The 1984 miner's strike succeeds.

What if the NMU's terribly long and ill-fated strike from 1984-1985 was way, way worse, eventually forcing Margareth Thatcher to back down?
What would be needed to turn the miner's strike into a general strike from several branches of the economy?
What would be the effects in the short term(for the Tory government and all) and in the long term, 27 years later?
 

Macragge1

Banned
The problem that the NUM has, basically, is that the Government cannot and will not be forced to back down. Thatcher and the rest of the cabinet remembered vividly Britain's descent into near-enough the Second World during the 1970s - humiliations such as the Battle of Saltley in 1972 and Heath's 'Who Governs Britain?' election failure in 1974 were still fresh in their minds and aching to be avenged. Therefore, the Conservatives effectively treated money as no object whilst crushing the strike; they will happily continue to pay Police overtime, pay to import coal, pay bonuses to strikebreakers - whatever it takes in order not only to break the strike, but to destroy the unions as a credible threat. It's notable that during the '84-'85 Strike, the Government spent more breaking the strike than it would have cost to pay every miner in the UK at that time up until retirement.

As well as the government's resolve, it's worth noting (as Scargill failed to do) that coal just isn't that big a deal in 1984-5; certainly, some power stations do need it (though most by this point were double-fired anyway), but its not as if very many homes are coal-heated, and its not as if the nation's infrastructure in the form of the railways or shipping is hurt. The worst that a full stop on coal production (something that never happened, thanks to Nottingham etc) could do is inconvenience the nation, not bring her to her knees; Scargill often boasted of a rerun of the 1926 Strike - the simple fact was that the nation was a very different place with very different energy demands by the nineteen-eighties. Even had coal been a bigger bargaining chip, Thatcher had been aching for a confrontation and planning to win it - strategic stockpiles of the resource had been built up since 1979.
 
Last edited:
I see, but don't you think that maybe more police brutality in the beginning of the strike could stir sympathy from other unions and cause a general strike? If so, I think the Conservative govt could probably fold. It's one thing when you have some thousand miners protesting; an Arab Spring-like situation is on a whole other level.
Was Thatcher popular at the time? The little I know about the time and place makes me think she wasn't, but then again the Falkland's War isn't that far back so it could be higher.
 
Was Thatcher popular at the time? .

She wasn't particularly poplar but the power stayed on....which was popular....as for police brutality against the miners...well that depends on if it keeps the power on, people's views will change if they are in light, warm and comfortable compared to in dark, cold and not comfortable.
 

Macragge1

Banned
I see, but don't you think that maybe more police brutality in the beginning of the strike could stir sympathy from other unions and cause a general strike? If so, I think the Conservative govt could probably fold. It's one thing when you have some thousand miners protesting; an Arab Spring-like situation is on a whole other level.
Was Thatcher popular at the time? The little I know about the time and place makes me think she wasn't, but then again the Falkland's War isn't that far back so it could be higher.

I think this is still rather difficult to achieve; Thatcher was already a divisive figure by 1984, but she still had enough support to comfortably win the General Election the previous summer. Whilst you rightly mention that this was partly due to its status as a 'khaki election' following the victory in the South Atlantic in '82, one must remember that Thatcher was originally elected on a mandate which included curbing union power - this was something that resonated with a population that had grown used to rolling blackouts, heat shortages and other deprivations thanks to excessive union power. Indeed, as late as 1979, plans were being devised to use the Royal Navy to perform mass burials-at-sea following a gravedigger's strike, whilst soldiers were fairly regularly forced to replace striking firemen. Against this background, the general population - barring students, some other workers (espec. railwaymen) and the hard left (the Labour Party only paid lip-service to supporting the miners) - was broadly in favour of strike-breaking at the time. Indeed, there will have been many who will have been happy to see more police brutality around the pitheads.

