Dave Gorton, Chesterfield Socialist Party
“This was the worst manifestation of evil I ever witnessed; four or five police officers bullying a man and enjoying it. Sheer sadism. ‘We’ll have this bastard next, give him the special treatment.’ Two or three police officers coming up to me casually, grinning. They frogmarched me to the rear of the van. They put me on the ground, with my arms out in front of me, my hands handcuffed tightly. My head and torso were then levered up with a truncheon [across the bridge of my nose]. Some kind of foreign body was inserted into each nostril. I was lowered back to the ground and my back was jumped on several times. Finally my head was turned sideways to the ground then someone jumped on my head.” (State of Seige: Miners’ Strike 1984 – Politics and Policing in the Coal Fields)
Not Chile under Pinochet, or Guantanamo Bay at the beginning of this century. This was Rainworth, a village in Nottinghamshire with a population of around 7,000. It was May 1984, a few hours after a large demonstration in nearby Mansfield to support National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) members during the momentous year-long strike against pit closures.
Mining villages weren’t idyllic places. Life was hard. Violence in the form of a punch-up after too many beers or the occasional clash with the police while following your football team was not totally absent. Miners didn’t expect to see a jolly, laughing policeman on their street every day.
But most did view the police as upholders of ‘law and order’ in what was thought a ‘democratic country’. That was shattered during the Miners’ Strike in a way that could never be fixed. The role of the state was laid bare to tens of thousands, who suffered and witnessed countless similar incidents.
State violence
To some, that the police could resort to violence and chicanery was no longer news by 1984. The outright racism of so many officers and their delight in handing out punishment in working-class Black communities, specifically by the hated Special Patrol Group (SPG), had been prevalent for years. Other minorities too experienced state violence. The corruption, particularly in the London Metropolitan Police, reached such staggering proportions in the 1970s that even the ruling class realised it would have to start clamping down and being seen to clean up the state forces.
Many in Northern Ireland had been experiencing extreme state repression and occupation for 15 years.
Miners weren’t the first group of organised trade unionists to experience new tactics that became much more widespread during the strike. The Stockport Messenger Group dispute in 1983-84 was the first real try-out of Thatcher’s anti-union laws alongside state forces using maximum violence to implement them. Six months prior to the start of the Miners’ Strike, I witnessed (and felt!) the levels of violence meted out by 2,000 police at the Warrington printworks in what became known as the Battle of Winwick Quay.
The 1981 Brixton riots led to Lord Scarman’s inquiry blaming the “racial disadvantage that is a fact of British life”. He found loss of confidence and mistrust in the police and their methods of policing. The outcome was the opposite of what many expected – police powers continued to be ramped up behind the scenes. By the time the miners struck in March 1984, Britain’s separate police forces were in a position to be used as one force, controlled centrally.
The Tory government wasn’t just seeking revenge for the electoral defeat suffered by a previous Tory administration at the hands of the NUM in 1974. It was part of a much more orchestrated plan, ‘launched’ in the US under Ronald Reagan and the UK, to reassert capitalism as the only workable economic system.
Part of the plan was to push the social democratic parties in Europe – such as the Labour Party in Britain – and their acolytes in the unions, to the right and away from being dragged into any revolutionary fervour of the masses. Thatcher’s later claim that her biggest victory was ‘Tony Blair and New Labour’ was not a lie, nor had it been accidental.
‘Worse than murder’
There was, however, unfinished business for the police force in the form of revenge for the humiliating defeat the organised working class had inflicted on them in the infamous Saltley Gate struggle of 1972, during another national miners’ strike. Then, the working class of Birmingham had united in solidarity with the miners, with thousands walking out to picket the fuel storage depot based there. There were 800 police on duty but, as a police officer interviewed later recalled: “We heard that some pickets were coming over the Saltley viaduct. The plan was to block off the bridge, steer them away. But”… he made a helpless, sweeping gesture across the café… “I can still see it now, them coming over the hill…”
In 1977, Robert Mark, Commissioner of the Met, had said: “I do not think that what we call crimes of violence are anything like as severe a threat to the maintenance of tranquillity in this country as the tendency to use violence to achieve political or industrial ends. As far as I’m concerned, that is the worst crime in the book. I think it is worse than murder.”
State repression increases
Leader of the Russian Revolution Vladimir Lenin, writing on Friedrich Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, famously used the phrase “special bodies of armed men” in relation to the development of state power to protect the ruling classes’ interests. In fact, Engels had written: “[The state] consists not merely of armed men, but also of material appendages, prisons and coercive institutions of all kinds”, which stretches beyond just the police and army.
