despite the poverty of the people that gave. The solidarity given by these communities broke down racist barriers and changed perceptions.
Forging unity
The LGBT community in the 1980s suffered even more discrimination than they do today. Sexual acts between gay men was only decriminalised in 1967, but only from the age of 21 and in private, meaning no other person could be in the same building, even if it was a hotel. Police forces enthusiastically enforced the law and were often openly prejudiced.
The AIDS crisis began in the UK in 1981 and, at the start of the miners’ strike, prejudice and discrimination against gay men was widespread because of ignorance and lack of understanding about the disease at a time when catching AIDS was an almost certain death sentence.
Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM) was formed in London in June 1984. Eleven other lesbian and gay support groups were formed across Britain and Ireland. When LGSM was formed some felt offering support to workers who were traditionally seen as homophobic was naïve. At first the miners themselves were very wary, but often it was the women who persuaded the men to welcome support from the LGBT groups. They all had a common hatred of the Thatcher government and had experienced the brutality of the police. Friendships were formed which have lasted to this day. They raised thousands of pounds. The NUM supported lesbian and gay equality motions which were passed for the first time at the national conferences of the Trades Union Congress and the Labour Party in 1985.
In 1985 the Pride march was led by an NUM banner and men, women and children from the Dulais mining community, in South Wales. And three years later, the Women’s Support Group of South Wales wrote to the former head of LGSM to pledge support for the campaign against Clause 28 – which prohibited the ‘promotion of homosexuality’ by local authorities – believing the clause would lead to greater inequality and persecution of gay men and women.
“You have worn our badge, ‘Coal not Dole’, and you know what harassment
means, as we do. Now we will pin your badge on us, we will support you. It won’t change overnight, but now 140,000 miners know that there are other causes and other problems. We know about blacks, and gays, and nuclear disarmament. And we will never be the same”, said South Wales miner David Donovan at the 1984 Pits & Perverts benefit gig put on by Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners.
The miners’ strike showed how prejudice and discrimination can be undermined through struggle. There are still many battles to be fought. Finding what unites us and who our real oppressors are is vital in the forging of working-class unity in struggles for equality, to defend jobs, wages and services and to sweep away this rotten and decrepit capitalist system, replacing it with a socialist democratically planned economy, which will lay the basis for the eradication of all oppressions.