HOME Secretary Amber Rudd told MPs on Monday in the House of Commons that a review into the police attack on pickets during the miners strike in 1984 at Orgreave is not in the public interest.
This is after both PM May and Rudd had given the impression that there would be an inquiry into the state attack on the miners at Orgreave on June 18th 1984 when 71 pickets were charged with riot, punishable at that time by life imprisonment, while 24 were charged with ‘violent disorder’.
Their trial collapsed, and police officers revealed years later that they had been pressed by their superiors to charge the pickets with a ‘crime’ that would earn them life sentences, so determined was the state to break the miners strike of 1984-85. May and Rudd had their minds changed by the chiefs of the capitalist state, no doubt.
They were told that this is not the time to lift even a little part of the veil that would expose Thatcher’s preparations and prosecution of a violent civil war against the miners to shut down the mining industry and hopefully deal a mortal blow at the working class.
Thatcher came to office in 1979, determined to teach the miners and the working class a big lesson. The NUM had fought the Heath government to a standstill, and when Heath called an election in 1974 over who ran Britain – the government or the NUM – the NUM won and his government was removed. His anti-union laws were also quashed, a great victory for the trade unions.
Thatcher cultivated the military leadership and let them loose in the Malvinas, in 1982, becoming their darling. She would need their support in the struggles ahead against the working class.
North Sea oil was making billions as a new nationalised industry, and she milked it to build up coal stocks all over the UK and in Europe. The object was to be able to go a whole year, with the miners on strike, without a single power cut.
She brought in Ian McGregor to close the mining industry, and encouraged him to draw up a hit list of the 75 pits that were to be closed, while at the same time she prepared the police forces for national action so that the London Met police could become an occupying force in the mining areas. McGregor meanwhile christened the miners ‘the enemies within’. It was civil war!
Thatcher made the discovery that Gorbachev, if cultivated, would agree that Polish coal would be exported to the UK to help break the miners. The Stalinist bureaucracy joined the strike breakers.
On March 1st 1984 Cortonwood was closed and the miners walked out nationally. In the course of the savage struggle that ensued the NUM had its funds sequestrated, two miners were killed on the picket line, 700 men were sacked, over 100 jailed, and a civil war between the miners and their allies in the working class, and the capitalist state raged every morning on every picket line, while millions of workers chipped in every day to feed the miners’ families.
Thatcher was very careful to cultivate the trade union bureaucracy to make sure that NACODS, the mining safety union, did not join the strike so that scabs could carry on working. She also made it clear that the job of the TUC was to block a general strike.
The strike ended on March 3rd 1985 when a final vote by the National Union of Mineworkers national executive was 98 to 91 for a return to work without any agreement and without accepting the pit closures. The NUM president Arthur Scargill told a news conference: ‘We have decided to go back for a whole range of reasons.
One of the reasons is that the trade union movement of Britain, with a few notable exceptions, has left this union isolated.’
The miners however were not defeated. It took another eight years before the pit closure programme could be carried out under the Major government, after Thatcher was removed.
There is a great lesson for today when another great nationalised industry, the NHS, is now under threat of hundreds of A&Es and many hospitals closing so that health can be privatised. There is only one answer to this challenge.
It is to join the WRP and battle for a general strike to bring down the May government and to bring in a workers government and socialism. The need for this revolutionary leadership and this revolutionary action is the main lesson of the miners strike!
