When Margaret Thatcher died in 2013, people threw street parties. Others called her the greatest peacetime prime minister Britain ever had.
To understand why she provoked such fury, you need to understand the miners' strike of 1984.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to talk about one of the most divisive, bitter, and emotionally charged periods in modern British history: the miners' strike of the mid 1980s.
[00:00:37] This is a story about coal, about class, about power, and about what happens when a government and a community decide that neither side will back down.
[00:00:50] So, let’s not waste a minute, and get right into it.
[00:00:56] It was the 8th of April, 2013.
[00:01:00] The family of Margaret Thatcher, the former British Prime Minister who had governed the country from 1979 to 1990, announced that she had died of a stroke at the age of 87.
[00:01:17] Now, for most people, the death of an elderly woman, especially someone who was one of the longest serving British Prime Ministers, well it would be a sad moment. A moment of reflection, of thanks for their decade-plus of public service.
[00:01:38] And, when Margaret Thatcher died, tributes certainly did pour in from around the world.
[00:01:47] The right-leaning Daily Mail ran the headline: "The Woman Who Saved Britain", while The Daily Express went with a reference to her nickname, “Farewell, Iron Lady”.
[00:02:00] Her supporters described her as the greatest peacetime prime minister the UK had ever had, a woman who made hard decisions and turned the country’s economy around.
[00:02:14] Not everyone was so complimentary.
[00:02:18] In the coal belt of northern England, a former miner lit up an enormous cigar and said he was looking forward to some celebratory drinks. Street parties broke out in Glasgow, Liverpool, Bristol, Leeds, Cardiff, and Belfast.
[00:02:38] The Socialist Worker newspaper announced the death with the headline “REJOICE”, and enticed its readers with the prospect of a “Thatcher’s Dead Special Pullout”.
[00:02:51] And thanks to a coordinated online campaign, the song "Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead," from The Wizard of Oz, shot to number two in the UK charts, forcing the BBC to decide whether to play it or not on the weekly chart show.
[00:03:12] The regional secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers said that he was having a drink to celebrate her death, adding that it was also his 70th birthday that day, and this made it one of the best birthdays he'd ever had.
[00:03:29] Now, although Margaret Thatcher is one of if not the central characters of the miners’ strike, this isn’t all about her.
[00:03:39] We did actually make an episode about her life, it’s number 59 if you’re interested.
[00:03:46] But let me give you a little background, or a reminder, of who Margaret Thatcher was, as you can’t understand the miners’ strike without understanding Margaret Thatcher.
[00:03:58] So, she was born Margaret Roberts, the younger daughter of a grocer from the town of Grantham in Lincolnshire, in the English Midlands.
[00:04:10] She studied chemistry at Oxford, worked briefly as a chemist before becoming a barrister, which is a type of lawyer.
[00:04:19] In 1950, at the age of 24, she decided to enter politics as a Conservative.
[00:04:28] She rose through the party ranks and by 1975 she had become not just its leader, but the first woman to lead a major British political party.
[00:04:41] Four years later, in 1979, she won the general election and became the first female British Prime Minister.
[00:04:51] Clearly, this was a remarkable achievement.
[00:04:54] And even her greatest critics would have to admit that she was a remarkable woman: fiercely intelligent, intensely ideological, and utterly unafraid of confrontation.
[00:05:09] And in terms of her political beliefs, she believed in free markets and private enterprise. She believed the state should be strong when it came to law and order, but much less involved in the economy. She was deeply suspicious of trade unions, which she saw as obstacles to economic reform and, at their most extreme, as threats to democracy itself.
[00:05:40] It is perhaps unsurprising that she had come to these conclusions.
[00:05:46] The Britain she inherited, the Britain of the late 1970s, was not exactly thriving.
[00:05:55] In 1979 the country had been through a turbulent decade of strikes, power cuts, and industrial unrest. The unions were powerful, so powerful, in fact, that a miners’ strike in 1974 had effectively brought down the Conservative government, and paved the way for Labour to take power.
[00:06:20] Thatcher had watched all of this. She had no intention of being brought down the same way.
[00:06:29] The problem was that the coal mining industry in the UK was still large and powerful.
[00:06:36] In 1983, there were over 170 coal mines operating across Britain, employing almost 200,000 miners. They were all state owned, after being nationalised right after the Second World War.
[00:06:54] These mines were all over the country, but the largest concentrations were in the Midlands, the North, South Wales and Scotland.
[00:07:05] And these mines were not just places of work.
[00:07:11] In many pit villages, as they were called, the mine was the only real employer, the only option for a stable job.
[00:07:22] The mine supported the entire community, so even if 200,000 miners might not sound like all that much, these jobs provided the incomes that supported families and entire communities.
[00:07:38] But the industry had been in long-term decline.
[00:07:43] Cheaper oil and natural gas had reduced demand for coal.
[00:07:48] Many mines were running at a loss and were being heavily subsidised by the government. Margaret Thatcher, with her deep commitment to and belief in free markets, well, this went against everything she believed in. She wanted to end those subsidies, and close the unprofitable mines.
[00:08:13] In 1983, she appointed a new chairman of the National Coal Board, the NCB, the state body that ran the mines.
[00:08:24] His name was Ian MacGregor, and he was a Scottish-American businessman who had previously restructured the steel industry by closing plants and cutting the workforce in half.
[00:08:38] The message was not subtle. The same was coming for coal.
[00:08:44] On the other side of the coming confrontation was a man called Arthur Scargill, who was the president of the NUM, the National Union of Mineworkers. He was a militant trade unionist from Yorkshire, deeply socialist in his politics, and utterly convinced that the government's real aim was not simply economic efficiency but the complete destruction of both the coal industry and the unions.
[00:09:17] So, the stage was set: an industry that supported hundreds of thousands of people up and down the country, and a Prime Minister who looked set on destroying it.
[00:09:31] The spark that lit the fire came in early March 1984.
[00:09:38] On the 1st of March, the National Coal Board announced the closure of a mine in South Yorkshire.
[00:09:46] The miners there walked out almost immediately in protest; they went on strike.
[00:09:52] Then, on the 6th of March, MacGregor announced plans to close 20 pits across the country, with the loss of 20,000 jobs. Scargill insisted the real figure was far higher, claiming the government planned to shut more than 70 pits.
[00:10:13] The government denied it.
[00:10:16] But…Scargill was not making it up. More than three decades later, government papers were released showing that MacGregor did indeed have plans to close around 75 pits within three years.
[00:10:33] On the 12th of March, Scargill, the union boss, united the growing regional strikes into a national action, declaring the National Union of Mineworkers’ full support.
[00:10:47] Crucially, and controversially, he did this without holding a national ballot, a vote of all the union members.
[00:10:57] Scargill argued that a national vote wasn't needed. In the trade union movement there was a strong principle that you never cross a picket line — that if your fellow workers are already on strike, you don't walk past them and go to work as usual.
[00:11:17] Miners in Yorkshire and other areas had already walked out. And Scargill's argument was that miners everywhere else in the country were simply honour-bound to join them, vote or no vote.
[00:11:31] His critics, including some on the left, argued that calling a national strike without a vote was fundamentally undemocratic; he couldn’t just tell union members to strike. It needed to be put to a vote.
[00:11:48] So, what happened?
[00:11:50] Well, around 140,000 miners went on strike. But this wasn’t every miner, not every member of the union.
[00:12:01] Miners in Nottinghamshire and the Midlands largely refused to join, as most had voted against the strike in previous local ballots.
[00:12:12] Now, before we go further, it's worth clarifying what going on strike actually meant, from a practical point of view.
[00:12:22] Simply put, it meant no wages, no pay. A miner on strike received nothing from the National Coal Board, obviously, since he wasn't working. And strike pay from the union itself was minimal, partly because the NUM's funds were limited and, as the months went on, partly because those funds were frozen by the courts.
[00:12:48] So the men who went out and stayed out for a year were, in many cases, entirely dependent on the goodwill of others to feed their families.
[00:13:00] Soup kitchens were set up in mining communities. Support groups sent food parcels. Local businesses gave what they could. Solidarity collections were organised across the country and beyond.
[00:13:15] The reality was that these men, men who had worked hard physical jobs underground for their entire adult lives, were going hungry, along with their wives and children.
[00:13:29] Now, with that said, what was the strategy?
[00:13:33] What were the miners actually trying to achieve?
[00:13:38] The plan, broadly, was to cause an energy crisis severe enough to force the government to the negotiating table, and stop the mines from being closed.
[00:13:50] Britain's economy still depended heavily on coal-fired power stations. If the mines stopped producing coal, if supplies to those power stations could be cut off or disrupted, then the lights would go out across the country, industry would grind to a halt, and the government would have no choice but to make concessions to the miners.
[00:14:16] And this was not a fantasy; it had worked before. In 1972, Scargill had used exactly this strategy, using mass pickets to shut down a key location in Birmingham, and it had forced the Conservative government of Edward Heath to give the miners a significant pay rise.
[00:14:38] And it had worked again in 1974, when a miners' strike brought down Heath's government entirely.
[00:14:46] What Thatcher had done, with great deliberation, was make sure it could not work a third time. Her government had spent years preparing for exactly this confrontation.
[00:15:01] They had stockpiled coal at power stations. They had converted some plants to run on heavy fuel oil. They had arranged fleets of road hauliers to move coal by lorry.
[00:15:14] By 1984, she had around six months of coal reserves. And her strategy was simple: outlast the miners.
[00:15:25] The strike that followed was one of the most bitter and violent episodes of industrial conflict in British history.
[00:15:35] The miners used a tactic that had served them well in the early 1970s: something called the flying picket.
[00:15:44] What this involved was large groups of striking miners who would travel quickly to a mine or industrial site that was still operational, overwhelm any police presence, and shut it down completely.
[00:15:58] The problem was, the government and the police suspected that this was exactly what they would do.
[00:16:07] And in 1984, they were ready.
[00:16:11] Police were deployed in enormous numbers to key mining sites.
[00:16:16] Motorway checkpoints were set up to turn back miners travelling to join pickets. The sheer scale of policing was something many people had never seen before in Britain, and it led to confrontations that were sometimes extraordinarily violent.
[00:16:35] The most dramatic of these came in June, 1984, at a plant near Rotherham in South Yorkshire.
[00:16:45] Scargill wanted to stop any materials from leaving the plant and reaching the steel works in Scunthorpe, as it would disrupt steel production and ratchet up pressure on the government.
[00:17:00] What happened next is remembered as the Battle of Orgreave.
[00:17:06] Around 5,000 miners faced roughly the same number of police, including officers on horseback and others with large dogs.
[00:17:17] And the confrontation became one of the most iconic and contested moments of the entire strike.
[00:17:25] Police on horseback charged into the crowd of strikers with their truncheons drawn. Truncheons, by the way, are those short, thick sticks that the police often carry.
[00:17:38] Of course, there were casualties.
[00:17:41] Fifty-one striking miners and 72 police officers were injured. Scargill himself was arrested and photographed being led away with a bloodied head.
[00:17:55] Ninety-five miners were arrested and charged with something called “riot”, which at the time carried the possibility of a life sentence.
[00:18:07] Naturally, it was the biggest news item that day, but bafflingly, when the BBC broadcast it, it showed the footage of the confrontation in the wrong order. It showed the miners appearing to attack the police first, when in fact it was the police that charged first, it was the authorities that appeared to have provoked the situation.
[00:18:34] Before “fake news” was even a term, many miners and their supporters felt they had been deliberately framed by the national broadcaster, deliberately portrayed to have started the fight, when many miners believed the police had in fact initiated the violence.
[00:18:53] The BBC later said it was a simple production mistake, rather than some sort of institutional bias, but the damage was done.
[00:19:06] As the strike continued into the summer and then the autumn, life became increasingly tough for the miners, and for their communities.
[00:19:17] They didn’t give up. But the government was doing the arithmetic.
[00:19:23] Coal was still reaching the power stations, partly from stockpiles, partly from the mines that had never stopped working, and partly from imported coal.
[00:19:34] There would be no power cuts.
[00:19:37] In terms of public support, the public increasingly began to side with the government rather than the striking miners.
[00:19:47] At the beginning of the strike, support was split relatively equally between the miners and the employers, or the government, but by December of 1984, nine months into the strike, 51% of the public said that they supported the employers, and support for the miners had dropped to 26%.
[00:20:12] And almost every major newspaper took an “anti-miners” stance, which certainly didn’t help.
[00:20:21] Things were not looking good.
[00:20:23] And as winter set in, more and more miners, facing months without pay and with families to feed, well, perfectly understandably, they began drifting back to work.
[00:20:37] And there didn’t seem to be any way out for the miners that were still on strike.
[00:20:42] The union’s assets were still frozen.
[00:20:46] Scargill's attempt to shut down the plant at Orgreave had failed.
[00:20:51] The strategy of flying pickets had been neutralised.
[00:20:56] There was one potential lifeline. The mines employed not just miners, but safety deputies, whose job was to inspect the mines for gas leaks, structural problems, and other dangers. Without them, no mine could legally open.
[00:21:16] Their union, which represented around 17,000 workers, voted in October 1984 to strike in sympathy with the miners.
[00:21:28] This would have been game over for Thatcher. Every pit in Britain would have been forced to close immediately, regardless of whether the miners inside wanted to work or not.
[00:21:43] But at the last minute, the government made a small concession on the pit closure process, just enough for the deputies to call off the strike and accept a deal.
[00:21:56] The lifeline was gone.
[00:21:59] On the 3rd of March, 1985, almost exactly one year after the strike had begun, there was a vote on whether to return to work. It was close, but “yes” won, 98 to 91.
[00:22:15] There was no deal. There were no concessions.
[00:22:20] The miners went back with nothing.
[00:22:24] At many pits, they marched back with brass bands playing and union banners flying. It was a display of dignity in defeat that moved even many of those who had opposed the strike.
[00:22:38] Scargill told reporters the campaign against closures would continue.
[00:22:44] Margaret Thatcher said she was relieved the miners would be returning to work, but made no attempt to disguise that her government had won.
[00:22:54] What followed over the next ten years was precisely what Scargill had predicted, and precisely what the government had denied.
[00:23:04] At the time of the strike, there were 170 operating coal mines in Britain. By 1994, only 15 remained. Nearly 90% of the workforce had been shed.
[00:23:20] The final deep coal mine in Britain closed in 2015.
[00:23:27] For the communities built around those mines, the consequences were severe and in many cases have never fully been reversed.
[00:23:37] If you look at a map of unemployment and economic deprivation in the UK, many of the most affected areas are in former mining communities.
[00:23:48] The mine had been practically the only reliable employment opportunity, and with it gone, there was nothing. In most former mining communities, nothing comparable came to replace it.
[00:24:03] And of course, the social consequences were real and lasting.
[00:24:09] Mental health problems from people struggling with the loss of their identity, their purpose, and their community. Many areas saw increases in crime, alcohol and drug abuse.
[00:24:23] Poverty became entrenched.
[00:24:26] And entire generations grew up knowing what had happened, and pointing the finger squarely at Margaret Thatcher.
[00:24:36] And this has had a long-term impact on the political geography of Britain.
[00:24:43] The Conservative Party was already not particularly popular in northern England, and this episode made it toxic. In many northern cities and towns, voting Conservative became almost unthinkable, and to this day, many people simply cannot forgive the Conservative Party for what they did to the miners.
[00:25:09] So, who was right?
[00:25:12] Well, Thatcher's defenders would point out several things.
[00:25:17] The coal industry was not economically viable in its existing form. The subsidies required to keep these loss-making pits open were enormous, and the coal produced was more expensive than that available from other sources.
[00:25:33] Britain's industrial structure needed to change, and had been changing since the 1950s. The coal industry did need to go, and this is before we get to any kind of environmental discussion.
[00:25:49] Her supporters would also point to Scargill's tactics.
[00:25:53] He called a national strike without a public vote, which split the union and gave the government a crucial political advantage. He started the strike in spring, the worst possible time, when coal demand is lowest. He attempted to use flying pickets to intimidate miners who had exercised their democratic right not to strike.
[00:26:18] His refusal to compromise at various points when deals might still have been possible is still a source of bitter debate.
[00:26:28] Those on the other side will point to the secrecy and the scale of the government's real intentions.
[00:26:35] Cabinet papers confirmed that the government and MacGregor planned to close far more pits than they ever admitted publicly, and that they knew the employment consequences would be devastating.
[00:26:49] The conduct at Orgreave, and the subsequent cover-up by police, was a serious miscarriage of justice.
[00:26:59] Most importantly, perhaps, they will argue that the government's victory was not followed by any serious attempt to help the communities that had been destroyed. No major investment programme, no retraining at scale, no replacement industries. Just closure, and silence.
[00:27:21] So, to wrap things up, the miners' strike was not just a labour dispute. It was a defining confrontation about who held power in Britain, and about what happens to people when the economic foundation of their lives is removed.
[00:27:40] Margaret Thatcher won. The miners lost.
[00:27:44] And in some of the places where those miners once worked and lived, the effects of that defeat are still being felt today.
[00:27:54] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on the miners' strike.
[00:27:59] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you have learnt something new.
[00:28:03] I’d love to know…had you heard of the miners’ strike before? Have you been to any of these areas of the UK that were the most affected? And are there similar episodes in your country’s history?
[00:28:16] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started. The place for that is our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com.
[00:28:25] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:28:30] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to talk about one of the most divisive, bitter, and emotionally charged periods in modern British history: the miners' strike of the mid 1980s.
[00:00:37] This is a story about coal, about class, about power, and about what happens when a government and a community decide that neither side will back down.
[00:00:50] So, let’s not waste a minute, and get right into it.
[00:00:56] It was the 8th of April, 2013.
[00:01:00] The family of Margaret Thatcher, the former British Prime Minister who had governed the country from 1979 to 1990, announced that she had died of a stroke at the age of 87.
[00:01:17] Now, for most people, the death of an elderly woman, especially someone who was one of the longest serving British Prime Ministers, well it would be a sad moment. A moment of reflection, of thanks for their decade-plus of public service.
[00:01:38] And, when Margaret Thatcher died, tributes certainly did pour in from around the world.
[00:01:47] The right-leaning Daily Mail ran the headline: "The Woman Who Saved Britain", while The Daily Express went with a reference to her nickname, “Farewell, Iron Lady”.
[00:02:00] Her supporters described her as the greatest peacetime prime minister the UK had ever had, a woman who made hard decisions and turned the country’s economy around.
[00:02:14] Not everyone was so complimentary.
[00:02:18] In the coal belt of northern England, a former miner lit up an enormous cigar and said he was looking forward to some celebratory drinks. Street parties broke out in Glasgow, Liverpool, Bristol, Leeds, Cardiff, and Belfast.
[00:02:38] The Socialist Worker newspaper announced the death with the headline “REJOICE”, and enticed its readers with the prospect of a “Thatcher’s Dead Special Pullout”.
[00:02:51] And thanks to a coordinated online campaign, the song "Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead," from The Wizard of Oz, shot to number two in the UK charts, forcing the BBC to decide whether to play it or not on the weekly chart show.
[00:03:12] The regional secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers said that he was having a drink to celebrate her death, adding that it was also his 70th birthday that day, and this made it one of the best birthdays he'd ever had.
[00:03:29] Now, although Margaret Thatcher is one of if not the central characters of the miners’ strike, this isn’t all about her.
[00:03:39] We did actually make an episode about her life, it’s number 59 if you’re interested.
[00:03:46] But let me give you a little background, or a reminder, of who Margaret Thatcher was, as you can’t understand the miners’ strike without understanding Margaret Thatcher.
[00:03:58] So, she was born Margaret Roberts, the younger daughter of a grocer from the town of Grantham in Lincolnshire, in the English Midlands.
[00:04:10] She studied chemistry at Oxford, worked briefly as a chemist before becoming a barrister, which is a type of lawyer.
[00:04:19] In 1950, at the age of 24, she decided to enter politics as a Conservative.
[00:04:28] She rose through the party ranks and by 1975 she had become not just its leader, but the first woman to lead a major British political party.
[00:04:41] Four years later, in 1979, she won the general election and became the first female British Prime Minister.
[00:04:51] Clearly, this was a remarkable achievement.
[00:04:54] And even her greatest critics would have to admit that she was a remarkable woman: fiercely intelligent, intensely ideological, and utterly unafraid of confrontation.
[00:05:09] And in terms of her political beliefs, she believed in free markets and private enterprise. She believed the state should be strong when it came to law and order, but much less involved in the economy. She was deeply suspicious of trade unions, which she saw as obstacles to economic reform and, at their most extreme, as threats to democracy itself.
[00:05:40] It is perhaps unsurprising that she had come to these conclusions.
[00:05:46] The Britain she inherited, the Britain of the late 1970s, was not exactly thriving.
[00:05:55] In 1979 the country had been through a turbulent decade of strikes, power cuts, and industrial unrest. The unions were powerful, so powerful, in fact, that a miners’ strike in 1974 had effectively brought down the Conservative government, and paved the way for Labour to take power.
[00:06:20] Thatcher had watched all of this. She had no intention of being brought down the same way.
[00:06:29] The problem was that the coal mining industry in the UK was still large and powerful.
[00:06:36] In 1983, there were over 170 coal mines operating across Britain, employing almost 200,000 miners. They were all state owned, after being nationalised right after the Second World War.
[00:06:54] These mines were all over the country, but the largest concentrations were in the Midlands, the North, South Wales and Scotland.
[00:07:05] And these mines were not just places of work.
[00:07:11] In many pit villages, as they were called, the mine was the only real employer, the only option for a stable job.
[00:07:22] The mine supported the entire community, so even if 200,000 miners might not sound like all that much, these jobs provided the incomes that supported families and entire communities.
[00:07:38] But the industry had been in long-term decline.
[00:07:43] Cheaper oil and natural gas had reduced demand for coal.
[00:07:48] Many mines were running at a loss and were being heavily subsidised by the government. Margaret Thatcher, with her deep commitment to and belief in free markets, well, this went against everything she believed in. She wanted to end those subsidies, and close the unprofitable mines.
[00:08:13] In 1983, she appointed a new chairman of the National Coal Board, the NCB, the state body that ran the mines.
[00:08:24] His name was Ian MacGregor, and he was a Scottish-American businessman who had previously restructured the steel industry by closing plants and cutting the workforce in half.
[00:08:38] The message was not subtle. The same was coming for coal.
[00:08:44] On the other side of the coming confrontation was a man called Arthur Scargill, who was the president of the NUM, the National Union of Mineworkers. He was a militant trade unionist from Yorkshire, deeply socialist in his politics, and utterly convinced that the government's real aim was not simply economic efficiency but the complete destruction of both the coal industry and the unions.
[00:09:17] So, the stage was set: an industry that supported hundreds of thousands of people up and down the country, and a Prime Minister who looked set on destroying it.
[00:09:31] The spark that lit the fire came in early March 1984.
[00:09:38] On the 1st of March, the National Coal Board announced the closure of a mine in South Yorkshire.
[00:09:46] The miners there walked out almost immediately in protest; they went on strike.
[00:09:52] Then, on the 6th of March, MacGregor announced plans to close 20 pits across the country, with the loss of 20,000 jobs. Scargill insisted the real figure was far higher, claiming the government planned to shut more than 70 pits.
[00:10:13] The government denied it.
[00:10:16] But…Scargill was not making it up. More than three decades later, government papers were released showing that MacGregor did indeed have plans to close around 75 pits within three years.
[00:10:33] On the 12th of March, Scargill, the union boss, united the growing regional strikes into a national action, declaring the National Union of Mineworkers’ full support.
[00:10:47] Crucially, and controversially, he did this without holding a national ballot, a vote of all the union members.
[00:10:57] Scargill argued that a national vote wasn't needed. In the trade union movement there was a strong principle that you never cross a picket line — that if your fellow workers are already on strike, you don't walk past them and go to work as usual.
[00:11:17] Miners in Yorkshire and other areas had already walked out. And Scargill's argument was that miners everywhere else in the country were simply honour-bound to join them, vote or no vote.
[00:11:31] His critics, including some on the left, argued that calling a national strike without a vote was fundamentally undemocratic; he couldn’t just tell union members to strike. It needed to be put to a vote.
[00:11:48] So, what happened?
[00:11:50] Well, around 140,000 miners went on strike. But this wasn’t every miner, not every member of the union.
[00:12:01] Miners in Nottinghamshire and the Midlands largely refused to join, as most had voted against the strike in previous local ballots.
[00:12:12] Now, before we go further, it's worth clarifying what going on strike actually meant, from a practical point of view.
[00:12:22] Simply put, it meant no wages, no pay. A miner on strike received nothing from the National Coal Board, obviously, since he wasn't working. And strike pay from the union itself was minimal, partly because the NUM's funds were limited and, as the months went on, partly because those funds were frozen by the courts.
[00:12:48] So the men who went out and stayed out for a year were, in many cases, entirely dependent on the goodwill of others to feed their families.
[00:13:00] Soup kitchens were set up in mining communities. Support groups sent food parcels. Local businesses gave what they could. Solidarity collections were organised across the country and beyond.
[00:13:15] The reality was that these men, men who had worked hard physical jobs underground for their entire adult lives, were going hungry, along with their wives and children.
[00:13:29] Now, with that said, what was the strategy?
[00:13:33] What were the miners actually trying to achieve?
[00:13:38] The plan, broadly, was to cause an energy crisis severe enough to force the government to the negotiating table, and stop the mines from being closed.
[00:13:50] Britain's economy still depended heavily on coal-fired power stations. If the mines stopped producing coal, if supplies to those power stations could be cut off or disrupted, then the lights would go out across the country, industry would grind to a halt, and the government would have no choice but to make concessions to the miners.
[00:14:16] And this was not a fantasy; it had worked before. In 1972, Scargill had used exactly this strategy, using mass pickets to shut down a key location in Birmingham, and it had forced the Conservative government of Edward Heath to give the miners a significant pay rise.
[00:14:38] And it had worked again in 1974, when a miners' strike brought down Heath's government entirely.
[00:14:46] What Thatcher had done, with great deliberation, was make sure it could not work a third time. Her government had spent years preparing for exactly this confrontation.
[00:15:01] They had stockpiled coal at power stations. They had converted some plants to run on heavy fuel oil. They had arranged fleets of road hauliers to move coal by lorry.
[00:15:14] By 1984, she had around six months of coal reserves. And her strategy was simple: outlast the miners.
[00:15:25] The strike that followed was one of the most bitter and violent episodes of industrial conflict in British history.
[00:15:35] The miners used a tactic that had served them well in the early 1970s: something called the flying picket.
[00:15:44] What this involved was large groups of striking miners who would travel quickly to a mine or industrial site that was still operational, overwhelm any police presence, and shut it down completely.
[00:15:58] The problem was, the government and the police suspected that this was exactly what they would do.
[00:16:07] And in 1984, they were ready.
[00:16:11] Police were deployed in enormous numbers to key mining sites.
[00:16:16] Motorway checkpoints were set up to turn back miners travelling to join pickets. The sheer scale of policing was something many people had never seen before in Britain, and it led to confrontations that were sometimes extraordinarily violent.
[00:16:35] The most dramatic of these came in June, 1984, at a plant near Rotherham in South Yorkshire.
[00:16:45] Scargill wanted to stop any materials from leaving the plant and reaching the steel works in Scunthorpe, as it would disrupt steel production and ratchet up pressure on the government.
[00:17:00] What happened next is remembered as the Battle of Orgreave.
[00:17:06] Around 5,000 miners faced roughly the same number of police, including officers on horseback and others with large dogs.
[00:17:17] And the confrontation became one of the most iconic and contested moments of the entire strike.
[00:17:25] Police on horseback charged into the crowd of strikers with their truncheons drawn. Truncheons, by the way, are those short, thick sticks that the police often carry.
[00:17:38] Of course, there were casualties.
[00:17:41] Fifty-one striking miners and 72 police officers were injured. Scargill himself was arrested and photographed being led away with a bloodied head.
[00:17:55] Ninety-five miners were arrested and charged with something called “riot”, which at the time carried the possibility of a life sentence.
[00:18:07] Naturally, it was the biggest news item that day, but bafflingly, when the BBC broadcast it, it showed the footage of the confrontation in the wrong order. It showed the miners appearing to attack the police first, when in fact it was the police that charged first, it was the authorities that appeared to have provoked the situation.
[00:18:34] Before “fake news” was even a term, many miners and their supporters felt they had been deliberately framed by the national broadcaster, deliberately portrayed to have started the fight, when many miners believed the police had in fact initiated the violence.
[00:18:53] The BBC later said it was a simple production mistake, rather than some sort of institutional bias, but the damage was done.
[00:19:06] As the strike continued into the summer and then the autumn, life became increasingly tough for the miners, and for their communities.
[00:19:17] They didn’t give up. But the government was doing the arithmetic.
[00:19:23] Coal was still reaching the power stations, partly from stockpiles, partly from the mines that had never stopped working, and partly from imported coal.
[00:19:34] There would be no power cuts.
[00:19:37] In terms of public support, the public increasingly began to side with the government rather than the striking miners.
[00:19:47] At the beginning of the strike, support was split relatively equally between the miners and the employers, or the government, but by December of 1984, nine months into the strike, 51% of the public said that they supported the employers, and support for the miners had dropped to 26%.
[00:20:12] And almost every major newspaper took an “anti-miners” stance, which certainly didn’t help.
[00:20:21] Things were not looking good.
[00:20:23] And as winter set in, more and more miners, facing months without pay and with families to feed, well, perfectly understandably, they began drifting back to work.
[00:20:37] And there didn’t seem to be any way out for the miners that were still on strike.
[00:20:42] The union’s assets were still frozen.
[00:20:46] Scargill's attempt to shut down the plant at Orgreave had failed.
[00:20:51] The strategy of flying pickets had been neutralised.
[00:20:56] There was one potential lifeline. The mines employed not just miners, but safety deputies, whose job was to inspect the mines for gas leaks, structural problems, and other dangers. Without them, no mine could legally open.
[00:21:16] Their union, which represented around 17,000 workers, voted in October 1984 to strike in sympathy with the miners.
[00:21:28] This would have been game over for Thatcher. Every pit in Britain would have been forced to close immediately, regardless of whether the miners inside wanted to work or not.
[00:21:43] But at the last minute, the government made a small concession on the pit closure process, just enough for the deputies to call off the strike and accept a deal.
[00:21:56] The lifeline was gone.
[00:21:59] On the 3rd of March, 1985, almost exactly one year after the strike had begun, there was a vote on whether to return to work. It was close, but “yes” won, 98 to 91.
[00:22:15] There was no deal. There were no concessions.
[00:22:20] The miners went back with nothing.
[00:22:24] At many pits, they marched back with brass bands playing and union banners flying. It was a display of dignity in defeat that moved even many of those who had opposed the strike.
[00:22:38] Scargill told reporters the campaign against closures would continue.
[00:22:44] Margaret Thatcher said she was relieved the miners would be returning to work, but made no attempt to disguise that her government had won.
[00:22:54] What followed over the next ten years was precisely what Scargill had predicted, and precisely what the government had denied.
[00:23:04] At the time of the strike, there were 170 operating coal mines in Britain. By 1994, only 15 remained. Nearly 90% of the workforce had been shed.
[00:23:20] The final deep coal mine in Britain closed in 2015.
[00:23:27] For the communities built around those mines, the consequences were severe and in many cases have never fully been reversed.
[00:23:37] If you look at a map of unemployment and economic deprivation in the UK, many of the most affected areas are in former mining communities.
[00:23:48] The mine had been practically the only reliable employment opportunity, and with it gone, there was nothing. In most former mining communities, nothing comparable came to replace it.
[00:24:03] And of course, the social consequences were real and lasting.
[00:24:09] Mental health problems from people struggling with the loss of their identity, their purpose, and their community. Many areas saw increases in crime, alcohol and drug abuse.
[00:24:23] Poverty became entrenched.
[00:24:26] And entire generations grew up knowing what had happened, and pointing the finger squarely at Margaret Thatcher.
[00:24:36] And this has had a long-term impact on the political geography of Britain.
[00:24:43] The Conservative Party was already not particularly popular in northern England, and this episode made it toxic. In many northern cities and towns, voting Conservative became almost unthinkable, and to this day, many people simply cannot forgive the Conservative Party for what they did to the miners.
[00:25:09] So, who was right?
[00:25:12] Well, Thatcher's defenders would point out several things.
[00:25:17] The coal industry was not economically viable in its existing form. The subsidies required to keep these loss-making pits open were enormous, and the coal produced was more expensive than that available from other sources.
[00:25:33] Britain's industrial structure needed to change, and had been changing since the 1950s. The coal industry did need to go, and this is before we get to any kind of environmental discussion.
[00:25:49] Her supporters would also point to Scargill's tactics.
[00:25:53] He called a national strike without a public vote, which split the union and gave the government a crucial political advantage. He started the strike in spring, the worst possible time, when coal demand is lowest. He attempted to use flying pickets to intimidate miners who had exercised their democratic right not to strike.
[00:26:18] His refusal to compromise at various points when deals might still have been possible is still a source of bitter debate.
[00:26:28] Those on the other side will point to the secrecy and the scale of the government's real intentions.
[00:26:35] Cabinet papers confirmed that the government and MacGregor planned to close far more pits than they ever admitted publicly, and that they knew the employment consequences would be devastating.
[00:26:49] The conduct at Orgreave, and the subsequent cover-up by police, was a serious miscarriage of justice.
[00:26:59] Most importantly, perhaps, they will argue that the government's victory was not followed by any serious attempt to help the communities that had been destroyed. No major investment programme, no retraining at scale, no replacement industries. Just closure, and silence.
[00:27:21] So, to wrap things up, the miners' strike was not just a labour dispute. It was a defining confrontation about who held power in Britain, and about what happens to people when the economic foundation of their lives is removed.
[00:27:40] Margaret Thatcher won. The miners lost.
[00:27:44] And in some of the places where those miners once worked and lived, the effects of that defeat are still being felt today.
[00:27:54] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on the miners' strike.
[00:27:59] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you have learnt something new.
[00:28:03] I’d love to know…had you heard of the miners’ strike before? Have you been to any of these areas of the UK that were the most affected? And are there similar episodes in your country’s history?
[00:28:16] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started. The place for that is our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com.
[00:28:25] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:28:30] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to talk about one of the most divisive, bitter, and emotionally charged periods in modern British history: the miners' strike of the mid 1980s.
[00:00:37] This is a story about coal, about class, about power, and about what happens when a government and a community decide that neither side will back down.
[00:00:50] So, let’s not waste a minute, and get right into it.
[00:00:56] It was the 8th of April, 2013.
[00:01:00] The family of Margaret Thatcher, the former British Prime Minister who had governed the country from 1979 to 1990, announced that she had died of a stroke at the age of 87.
[00:01:17] Now, for most people, the death of an elderly woman, especially someone who was one of the longest serving British Prime Ministers, well it would be a sad moment. A moment of reflection, of thanks for their decade-plus of public service.
[00:01:38] And, when Margaret Thatcher died, tributes certainly did pour in from around the world.
[00:01:47] The right-leaning Daily Mail ran the headline: "The Woman Who Saved Britain", while The Daily Express went with a reference to her nickname, “Farewell, Iron Lady”.
[00:02:00] Her supporters described her as the greatest peacetime prime minister the UK had ever had, a woman who made hard decisions and turned the country’s economy around.
[00:02:14] Not everyone was so complimentary.
[00:02:18] In the coal belt of northern England, a former miner lit up an enormous cigar and said he was looking forward to some celebratory drinks. Street parties broke out in Glasgow, Liverpool, Bristol, Leeds, Cardiff, and Belfast.
[00:02:38] The Socialist Worker newspaper announced the death with the headline “REJOICE”, and enticed its readers with the prospect of a “Thatcher’s Dead Special Pullout”.
[00:02:51] And thanks to a coordinated online campaign, the song "Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead," from The Wizard of Oz, shot to number two in the UK charts, forcing the BBC to decide whether to play it or not on the weekly chart show.
[00:03:12] The regional secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers said that he was having a drink to celebrate her death, adding that it was also his 70th birthday that day, and this made it one of the best birthdays he'd ever had.
[00:03:29] Now, although Margaret Thatcher is one of if not the central characters of the miners’ strike, this isn’t all about her.
[00:03:39] We did actually make an episode about her life, it’s number 59 if you’re interested.
[00:03:46] But let me give you a little background, or a reminder, of who Margaret Thatcher was, as you can’t understand the miners’ strike without understanding Margaret Thatcher.
[00:03:58] So, she was born Margaret Roberts, the younger daughter of a grocer from the town of Grantham in Lincolnshire, in the English Midlands.
[00:04:10] She studied chemistry at Oxford, worked briefly as a chemist before becoming a barrister, which is a type of lawyer.
[00:04:19] In 1950, at the age of 24, she decided to enter politics as a Conservative.
[00:04:28] She rose through the party ranks and by 1975 she had become not just its leader, but the first woman to lead a major British political party.
[00:04:41] Four years later, in 1979, she won the general election and became the first female British Prime Minister.
[00:04:51] Clearly, this was a remarkable achievement.
[00:04:54] And even her greatest critics would have to admit that she was a remarkable woman: fiercely intelligent, intensely ideological, and utterly unafraid of confrontation.
[00:05:09] And in terms of her political beliefs, she believed in free markets and private enterprise. She believed the state should be strong when it came to law and order, but much less involved in the economy. She was deeply suspicious of trade unions, which she saw as obstacles to economic reform and, at their most extreme, as threats to democracy itself.
[00:05:40] It is perhaps unsurprising that she had come to these conclusions.
[00:05:46] The Britain she inherited, the Britain of the late 1970s, was not exactly thriving.
[00:05:55] In 1979 the country had been through a turbulent decade of strikes, power cuts, and industrial unrest. The unions were powerful, so powerful, in fact, that a miners’ strike in 1974 had effectively brought down the Conservative government, and paved the way for Labour to take power.
[00:06:20] Thatcher had watched all of this. She had no intention of being brought down the same way.
[00:06:29] The problem was that the coal mining industry in the UK was still large and powerful.
[00:06:36] In 1983, there were over 170 coal mines operating across Britain, employing almost 200,000 miners. They were all state owned, after being nationalised right after the Second World War.
[00:06:54] These mines were all over the country, but the largest concentrations were in the Midlands, the North, South Wales and Scotland.
[00:07:05] And these mines were not just places of work.
[00:07:11] In many pit villages, as they were called, the mine was the only real employer, the only option for a stable job.
[00:07:22] The mine supported the entire community, so even if 200,000 miners might not sound like all that much, these jobs provided the incomes that supported families and entire communities.
[00:07:38] But the industry had been in long-term decline.
[00:07:43] Cheaper oil and natural gas had reduced demand for coal.
[00:07:48] Many mines were running at a loss and were being heavily subsidised by the government. Margaret Thatcher, with her deep commitment to and belief in free markets, well, this went against everything she believed in. She wanted to end those subsidies, and close the unprofitable mines.
[00:08:13] In 1983, she appointed a new chairman of the National Coal Board, the NCB, the state body that ran the mines.
[00:08:24] His name was Ian MacGregor, and he was a Scottish-American businessman who had previously restructured the steel industry by closing plants and cutting the workforce in half.
[00:08:38] The message was not subtle. The same was coming for coal.
[00:08:44] On the other side of the coming confrontation was a man called Arthur Scargill, who was the president of the NUM, the National Union of Mineworkers. He was a militant trade unionist from Yorkshire, deeply socialist in his politics, and utterly convinced that the government's real aim was not simply economic efficiency but the complete destruction of both the coal industry and the unions.
[00:09:17] So, the stage was set: an industry that supported hundreds of thousands of people up and down the country, and a Prime Minister who looked set on destroying it.
[00:09:31] The spark that lit the fire came in early March 1984.
[00:09:38] On the 1st of March, the National Coal Board announced the closure of a mine in South Yorkshire.
[00:09:46] The miners there walked out almost immediately in protest; they went on strike.
[00:09:52] Then, on the 6th of March, MacGregor announced plans to close 20 pits across the country, with the loss of 20,000 jobs. Scargill insisted the real figure was far higher, claiming the government planned to shut more than 70 pits.
[00:10:13] The government denied it.
[00:10:16] But…Scargill was not making it up. More than three decades later, government papers were released showing that MacGregor did indeed have plans to close around 75 pits within three years.
[00:10:33] On the 12th of March, Scargill, the union boss, united the growing regional strikes into a national action, declaring the National Union of Mineworkers’ full support.
[00:10:47] Crucially, and controversially, he did this without holding a national ballot, a vote of all the union members.
[00:10:57] Scargill argued that a national vote wasn't needed. In the trade union movement there was a strong principle that you never cross a picket line — that if your fellow workers are already on strike, you don't walk past them and go to work as usual.
[00:11:17] Miners in Yorkshire and other areas had already walked out. And Scargill's argument was that miners everywhere else in the country were simply honour-bound to join them, vote or no vote.
[00:11:31] His critics, including some on the left, argued that calling a national strike without a vote was fundamentally undemocratic; he couldn’t just tell union members to strike. It needed to be put to a vote.
[00:11:48] So, what happened?
[00:11:50] Well, around 140,000 miners went on strike. But this wasn’t every miner, not every member of the union.
[00:12:01] Miners in Nottinghamshire and the Midlands largely refused to join, as most had voted against the strike in previous local ballots.
[00:12:12] Now, before we go further, it's worth clarifying what going on strike actually meant, from a practical point of view.
[00:12:22] Simply put, it meant no wages, no pay. A miner on strike received nothing from the National Coal Board, obviously, since he wasn't working. And strike pay from the union itself was minimal, partly because the NUM's funds were limited and, as the months went on, partly because those funds were frozen by the courts.
[00:12:48] So the men who went out and stayed out for a year were, in many cases, entirely dependent on the goodwill of others to feed their families.
[00:13:00] Soup kitchens were set up in mining communities. Support groups sent food parcels. Local businesses gave what they could. Solidarity collections were organised across the country and beyond.
[00:13:15] The reality was that these men, men who had worked hard physical jobs underground for their entire adult lives, were going hungry, along with their wives and children.
[00:13:29] Now, with that said, what was the strategy?
[00:13:33] What were the miners actually trying to achieve?
[00:13:38] The plan, broadly, was to cause an energy crisis severe enough to force the government to the negotiating table, and stop the mines from being closed.
[00:13:50] Britain's economy still depended heavily on coal-fired power stations. If the mines stopped producing coal, if supplies to those power stations could be cut off or disrupted, then the lights would go out across the country, industry would grind to a halt, and the government would have no choice but to make concessions to the miners.
[00:14:16] And this was not a fantasy; it had worked before. In 1972, Scargill had used exactly this strategy, using mass pickets to shut down a key location in Birmingham, and it had forced the Conservative government of Edward Heath to give the miners a significant pay rise.
[00:14:38] And it had worked again in 1974, when a miners' strike brought down Heath's government entirely.
[00:14:46] What Thatcher had done, with great deliberation, was make sure it could not work a third time. Her government had spent years preparing for exactly this confrontation.
[00:15:01] They had stockpiled coal at power stations. They had converted some plants to run on heavy fuel oil. They had arranged fleets of road hauliers to move coal by lorry.
[00:15:14] By 1984, she had around six months of coal reserves. And her strategy was simple: outlast the miners.
[00:15:25] The strike that followed was one of the most bitter and violent episodes of industrial conflict in British history.
[00:15:35] The miners used a tactic that had served them well in the early 1970s: something called the flying picket.
[00:15:44] What this involved was large groups of striking miners who would travel quickly to a mine or industrial site that was still operational, overwhelm any police presence, and shut it down completely.
[00:15:58] The problem was, the government and the police suspected that this was exactly what they would do.
[00:16:07] And in 1984, they were ready.
[00:16:11] Police were deployed in enormous numbers to key mining sites.
[00:16:16] Motorway checkpoints were set up to turn back miners travelling to join pickets. The sheer scale of policing was something many people had never seen before in Britain, and it led to confrontations that were sometimes extraordinarily violent.
[00:16:35] The most dramatic of these came in June, 1984, at a plant near Rotherham in South Yorkshire.
[00:16:45] Scargill wanted to stop any materials from leaving the plant and reaching the steel works in Scunthorpe, as it would disrupt steel production and ratchet up pressure on the government.
[00:17:00] What happened next is remembered as the Battle of Orgreave.
[00:17:06] Around 5,000 miners faced roughly the same number of police, including officers on horseback and others with large dogs.
[00:17:17] And the confrontation became one of the most iconic and contested moments of the entire strike.
[00:17:25] Police on horseback charged into the crowd of strikers with their truncheons drawn. Truncheons, by the way, are those short, thick sticks that the police often carry.
[00:17:38] Of course, there were casualties.
[00:17:41] Fifty-one striking miners and 72 police officers were injured. Scargill himself was arrested and photographed being led away with a bloodied head.
[00:17:55] Ninety-five miners were arrested and charged with something called “riot”, which at the time carried the possibility of a life sentence.
[00:18:07] Naturally, it was the biggest news item that day, but bafflingly, when the BBC broadcast it, it showed the footage of the confrontation in the wrong order. It showed the miners appearing to attack the police first, when in fact it was the police that charged first, it was the authorities that appeared to have provoked the situation.
[00:18:34] Before “fake news” was even a term, many miners and their supporters felt they had been deliberately framed by the national broadcaster, deliberately portrayed to have started the fight, when many miners believed the police had in fact initiated the violence.
[00:18:53] The BBC later said it was a simple production mistake, rather than some sort of institutional bias, but the damage was done.
[00:19:06] As the strike continued into the summer and then the autumn, life became increasingly tough for the miners, and for their communities.
[00:19:17] They didn’t give up. But the government was doing the arithmetic.
[00:19:23] Coal was still reaching the power stations, partly from stockpiles, partly from the mines that had never stopped working, and partly from imported coal.
[00:19:34] There would be no power cuts.
[00:19:37] In terms of public support, the public increasingly began to side with the government rather than the striking miners.
[00:19:47] At the beginning of the strike, support was split relatively equally between the miners and the employers, or the government, but by December of 1984, nine months into the strike, 51% of the public said that they supported the employers, and support for the miners had dropped to 26%.
[00:20:12] And almost every major newspaper took an “anti-miners” stance, which certainly didn’t help.
[00:20:21] Things were not looking good.
[00:20:23] And as winter set in, more and more miners, facing months without pay and with families to feed, well, perfectly understandably, they began drifting back to work.
[00:20:37] And there didn’t seem to be any way out for the miners that were still on strike.
[00:20:42] The union’s assets were still frozen.
[00:20:46] Scargill's attempt to shut down the plant at Orgreave had failed.
[00:20:51] The strategy of flying pickets had been neutralised.
[00:20:56] There was one potential lifeline. The mines employed not just miners, but safety deputies, whose job was to inspect the mines for gas leaks, structural problems, and other dangers. Without them, no mine could legally open.
[00:21:16] Their union, which represented around 17,000 workers, voted in October 1984 to strike in sympathy with the miners.
[00:21:28] This would have been game over for Thatcher. Every pit in Britain would have been forced to close immediately, regardless of whether the miners inside wanted to work or not.
[00:21:43] But at the last minute, the government made a small concession on the pit closure process, just enough for the deputies to call off the strike and accept a deal.
[00:21:56] The lifeline was gone.
[00:21:59] On the 3rd of March, 1985, almost exactly one year after the strike had begun, there was a vote on whether to return to work. It was close, but “yes” won, 98 to 91.
[00:22:15] There was no deal. There were no concessions.
[00:22:20] The miners went back with nothing.
[00:22:24] At many pits, they marched back with brass bands playing and union banners flying. It was a display of dignity in defeat that moved even many of those who had opposed the strike.
[00:22:38] Scargill told reporters the campaign against closures would continue.
[00:22:44] Margaret Thatcher said she was relieved the miners would be returning to work, but made no attempt to disguise that her government had won.
[00:22:54] What followed over the next ten years was precisely what Scargill had predicted, and precisely what the government had denied.
[00:23:04] At the time of the strike, there were 170 operating coal mines in Britain. By 1994, only 15 remained. Nearly 90% of the workforce had been shed.
[00:23:20] The final deep coal mine in Britain closed in 2015.
[00:23:27] For the communities built around those mines, the consequences were severe and in many cases have never fully been reversed.
[00:23:37] If you look at a map of unemployment and economic deprivation in the UK, many of the most affected areas are in former mining communities.
[00:23:48] The mine had been practically the only reliable employment opportunity, and with it gone, there was nothing. In most former mining communities, nothing comparable came to replace it.
[00:24:03] And of course, the social consequences were real and lasting.
[00:24:09] Mental health problems from people struggling with the loss of their identity, their purpose, and their community. Many areas saw increases in crime, alcohol and drug abuse.
[00:24:23] Poverty became entrenched.
[00:24:26] And entire generations grew up knowing what had happened, and pointing the finger squarely at Margaret Thatcher.
[00:24:36] And this has had a long-term impact on the political geography of Britain.
[00:24:43] The Conservative Party was already not particularly popular in northern England, and this episode made it toxic. In many northern cities and towns, voting Conservative became almost unthinkable, and to this day, many people simply cannot forgive the Conservative Party for what they did to the miners.
[00:25:09] So, who was right?
[00:25:12] Well, Thatcher's defenders would point out several things.
[00:25:17] The coal industry was not economically viable in its existing form. The subsidies required to keep these loss-making pits open were enormous, and the coal produced was more expensive than that available from other sources.
[00:25:33] Britain's industrial structure needed to change, and had been changing since the 1950s. The coal industry did need to go, and this is before we get to any kind of environmental discussion.
[00:25:49] Her supporters would also point to Scargill's tactics.
[00:25:53] He called a national strike without a public vote, which split the union and gave the government a crucial political advantage. He started the strike in spring, the worst possible time, when coal demand is lowest. He attempted to use flying pickets to intimidate miners who had exercised their democratic right not to strike.
[00:26:18] His refusal to compromise at various points when deals might still have been possible is still a source of bitter debate.
[00:26:28] Those on the other side will point to the secrecy and the scale of the government's real intentions.
[00:26:35] Cabinet papers confirmed that the government and MacGregor planned to close far more pits than they ever admitted publicly, and that they knew the employment consequences would be devastating.
[00:26:49] The conduct at Orgreave, and the subsequent cover-up by police, was a serious miscarriage of justice.
[00:26:59] Most importantly, perhaps, they will argue that the government's victory was not followed by any serious attempt to help the communities that had been destroyed. No major investment programme, no retraining at scale, no replacement industries. Just closure, and silence.
[00:27:21] So, to wrap things up, the miners' strike was not just a labour dispute. It was a defining confrontation about who held power in Britain, and about what happens to people when the economic foundation of their lives is removed.
[00:27:40] Margaret Thatcher won. The miners lost.
[00:27:44] And in some of the places where those miners once worked and lived, the effects of that defeat are still being felt today.
[00:27:54] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on the miners' strike.
[00:27:59] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you have learnt something new.
[00:28:03] I’d love to know…had you heard of the miners’ strike before? Have you been to any of these areas of the UK that were the most affected? And are there similar episodes in your country’s history?
[00:28:16] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started. The place for that is our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com.
[00:28:25] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:28:30] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
