'STRIKE: WHEN BRITAIN WENT TO WAR'
Channel Four's documentary marking twenty years since the start of the year-long miners' strike was a ghoulish exercise in nostalgia. Told largely from the point of view of student 'sympathisers' at the time, the documentary ended up as a pop-sociology account of the way Britain had moved on from heavy industry, leaving the miners' way of life redundant as they were. National Union of Students' leader Phil Woolas joined author John O'Farrell in tragic-comic reflections on the delusions of youth. Mostly these were predatory fantasies about sexual relations with the anthropological specimens from the Rhondda valley. Woolas recalled that supporting the miners was an easy way to get elected to the Students Union, but felt 'let down' when the miners were driven back to work.
The most interesting comment came from Tory image consultant Tim Bell who recalled that the government strategy was to ignore the broad public sympathy they enjoyed and concentrate on breaking the miners' own will, so that they had to go back 'with their tails between their legs'. That strategy was successful because the 'sympathy' the miners' enjoyed never translated into solidarity.
The Channel Four version gave too much credence to the idea that the intransigent miners' leader Arthur Scargill was bent upon overthrowing capitalism. Despite the rhetoric, the miners' strategy was framed within the need to save the British coal industry, arguing quixotically, that it could be made profitable. This meant that miners' livelihoods were subordinate to the success of the National Coal Board - and it was easy to demonstrate that actually profitability was best preserved by shedding jobs.
The National Union of Miners' defeat was set in the end by the inability to get all of the miners out on strike. The union officers, supported by the more militant miners, tried to side-step the difficult business of winning over the less active miners. Rather than call a national ballot, they struck on the basis of a delegates conference resolution, and attempted to picket out the less militant Nottingham pits. That gave the government an opening to divide the miners, and they poured police in to defend the working miners - though most lost their jobs subsequently. Leader of the breakaway 'Union of Democratic Miners' Roy Lynk told the Independent that his establishment supporters 'must have been laughing at me behind my back' (7 November 1992).
In 'Strike' Labour leader Neil Kinnock engaged in mea culpa, saying that his greatest mistake was not supporting the call for a national ballot. In Kinnock's case this was just a retrospective attempt to justify his failure to organise real support. But in fact almost everyone now admits that the absence of a national ballot was a hall-mark of the miners' failure to unite. But at the time the miners' sympathisers were more interested in patronising them, than telling them the truth. The version of history in Strike made the end of militant working class politics, and the rise of nerdy student leaders seem inevitable. But like all social changes, it was a result of the choices people made at the time.
-- James Heartfield