Miners’ strike (2014)

Book Review from the April 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

How Black Were Our Valleys. By Deborah Price and Natalie Butts-Thompson. 180 pages. £7.99

The authors have recorded and transcribed reminiscences by miners and their wives and daughters in one ex-mining valley in South Wales of the Miners Strike that began thirty years ago. Three things from them stand out. First, the solidarity of people in the mining villages. The strike was practically solid in South Wales, so much so that miners who went from there to picket in other areas such as Staffordshire and Nottingham were surprised to find that it was the strikers not the scabs who were ostracised. Second, that Thatcher is still a hated figure a generation later much as Churchill used to be for what he did in Tonypandy in 1911. The first photo in the book is of a poster for a benefit gig in a local hotel for the Miners Benevolent Fund on the day of her funeral. Third, the hostility and bitterness towards the police because of the brutality they employed to try to stop mass picketing. This lives on too.

In this last regard, the authors reproduce as an appendix a lengthy passage from our 1985 pamphlet The Strike Weapon: Lessons of the Miners Strike on ‘The Role of the State’ which makes the point that ‘by the time the strike was over the miners had experienced at first hand the way in which the coercive power of the state can be, and is, used in defence of ruling class interests’ and ‘that the coercive forces of the state should have been used against the striking miners, is not surprising. Governments – both Labour and Tory have used the police and even the army to break strikes many times before.’

The same divergent views of the tactics employed by the NUM leaders which socialists have discussed amongst ourselves – should there have been a national ballot, was Scargill too intransigent – are expressed in the reminiscences.

There are a couple of silly errors which could have been corrected if the text had been re-read by people around at the time. The NUM Vice-President was Mick McGahey not McCarthy and workers conscripted to work in the mines in WW2 were Bevin, not Bevan, boys. All the same, this is a useful addition to the memory of working-class experience.

Adam Buick