I missed most of the nineteen-eighties. I was working as a university researcher, writing a thesis in my spare time, and volunteering with the Samaritans. As well as all that, my mother was in and out of hospital with breast cancer, and then died. It left little over for anything else, and I gave no great thought to events taking place around me. Even the re-runs of old Top Of The Pops programmes from that time have seemed refreshingly new to me in recent years.
Yet, in Britain, it was a decade of great change: to commerce and industry, to individual and national identity, in lifestyle, and in politics. Almost every week there was some new controversy about the morals of the young and the state of the nation. Most of it went over my head.
So, forty years late, I have been back in the nineteen-eighties. I started with a 2016 television documentary, “The 80s With Dominic Sandbrook”. If nothing else, it is wonderful nostalgia.
It takes us through the years of Margaret Thatcher and the IRA Brighton bombing, her “special relationship” with Ronald Reagan, and her nation of young computer programmers. Our hearts and minds are invaded by Japanese video games and VCR video nasties such as Cannibal Holocaust, much to the outrage of Mrs. Mary Whitehouse, a puritanical Christian campaigner. We fall under the influence of the American consumerist dream, and the lifestyles of television shows such as Dallas. There is the civil unrest of racism, and we are terrified by the “gay plague” of AIDS, fought with surprisingly frank publicity and the example of Princess Diana. There is a gradual increase in sexual tolerance and acceptance of diversity. We go to war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands, and with the striking miners.
Is it rhetoric to say “we went to war” with the miners? It was certainly planned like a military campaign. The miners and other trade unions had been causing trouble for years, and the Thatcher government was determined to see them off once and for all. A sweeping programme of pit closures was announced, bringing miners out on strike throughout Yorkshire and elsewhere. The government had prepared by stockpiling mountains of coal at power stations, and were fortunate that the Nottinghamshire miners stayed at work, thinking their jobs were secure. An information assault was mounted, branding the miners as “the enemy within”, portraying then as uncouth animals making outrageous demands, prepared to be violent if not met. The image and persona of their leader, Arthur Scargill, seemed to fit perfectly. The mainstream media reinforced it, with reporting doctored to portray the miners in an unfavourable light. It had elements of regional and class snobbery designed to appeal to voters sympathetic to a right-wing government.
But another documentary, made to correspond with this year’s fortieth anniversary of the strike, gives a different perspective. “The Miners’ Strike: A Frontline Story”, recalls the personal experiences of fifteen men and women involved in different ways: striking and strike-breaking miners from working and striking areas, their families, and members of the police force. It is powerful stuff, with harrowing recollections of hardship and brutality.
One of the worst incidents occurred at Orgreave near Rotherham on the 18th June, 1984, where the miners planned to carry out peaceful secondary picketing. The police allowed them to approach and assemble without hindrance, and then brutally attacked them. The police were armed with batons, shields and riot gear, and hacked down the miners from horseback. It was like a medieval rout. At the time, it was widely presented as an act of self-defence by the police, but, later, miners were compensated for assault, wrongful arrest, unlawful detention and malicious prosecution.
The strike ended after a year when the defeated miners went back to work. Essentially, they had been trying to defend their communities. They accepted that mines had to close, but not that it had to be done so abruptly, leaving whole villages near-destitute. You cannot “get on your bike and look for work”, as one cabinet minister told them, when you have a mortgage on an unsaleable house, and there is no work to be had anyway. And you can’t go to university late like I did when you have a family. The changes could have been introduced gradually, with support, as with later pit closures. Many of the affected areas never recovered, and remain amongst the poorest in Europe.
Even now, there are many who choose to believe the media propaganda of the day, rather than recognising Margaret Thatcher and her Conservatives as uncaring, self-serving leeches who sold off the country’s assets and gave away the money.
At the end of his programme, Dominic Sandbrook wonders how Britain might have looked had the miners and IRA succeeded. Would it have remained a trade union fortress holding out against globalisation and the advance of technology? No, it would not. Change was unstoppable, and trying to hold it back would have been futile. But it did not need to be handled with such incompetence.
LINKS
The second of three parts of the series “The 80s With Dominic Sandbrook” (59 minutes) is online and apparently accessible without restriction at: https://clp.bbcrewind.co.uk/6b0ca8405623eacd3c490e87398bb3b9
Currently there appear to be no legitimate copies of parts 1 and 3 online.
“The Miners’ Strike: A Frontline Story” (89 minutes) is on the BBC iPlayer (UK only): https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001wm1x/miners-strike-a-frontline-story
However, much more is generally available on the BBC website (search for “The Miners’ Strike”), such as: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-scotland-68442261
