UK Miners' Strike (1984–1985): Thatcher Versus the NUM

The UK miners’ strike of 1984–85 was a year-long national dispute in which the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), led by Arthur Scargill, fought the closure of coal pits by the state-owned National Coal Board and Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government. At its height around 140,000 miners were on strike. It ended in defeat for the union in March 1985 and became one of the most bitter and divisive industrial conflicts in modern British history.

Background: coal, unions and politics

Coal had powered British industry for two centuries, and mining communities in Yorkshire, South Wales, Scotland, the North East and the Midlands were built around their pits. The industry had been nationalised in 1947, but it was shrinking and many pits made losses. Across Western Europe coal, once at the heart of post-war recovery and of the European Coal and Steel Community, was losing ground to oil, gas and nuclear power.

The NUM had won national strikes in 1972 and 1974; the second contributed to the fall of Edward Heath’s Conservative government. Many Conservatives were determined not to be defeated again. A party policy group report of 1977–78, known as the Ridley Plan, suggested building up coal stocks and preparing for a confrontation. In 1981 Thatcher’s government backed down from a threatened strike over closures, but stockpiles were increased afterwards.

Arthur Scargill, a militant socialist from Yorkshire, became NUM president in 1982. In 1983 Thatcher appointed Ian MacGregor, who had already cut the workforce of British Steel, as chairman of the National Coal Board.

The strike begins

On 1 March 1984 the Coal Board announced the closure of Cortonwood colliery in South Yorkshire. On 6 March it outlined plans to cut capacity by around 4 million tonnes a year, which the union said meant about 20 pits and 20,000 jobs. Yorkshire miners walked out, followed by Scotland, and on 8 March the NUM executive approved area strikes under the union’s rule 41.

There was no national ballot. Scargill’s supporters argued that no miner had the right to vote away another’s job. Opponents pointed out that members had rejected national strike action in three ballots between 1982 and 1983. In Nottinghamshire, the second-largest coalfield, most miners voted against striking and kept working, as did many in Leicestershire and the Midlands.

Picketing and Orgreave

Flying pickets travelled to working pits and power stations to persuade or pressure others to join. The police organised a national operation, stopping cars on motorways and turning back pickets far from their destinations. Clashes between pickets and police became common.

The most famous confrontation came on 18 June 1984 at the Orgreave coking plant near Rotherham. Thousands of pickets faced a similar number of police, including mounted officers and units with riot shields. Television footage of charges and injuries shocked many viewers. Ninety-five pickets were charged with riot or unlawful assembly, offences that could carry long prison sentences, but all the cases collapsed in 1985 amid doubts about police evidence. Campaigners continue to call for a public inquiry.

Hardship and support

Strikers received no strike pay and, under new rules, families got reduced social security benefits. Communities relied on soup kitchens, food parcels and donations. Groups such as Women Against Pit Closures organised support, and solidarity came from trade unions at home and abroad, as well as from unexpected allies such as Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners.

In October 1984 the High Court ordered the sequestration of the NUM’s funds for defying a ruling that the strike was unlawful without a ballot. Revelations that a union official had sought money from Colonel Gaddafi’s Libya damaged its public image. In July 1984 Thatcher described the militant left as “the enemy within”, a phrase that came to define the government’s view of the dispute.

The government avoided a second front in October 1984 by reaching a deal with the pit deputies’ union, NACODS, whose strike could have closed every pit. During the winter, with power stations still working and coal stocks high, the number of miners returning to work rose steadily.

The end of the strike

On 3 March 1985 an NUM delegate conference voted by 98 to 91 to return to work without any agreement. Many miners marched back on 5 March behind brass bands and union banners. Thousands had been arrested during the strike, and hundreds were sacked by the Coal Board.

The return was painful. Families had run up debts, marriages and friendships had broken under the strain, and in many villages the bitterness between strikers and those who had gone back to work, called “scabs” by their opponents, lasted for decades. In some areas groups of miners continued to strike for a few more days in protest at the sackings.

Several people died in incidents connected with the dispute, including the pickets David Jones and Joe Green and the taxi driver David Wilkie, killed when two strikers dropped a concrete post onto his car as he drove a working miner to work. The two men were initially convicted of murder, reduced to manslaughter on appeal.

Key people

• Arthur Scargill (born 1938): NUM president from 1982, the strike’s leader and its most polarising figure.
• Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013): Conservative prime minister, determined not to repeat the government defeats of the 1970s.
• Ian MacGregor (1912–1998): Scottish-American industrialist and chairman of the National Coal Board from 1983.
• Mick McGahey (1925–1999): Scottish miners’ leader and NUM vice-president.
• Neil Kinnock (born 1942): Labour leader from 1983, a miner’s son who supported the strikers but criticised the lack of a ballot and picket-line violence.

Consequences and legacy

The strike’s defeat greatly weakened the trade union movement and strengthened Thatcher’s government. Working Nottinghamshire miners broke away to form the Union of Democratic Mineworkers in 1985. Pit closures sped up: there were about 170 working collieries in 1984, but only around 15 deep mines were left when the industry was privatised in 1994. The last deep coal mine, Kellingley in North Yorkshire, closed in December 2015.

Many former mining communities suffered long-term unemployment and poverty. Later government papers, released under the thirty-year rule in 2014, showed that ministers had discussed a larger closure programme than they admitted publicly at the time, a point long argued by the NUM. The strike remains politically divisive and has been portrayed in many films, songs and books, including the films Brassed Off (1996), Billy Elliot (2000) and Pride (2014). It is often compared with the General Strike of 1926, another defining defeat for organised labour in Britain.

Timeline

• 1984, 1 March: Closure of Cortonwood colliery announced.
• 1984, 6 March: Coal Board sets out plans to cut capacity.
• 1984, 12 March: Strike spreads to further coalfields as the NUM backs area action.
• 1984, 15 March: Picket David Jones dies at Ollerton, Nottinghamshire.
• 1984, 18 June: Confrontation at the Orgreave coking plant.
• 1984, October: NUM funds sequestrated; deal with NACODS.
• 1984, 30 November: Taxi driver David Wilkie killed in South Wales.
• 1985, 3 March: NUM delegate conference votes to return to work.
• 1985, 5 March: Most strikers return to work.

Why it matters

The miners’ strike marked the end of the era in which trade unions could challenge British governments on equal terms. It accelerated the decline of coal and heavy industry and remains central to debates about deindustrialisation, policing and class in modern Britain.