Letter to Media North, March 2025
Many thanks for the latest edition of Media North. I very much appreciate the coverage in Media North of so many under-publicised items. However, I get weary of the glamorising of the miners’ strike. Far from being a valiant revolt against Thatcher and the Conservative government it was a Quixotic, badly led, badly organised and doomed charge of a modern day Light Brigade.
I have no time for Conservative governments - indeed I have fought the Tories for 67 years - and I regard the right-wing press as deceitful anti-union propagandists, but the 1984-85 miners’ strike played into their hands. The key analysis and significant critique of Arthur Scargill’s leadership came not from the Right but directly from the Left, notably from Jimmy Reid on Channel 4 in January 1985.
Once Scargill and the union’s leadership prevented a vote of members on the strike, the cause was lost, despite the very real public respect for miners. One key tenet of unionism is that members in strong positions have to maintain solidarity with their weaker brethren and therefore, if the full vote had gone in favour of the strike, which it could well have done, the Nottingham and Derbyshire miners would have come out in support and the strike would have had the legitimacy and potency it lacked. As it was I and my parliamentary colleagues at the time supported the welfare appeals but not the strike itself.
The other key facet of the strike that never gets adequate publicity is the difference between the police behaviour in South Yorkshire and West Yorkshire. As far as I have seen, every time police violence against striking miners is publicised it is from South Yorkshire, even though the number of pits in each county was roughly equal. The brutality of the South Yorkshire force and its Metropolitan police extras understandably created martyrs of the miners who were attacked. The South Yorkshire police methods were a huge propaganda boost for the strike and added to the myth of a justified strike that was defeated by huge police force action in support of the Thatcher government.
By contrast the West Yorkshire Chief Constable, Colin Sampson, refused to admit Met officers into the county and ended the mass use of riot shields and helmets which, he rightly believed, would provoke the striking miners with whom his force had to maintain relations for the future. This needs to be noted.
The last point is that one of Scargill’s main points was the need to save viable pits for the future jobs for miners’ sons and grandsons. In the 1960s, in my early days on the Leeds City Council representing Armley citizens, I had quite a number of miners as constituents. Not a single one told me that they wanted their sons to go down the pit. So, please, can we have a more rigorous analysis from the Left on what was certainly a very significant event for trade unionism.
Michael Meadowcroft
