George Kerevan, provides key personal and political insights into the miners strike.
The defining political moment in the post-war class struggle in Scotland and the UK was the miners’ strike of 1984-85 and its bitter defeat by Margaret Thatcher. Thereafter, the workers’ movement was on the defensive and the road open to the neoliberal reconstruction of British
capitalism. The crushing of the NUM allowed Thatcher to closed down not only the mining industry but also that part of the car industry that was British owned, thus eliminating the two strongest redoubts of trade union militancy. It was class war to the death.
At the time – though the sense of defeat was palpable – most of us did not realise the true existential seriousness of the situation after the strike ended, for there remained obvious signs of class resistance. Tony Benn had returned to Westminster (in March 1984, the very same month the miners’ strike began) to rally the Labour left against Kinnock. And 1986 would see a massive trades union campaign to close Rupert Murdoch’s new newspaper plant at Wapping – a year-long struggle nearly as epic in proportion as the NUM strike.