These other tools of the state were honed during the early years of Thatcher’s reign, with the intention of being used in the struggle against the organised working class.
The media were a crucial part of the state machinery during the Miners’ Strike, and remain firmly wedded to the maintenance of the capitalist system today. From the blatant bias of the BBC swapping newsreels around to show, at Orgreave, police ‘retaliating’ to stones being thrown at them by charging horses into the pickets (an original denial was proved false when closer examination clearly determined the correct order of events by the path of the sun and shadows!) to more subtle subterfuge, almost every media outlet and publication lined up behind Thatcher.
On the day Nottinghamshire’s miners were being balloted by their area NUM about joining the strike, a letter appeared in the Nottingham Evening Post from a woman claiming Yorkshire miners had been paying £2 a week into a strike fund since 1972. Now, she claimed, they were drawing £70 a week in strike pay. Blatantly untrue, but very likely to have had an effect.
The early days of the ‘drift back to work’, several months into the strike, were reported with massively inflated numbers, all later proved wrong from the National Coal Board’s own figures.
Ken Loach’s pro-strike film Which Side Are You On? was banned from our screens in November 1984 as being too political. It was subsequently shown on Channel 4 (very new at the time and with much fewer viewers) but then ‘balanced out’ by a programme with an opposing view of the strike.
The government revealed in 1985 it had spent £4,266,000 on national advertising about the strike (the equivalent of nearer £20 million today) plus a further £300,000 locally. (The cost of actually policing the strike was nearer £200 million at the time!)
In his autobiography, Norman Tebbit, the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry during the strike, wrote: “I do not think that anyone has properly assessed the skill with which the dispute was foreseen and then managed by the government.”
Powers of arrest were extensively misused, as a means of collecting intelligence and also as police detention without trial. “The latest figures suggest that of all those arrested under emergency powers about 80% are subsequently not charged with offences. They are released after spending up to seven days in police custody.”
The Thatcher government attempted to use hunger to undermine strike action by removing the rights to benefits for non-married strikers in the Social Security Act 1980. £15 a week (increased to £16 during the strike) was also removed from benefits for families on the deliberate misinterpretation miners were getting strike pay (they weren’t).
Alongside these state interventions, phone tapping was rife. When the Post Office Engineering Union sought an enquiry about abuses, its members and staff were threatened with the Official Secrets Act, which carries penalties of imprisonment and unlimited fines.
And, during October 1984, the High Court ordered the complete sequestration of all NUM assets in an attempt to starve miners back to work.
Kent miners were stopped from driving through the Dartford Tunnel because the police said they were going picketing in Nottinghamshire, 150 miles away, where a breach of the peace ‘could’ occur. The same restrictions were placed on supporters trying to get to the port of Wivenhoe in Essex, and other ports. Huge efforts were made to keep pickets away from the Orgreave coking plant near Rotherham, except on 18 June 1984, when police waved through vehicles instead of trying to stop them on motorways and surrounding roads. It was a trap which led to some of the worst instances of police brutality.
Sadly, though, the NUM leadership failed to fully realise the Tories’ change of tactics – using mass criminalisation of miners and their families – also meant they needed another tactic than just mass picketing. This became all the more prevalent after the defeat at Orgreave.
Mass picketing alone was not going to win the dispute. It needed the coordination from below of solidarity strike action from other workers. NUM leader Arthur Scargill should have used his unprecedented standing amongst ordinary workers to go over the heads of reluctant union leaders and demand a 24-hour general strike as the first weapon towards more concentrated action.
The state is not invincible
Socialists must understand what the state machine is capable of, in times of acute repression or in less volatile periods where it is used, more subtly, by the ruling class.
It is more important we don’t make the mistake of believing even the most well-armed states are invincible. In Egypt and Tunisia in 2011, seemingly all-powerful autocratic states were brought crashing to their knees by the movements of workers. But workers’ political parties with a clear programme, strategy and tested leadership were sadly lacking.
The state forces reconstituted under different leaders and the opportunity for a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism passed. What was missing during the ‘Arab Spring’ was exactly what had been present in the Russian revolution of 1917, which removed capitalism for the first time and installed a workers’ government.
The vast majority of the participants in the Miners’ Strike – the miners, their families and supporters – didn’t set out to overthrow capitalism. They were seeking to protect their jobs, communities and futures. But over the course of a year, the role of the state became clearer to tens of thousands involved in the titanic struggle. If the Labour and trade union leaders – with a few honourable exceptions – had led their class, rather than seeking compromise with the ruling capitalist class, those futures could have been very different indeed.
