The heroic 1984-85 miners strike

(Quote of the issue)

On the 25th anniversary of the year-long miners strike which began in March 1984, we reprint an excerpt from the article we published at the conclusion of that great battle. The Spartacist League intervened actively and fought to spread the strike to other unions, particularly the dockers and rail workers. The defeat of the miners strike, as a result of the betrayals of old Labour, emboldened Thatcher. Her policy of decimating the proletariat through massive job losses in manufacturing industry was continued by New Labour.

She had her courts, her cops, her press, her billions of pounds, but it still took Maggie Thatcher a solid year to beat back the miners. And when she finally forced them back, after twelve long and bitter months, they marched to the pit gates, heads high, banners unfurled. The strike has been defeated, but the NUM has not been broken….

In the final analysis, it was not the cops and courts that defeated the NUM; it was the fifth column in labour’s ranks. Norm Willis and Neil Kinnock opposed this strike from the first day to the last; now they’ll try to tell us class struggle doesn’t pay. And from the TUC ‘lefts’ who could have shut down the country and achieved a historic victory for the working class, there came plenty of hot air speeches and even more backroom sabotage….

The NUM leadership under Arthur Scargill took this strike about as far as it could go within a perspective of militant trade union reformism, and still it lost. Why? Because militancy alone is not enough. From day one it was clear that the NUM was up against the full power of the capitalist state. What was needed was a party of revolutionary activists rooted in the trade unions which fought tooth and nail to mobilise other unions in strike action alongside the NUM. But all Arthur Scargill had was the Labour Party, and it would rather see the NUM dead than organise to take on the bosses’ state in struggle.

The problem with Scargill, put simply, is that he is not a revolutionary. The key lesson of this strike is the burning need to forge a revolutionary workers party so that the next battle can end in victory.

—“Miners defiant in defeat”, Workers Hammer no 67, March 1985