With regards to the idea of an 'Arab Spring' type affair, it's worth noting just how different the worlds of 1984 and 2011 were. Effectively, the state had, if not control, then certainly the support of the BBC and the Murdoch Empire, which provided most of the country with news (this dovetails with your earlier point on police brutality - there were allegations that the BBC switched the order of footage of the Battle of Orgreave to show Police charging at miners in response to being pelted with missiles, whereas in reality, it was claimed, the exchange happened the other way round. If such 'police brutality' was to occur, there's no guarantee that people will hear about it through the mainstream media; the Socialist Worker etcetera made these allegations OTL, and no-one really took them seriously*) There is obviously no internet, nor any other viable way which independent, grass-roots revolutionary action can take place (arguably, the 'flying pickets' represented a primitive version of this, and they were basically harassed by a near-militarized, centrally governed, well paid and motivated police force until it became untenable), nor really is there the will for it. The other unions had basically seen sense and realised that they were not going to 'win' this strike, a feeling reflected by the TUC's absolute refusal to call a General Strike - given the levels of feeling and anger provoked by OTL's Miner's Strike, it's rather unlikely that even further levels of hostility could have changed the congress's decision.

Even if a General Strike was to take place (which is perishingly unlikely), a similar scenario to 1926 will unfold, whereby volunteer labour (like the OMS of 1926) and the military will be used to fulfill essential services for as long as the strikers can hold out. Thatcher's government was effectively the most hardline British government of the 20th Century, almost entirely as a reaction against union power - if it comes to a confrontation, it won't back down until it has exhausted every available means of beating the strike.

*Allegedly, the Police were trained to shout 'Camera!' every time such a device was spotted (again, cameras were still pretty big and obvious at this point - every mobile phone on every person wasn't a device capable of gathering evidence) at which point they were to stop whatever 'robustness' they were engaging in until the camera had been retrieved and the film confiscated (and often the camera smashed for good measure). I've asked some of those there about this, and all of them claim that this is little more than a fabrication.
 
A general strike is illegal in the UK, leaving the unions open to legal action. IIRC a lot of the other unions were not all that keen on the NUM.
To win the NUM would need to find a way to get the lights to go out. In 1984 with all the coal stockpiled that was impossible. Also calling a strike without a ballot was a really stupid move, especially since it led to the formation of the breakaway DUM.
Getting money from Libya and the USSR were also not clever moves.

As a personal aside, my Grandfather was a miner and he hated Scargill. I think with some justification he was right in thinking that Scargill killed the mining industry. He also said that Scargill totally misunderstood miners - he often said that he was fighting to allow miner's children to have jobs in the industry, the last thing that any miner would want.

By '84/85 coal was being supplemented by nuclear and gas. It was no longer the main form of power generation in the UK. What the leadership of the NUM failed to understand was that coal was in decline, and nothing would change that.

Best result the NUM can get is a better managed decline. We can call that a 'victory' perhaps, but that can only happen without a strike, and no confrontation with the government.
 

Macragge1

Banned
I would absolutely agree with your Grandad's verdict on Scargill; he was driven largely by his own ego (behind his desk hung a full size portrait of himself in appropriately Lenin-esque) and his absolute unwillingness to compromise one inch (a trait shared by Thatcher, of course, though she had the power behind her to win it); he illegally called a strike and basically forced every miner to either stop getting paid or given benefit or to continue to go to work under incredible pressure - there was a reason that the buses they went through the pickets in were armored - and under constant harassment and shaming. All of this he did under the illusion that the Britain of Baldwin, or even the Britain of Heath, worked the same as Thatcher's Britain.

To give just one example of his incredible incompetence as a leader, we need only look at, as you mentioned, the attempts by the NUM to gain funding from Gadaffi's Libya. Even then, the state was an absolute pariah, having shot WPC Yvonne Fletcher in April of '84 and selling Kalashnikovs and Semtex to the IRA. For an organisation with already limited popularity to do business of any kind with them literally beggars belief. It's one of those historical decisions that you read about, stop, read about again and then just say 'What the fuck were they thinking?' out loud; the closest present-day analogue I can think of is if the 'Occupy' Protestors tried to do a deal with Al-Qaeda. I think this goes to show both the sheer desperation and the absolute mismanagement that was the nature of Scargill's running of the strike.

Perhaps the bitterest irony is that the only people freezing during the Winter of '85-'85 were miners, their wives and their children.
 
Top