Look Back in Anger: Mining Communities, the Mining Novel and the Great Miners' Strike (original) (raw)
2004, Historical Studies in Industrial Relations
As I write this twenty years after the great strike of 1984-85, the final nails are being driven into the coffin of the British coalmining industry. The privatized company UK Coal has announced closure of its mine at Selby, Yorkshire, the 'super-pit' of the 1980s. The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), its power broken by the state, its 3,000 members a pitiful remnant of past splendours, is merging-a grandiloquent term for absorption-with the Rail, Maritime and Transport Union. Arthur Scargill, once world famous, the last in a lineage which stretched back to A. J. Cook and Herbert Smith and beyond to Alexander MacDonald and Tommy Hepburn, stepped down as NUM president in 2002 and survives only as a marginal public figure as boss of the tiny Socialist Labour Party, the fruit of defeat. Yet no matter how distant the past appears today, for historians it requires remembering, explaining and celebrating. In the case of the miners we are lucky enough to have a developed historical literature dealing with diverse aspects of coal capitalism. 1 It is still being expanded and there is also a rich vein of creative literature. In comparison with other groups of workers, the miners have been well served by their novelists.
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The aim of this paper is to examine the defeat of the 1984-1985 miners’ strike and assess whether an alternative strategy could have yielded a successful outcome for the miners or if the writing was on the wall from the outset. It will look at the consequences of the government’s ideological neoliberal victory and the long-term ramifications for the relationship between the British state and the British worker, arguing that through this political battle it was fundamentally altered to the detriment of worker’s rights and civil liberties. The Thatcher government purposefully dismantled and discredited the trade union movement, entrenching the values of meritocracy and a flexible labour market into the British economy. The legacy of these events can be seen in the suppression of wages and stagnation in the improvement of living standards, greatly damaging the economic autonomy and community integrity of working-class communities in the initial aftermath, resulting in widespread intergenerational poverty and extending to encompass middle-class professionals in the 21st century.
Revisiting the history of the British coal industry: the politics of legacy, memory and heritage
Waseda RILAS Journal, 2020
This paper revisits the history of the British coal industry in the context of deindustrialisation, ruptures in electoral politics, and attempts by former miners to preserve a mining past. Methodologically it draws on an oral history project that involved over 100 participants in England, Scotland and Wales. The life stories conveyed by the former miners provide entry points to various aspects of the industrial, social and cultural life of coal communities. The specific focus here is on the ways in which the miners themselves are striving to create and curate their own stories and experiences through local heritage projects in the town of Leigh in north west England and the former mining villages of the north Wales coast. The interviews are indicative of the sense of the isolation they continue to experience in the contemporary economic context of deindustrialisation and challenges to their sense of class, community and nation. Tensions between former miners and the wider social and political culture of their communities hinge on narratives and histories of the 1984/5 miners' strike. Heritage projects developed in both localities have become battlegrounds for what kind of history should be presented to the public, where memorials should be located, and which memories and experiences should be preserved. Miners who took part in the strike understandably want to centre their histories and narratives through the lens of 1984/5, while those who continued to work through the dispute argue that it should be given a more marginal position in commemoration and heritage. The interviews offer more complex readings of the social and cultural politics of the coal industry and challenge some of the prevailing orthodoxies in the historiography.
WEATHERING THE STORM?: COAL MINERS AND THEIR UNIONS IN BRITAIN AND POLAND*
Underlying this research is the authors' belief that labor unions have played. and will continue to play, an important role in defending workers' rights. But the extent to which labor unions will be able to carry on this role in the future depends on whether they survive the attacks of the corporate community and the anti-labor governments. We began this research with the premise that comparative-historical studies have the potential to make an important contribution to the recent debates regarding the future of labor unions by examining how the histories of nationalized industries and their socio-economic contexts shaped, and were shaped, by labor management struggles. The following paper reflects both our extant commitments and a new stage in our intellectual journey marked by the emphasis on the importance of institutional traditions and actors' identities in shaping the dynamics and outcomes of industrial conflicts.
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