The strike that could have beaten Thatcher
Thirty years on from the 1984-85 miners' strike most commentators, including many on the left, claim the power of the state made defeat inevitable. But Sheila McGregor argues we could have won but for betrayal by trade union officials and Labour leaders.
They fought for a year as the police occupied their villages, blocked roads and tunnels to stop them picketing, and surrounded working pits to stop them approaching. Miners and their wives faced gratuitous violence ranging from pickets' cars being smashed up to attacks by police armed with drawn truncheons, horses and dogs. Miners faced individual arrests and mass arrests. The courts were used to give bail restrictions banning miners from going to picket pits and to sequester NUM funds so as to limit the ability of the union to function.