In early 2014, I went to South Yorkshire to find Arthur Scargill. It was the 30th anniversary of the miners’ strike that had begun in 1984 – a good opportunity, it seemed, to write about that huge episode’s legacy, and to try to make contact with the former president of the National Union of Mineworkers.
In and around the town of Barnsley, I spoke to some of his friends, associates and adversaries – and then, just before I left for home, I had the briefest of encounters with the man himself. Using a knocker in the shape of a miniature miner’s lamp, I rapped on the door of a stone-clad house on a quiet back road – and suddenly, there he was. Seeing him in the flesh brought on a sudden feeling of awe; for a moment, I was lost for words. But then I explained what I had been doing, and said it would have been remiss of me not to try to make contact.
“Well, you’ve knocked on my door,” he said. “Now, good day to you.” And with that, he disappeared back into seclusion: the apparent personification not just of his union’s crushing defeat, but the way that the strike had subsequently been forgotten – not in the communities that still bore its scars, but certainly among people in positions of power and influence.
From time to time, the events of 1984-5 have briefly burst into the cultural foreground – in the 2000 film Billy Elliot, 2014’s Pride (about the inspirational campaign group Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners) and the playwright James Graham’s accomplished TV drama Sherwood, screened last year. On the edges of the national consciousness, there remains a latent unease about the brutality meted out to miners by police: last week, the Times somewhat belatedly reported that when the Queen had seen scenes of pickets being horse-charged during an infamous day at the Orgreave coking plant, she had been “horrified”. But in the long wake of the pit closures and resulting social calamities that the miners fought to prevent, the strike mostly remains confined to the historical shadows.
That is strange. This is a country still defined by the long dominance of Thatcherism, a weakened trade union movement, serial attacks on the welfare state, and the prevalence of insecure work. Whereas the Labour party once considered Britain’s coalfields its home turf, the strike commenced a long process of disconnection and estrangement. Those things, in turn, played a crucial role in the political turnabouts of the past two decades: Brexit, the rise in Scotland of the SNP, and the Tories’ snatching of the so-called red wall. And if you want to understand all this, the miners’ strike – which ended in a historic defeat for what was once known as the organised working class – is where you have to start.
As we approach its 40th anniversary next year, this is the big-picture story that hangs over a superb new book by the Oxford University historian Robert Gildea. Backbone of the Nation is based on interviews with 148 people who lived through the strike. It evokes its slow buildup – “It had the inevitability of a train wreck,” says one of his interviewees – and the divisions and conflicts that weakened the miners from the start (in the small Leicestershire coalfield, for example, only 30 of about 1,600 miners came out on strike). But in affectingly human terms, it also describes the spirit of shared sacrifice and collective endeavour that ran through the year the strike defined, and beyond.
There is also a vivid and familiar sense that as pits shut, the old coalfields were shoved into a new reality that soon spread just about everywhere. “Many former miners moved from industry to industry and from job to job with no stability,” he writes. “They were regularly condemned to doing ill-paid, largely unskilled jobs as caretakers, refuse collectors, delivery men, taxi drivers, warehouse or call-centre staff and petrol-pump attendants.” The climate crisis underlines the fact that the end of coalmining was sooner or later going to arrive; what was never inevitable was the absence of economic help for places left bereft by pit closures, nor the vicious enmity with which the Thatcher government pursued its goals, still reflected in the government’s refusal to open an inquiry into what happened at Orgreave.
Against huge odds, our old coalfields – where 5.7 million people live, slightly more than the entire population of Scotland – are still places where you will find a real community ethos and no end of social activism. In the UK as a whole, the survival of the same collectivist spirit has been highlighted by the recent wave of strikes. But in the continued absence of answers to their predicament, the politics of some former mining areas have taken a rum turn. The increasingly notorious Conservative party deputy chair Lee Anderson represents a constituency in the former Nottinghamshire coalfield, where the strike was bitterly divisive. His father was a miner who took part; Anderson himself started work underground the following year. But as the Tory promise of “levelling up” withers away, his approach to politics is a glaring case study in the vacuum left by pit closures. It is a twisted echo of the blunt, confrontational spirit of 1984-5, which replaces its solidarity with the odorous stuff of “fuck off back to France”, and suggestions that people use food banks as a “weekly shop”.
Self-evidently, his recent pronouncements barely touch on what the old coalfields need: investment, esteem, jobs, decent public transport, some means of ensuring that many of their young people are not minded to leave at the first available opportunity. Just before the pandemic, a report commissioned by the Coalfields Regeneration Trust shone light on the bleak position of former mining areas, where there were only 55 employee jobs per 100 residents of working age, compared with a national average of 73. Median hourly earnings in such places were 8-10% below the national average, and more than a third of their adult residents reported health problems lasting more than a year. Those findings were significant in themselves, but they also told a story about what the coalfields’ fate meant for the working class as a whole: as the title of Gildea’s book implies, these places’ brutal treatment and subsequent decline amounted to the dismantling of a whole social order’s foundations.
Put simply, the miners’ defeat began the era we are living in and left deep wounds that have been left to fester on. It is a hugely significant aspect of a country so tangled up in its past: millions of people still reeling from the events of 40 years ago, partly because those events remain so overlooked. Here, surely, lies one key reason why Britain feels so full of ghosts and guilty secrets.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist
