The Miners Strike...

                              
                                (note: in this picture the Police have taken off their collar numbers)


Remember the miners strike? Which one? No not 1974 and Heath's downfall. 1984/85 and the end of deep mines in this country. The end of 85000 mens jobs, the division of families and probably the most dramatic shift of morality in this countries history that happened in 1984/85. It was the time of Thatchers mad experiment "no such thing as society only consumers". It was the end of a socilism in UK politics for the next 40 years and the end of a society based on average people being able to have an average job and live a life with some degree of security. For after 1984/85 it became steadily more and more difficult  for a person to get and average education, get an average job and bring up a family without want.

The background to the strike is simple. Thatcher knew she would have to break the Unions in UK to achieve her plan for total capitalism. It was always on the cards that sooner or later she would take on the Unions and so it was that she decided the militant Miners would be the ones to break. She stockpiled coal at our main power stations to avoid the problems faced by Heath in the winter of discontent and she waited .

Arthur Scargill the leader of the National Union of Miners in Yorkshire made a big mistake in not holding a vote before taking strike action and rightly the Nottinghamshire Miners Demcratic Union on Miners (DMU) refused to strike without one. Thatcher saw her chance and put in the Police to hold the line, divide and rule the two factions and that set the scene for the worst division and real suffering I can recall in this country.

Miners by the very nature of their industry are stubborn and loyal to each other. My own Grandfather Bill had been  a Nottinghamshire Miner. He was a proud lad and built like an outside privy. He loved his wife and two daughters and they loved him. He would bring home his pay and put it on the table every Friday. Grandmar Lotti would "Divi" it up, pay the bills, put some in the Coop book and pay for the kids music lessons. She would give Bill half a quid for his beer and skittles and that gave them pride enough for they asked for nothing and kept the front step spotless. It was a community tied together by hard work, great danger and coal they kept faith in each other. Miners worked together, played together, lived and often died together and it was a community Thatcher hated as much as their politics.

King Coal had powered the industrial revolution and built an Empire. It had also cost many men their lives and health. It killed my Granddad to. He died young from coal dust. Deep pit mining was hard work and it bred hard men and women. The had worked for many years in a bad industry with appalling safety and very poor pay. History time and time again showed how badly the miners had been served and this alone made them socialist in nature and the nationalisation of the pits after the war in the first pos war labour governement had been a just reward.  But by 1984 Thatchers policy of "sod you jack im alright rampant capitalism" was bound to clash sooner or later with the likes of the miners and so it happened that she decided to seize the high ground and force a fight.

And a fight is what she got. Ill not go into the detail of it here, just to say it got very bloody and very divisive with families torn apart and I well recall seeing men driven back to work in tears of frustration and through the starvation of their families being called scab by those who stayed out on strike. It took terrible scenes of real need to break the strike with Miners, who were having to eat in soup kitchens and feed their families from food banks set up in the Miners Welfare Clubs, being taunted by Londons Met Police. "Thanks for the overtime" or "Thanks for the extension to my house" the Coppers would shout to goad the Miners still on strike. If ever one wanted an illustration of the greed and division in this country brought about in the 80s by Thatcher the miners strike was the epitome of greed and power versus socilism and the rights of a man to a fair days pay for a fair days work.

I will certainly never forget the sights and sounds of that time and the gevious effects that are felt to this day. Effects brought about by the likes of Heseltine who after the strike set about the total and complete destruction of the deep mines in this country by simply switching the pumps off and flooding the mines. Even the DMU, who had stayed loyal were destroyed and now those pits are a memory and the miners villages ghost towns in many instances.

I like to think that "what goes around come around" and maybe just maybe this country will return to a less greed driven society where what you drive, the speed of you computer and the new gadget you own becoimes less imporant than caring for your neighbour. But I doubt it. Thatcherism did for society by offering greed and averice to simple people in return for votes. It was so attractive that it even forced the workers party Labour to duplicate and improve upon it. First Kinnock refused to back the strike or support the strikers and then Tony Blair completed the job of closing down the pits. Blair to my mind will always be someone who illustrates the fact that truly evil people never seem to get caught. It was also the end of trust in politicians in general to my mind.

Ill leave you with this thought. I had a friend who was a Policeman and he was from Derbyshire during the miners strike. He resigned from the Police shortly after the strike. One day he was on Picket duty when a Superintendent of the Met Police threw a stone at a line of miners and shouted "Come and get it". All hell broke loose and in the fight my friend belted the Superintendant and called him "A southern Bastard" He was pulled off by two other Policemen. Make of that what you will.

But I tell you this, it was the start of division in this country, yes it had always existed, but it grew to the point where it was filled by UKIP and brexit was more than born in the Miners strike. You can say on a global scale it was also about the same time people across the world began to become disenfranchised and not to believe in their politicians anymore. In the USA you can see the same thing with Trump and Clinton. Its what happens when 1 percent of the population own 99 percent of the wealth and the own the politicians.