Okay. I'll have a go at telling this.

The story of the NUM and the miners' strike goes something like this.

Thatcher's Conservative Party had been elected in 1979 on the promise of curbing the power of the unions, which she saw as the major reason for the post-war decline, and it was that and the Falklands War that got her re-elected in 1983.

So she needed to do something about the power of trade unions. She wasn't content with the laws enacted by herself and Nicholas Ridley in 1979, so she decided to go for the union that in 1974 actually forced the Conservative prime minister Edward Heath to call a general election, which he lost. She had earlier tried to close mines in 1981, but the National Union of Mineworkers not only forced the government to back down, they also secured extra funding for their industry.

So Thatcher had another go. Her new government drew up plans in November 1983 to close 49 named mines, claiming "exhausted reserves". The reserves were not, in fact, exhausted. However, Thatcher is the patron saint and apostle of free-market forces. The mines were making a loss of millions of pounds per year, and were kept around by large public subsidies. Thatcher's point of view was that if the mines couldn't make a profit, they should be closed. The NUM didn't like it and so, in March 1984, the President, Arthur Scargill, a committed lefty, called an indefinite strike. Scargill's view was the exact polar opposite of Thatcher's. He thought that the mines should be run for the benefit of their workers first and foremost. The events that followed were thus a matter of principle as much as anything else for him. His strike was called without first calling a ballot of his members (now, secret ballots before a strike are compulsory), something which ended up splitting his union, and in Nottinghamshire in particular, whose members felt alienated by not being asked their opinions.

Over the next twelve months, the strike went on. Miners on the picket lines clashed with riot police being called in from all over the UK and effectively being given carte blanche to do what they wanted almost daily (at the Orgreave picket line in June '84, a woman trying to summon an ambulance for a wounded minor was batoned down). In addition, the Labour Party came out in overt support of the striking miners, organising regular collections of money and donations for food for the miners' families, in what is the only example of a British political party ever becoming anything more than just a party. The leader, Neil Kinnock, himself the son of a miner, once compared Scargill to a World War I general.

Thatcher also had a contingency plan. Power stations built up stocks of coal prior to the dispute, and when that ran low she shipped it in from pretty much anywhere that would sell.

Also, some of the other unions held strikes alongside the miners. The RMT and ASLEF, the two train drivers' unions, went on strike as well. Workers in the National Union of Seamen refused to handle any strike-breaking foreign coal. Scargill also called for a general strike at one point. However, he never specified a date and the Trades Union Congress did not act. Also, strikes that could have turned into sympathy strikes by members of the TGWU (Transport and General Workers' Union) were described as being "non-political" by the leaders, and Scargill never managed to get the support he needed.

Scargill's position was also undermined by a lot of unfavourable press. First, two strikers dropped a concrete block on a taxi carrying a strike-breaking miner to work, killing the driver. It was also reported that Scargill had gone to Paris under an assumed name and met with representatives of Colonel Muammar Gaddaffi to discuss financial support (later, Gaddaffi admitted to providing the NUM with about $200,000 of funds). He also didn't do himself any favours by encouraging his members to clash with police on the picket lines. It must be said that the gutter press was firmly on the side of Thatcher, and so ran articles every day highlighting various 'outrages' committed by strikers, whilst ignoring similar events where the police were clearly at fault.

Scargill had also made what turned out to be a fatal mistake by not balloting his members. I have already said that miners in Nottinghamshire, who defied the strike, would probably have obeyed the union had they had a chance to vote. As it was, they formed the Union of Democratic Miners and kept working. In return, they recieved funding from the Conservative Party and big business.

All these factors eventually proved too much for Scargill. In January 1985, the union for pit deputies, NACODS (who had voted 82% to join the NUM in March 1984) changed their stance and made a seperate settlement with the Government. This proved a fatal blow and NUM workers, worn down by months of violence and no pay, began trickling back to work. By March, Scargill was out of options and local union delegates voted to end the strike and go back to work. They went in with heads high and brass bands playing: soon after, most of them were out of a job as Thatcher went closing pits left, right, and centre.

However, this didn't have the utterly catastrophic effect on the unions some might have hoped for: proof can be seen right now in the current dispute between the firefighters and the Labour government (some have called the firefighters' leader Andy Gilchrist the second coming of Scargill). It did, however, severely dent the confidence of the unions and allowed Thatcher to regulate them a lot more tightly.

Zarn"phew!"iwoop