The strike that changed a nation

Shouts of "scum", "scabs" and "traitors" greeted the delegates as they arrived at the TUC headquarters in London, but the outcome of the meeting was scarcely in doubt. By 98 to 91 they voted to unconditionally abandon their dispute. Just two days short of a year since the first walk-out, the miners' strike was over.

It was March 1985. Terry Waite, the Archbishop of Canterbury's special envoy, had just secured the release of four Britons held hostage in Libya; the pound had fallen to its lowest value ever, worth just over one dollar; Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko was on his death bed, with rising star Mikhail Gorbachev waiting in the wings, and the bitterest industrial dispute in British history had come to an end.

It was 20 years ago tomorrow that a special delegate conference of the NUM threw in the towel. Two days later, a year to the day since it started, the strike came to an end, signalling a turning point in British political and industrial history.

It was just ten years earlier that the miners had been held responsible for bringing down the government, as Ted Heath went to the polls asking who ran the country, ministers or the miners, and the voters replied that, whoever was in charge, it wasn't Heath.

But the failure of the 1984/5 dispute sapped the trades union movement of its political muscle, not only removing its power to bring down governments, but also loosening its historic bond with the Labour Party. For all the strike was seen as a battle of wills between the Conservatives and the miners, and particularly between Margaret Thatcher and Arthur Scargill, its biggest impact was on the Labour Party.

"You can't put it down entirely to the miners' strike, but it was an important event in the way the Labour Party began to transform itself into the party that was elected in '97," says Professor Stephen Procter, holder of the Alcan chair of management at Newcastle University Business School.

'There was a recognition of changes in the relationship with the trades unions and what was considered appropriate for a party that sought to be elected to government."

Labour leader Neil Kinnock had been faced with the dilemma of what position to take on the strike. Traditionally, he could have been expected to support the miners, but the failure to hold a national ballot on strike action, and the horrifying scenes of picket line violence, turned the public against the strike and made it easier for Kinnock to distance himself, even though the miners had always occupied a special place in the Labour movement.

"It is ironic from a certain point of view but you could say it was certain views in the Labour Party that were the main beneficiaries," says Prof Procter. "It may be too much to say that they got the Conservatives to do their dirty work, but that would be the cynical view."

Although the miners' strike was by no means the only factor, it reinforced political and industrial trends which were already apparent. Mrs Thatcher's image as a strong leader, largely forged in the Falklands War, was strengthened, enabling her to continue with reforms to further weaken trades unions and ushering in a dark period from which the unions are only now recovering.

"For about 15 years following the strike trade union membership steadily declined," says Kevin Rowan, North-East regional secretary for the TUC. "Whilst it is hard to attribute that directly and solely to the strike, it gave an anti-union government and anti-union employers the confidence to take the unions on. That really quite seriously damaged unions and they only recently started to recover."

Although union membership has started to rise again, to about 6.8 million from a low of 6.6 million, the nature of unions has changed, and part of that process can be laid at the door of the strike.

Mr Rowan adds: "Unions are different now. They're much more considered and careful about industrial action. It is tied to industrial change, but without the miners' strike we might not have had the industrial change we had in the late 80s and early 90s."

But, unlike Prof Procter, he does not see the strike as a catalyst in the transformation of the Labour Party.

"Throughout most of the 80s the Labour Party was more left wing than it is now. It was electoral defeat which led to New Labour, and I don't think there was a direct link between the election defeats and the miners' strike," he says.

But the impact of the strike and its failure was most keenly felt in mining communities. The dispute created bitter conflicts which are still felt today, and the subsequent pit closures, proving Scargill's dire warnings over how many pits would shut to be on the conservative side, wreaked havoc in local economies.

"There were a lot of divisions between people who had gone back to work and people who had stayed out," says Dave Wray, director of the work and employment research centre at Northumbria University. "There was also a great deal of depression about having lost the strike: when you have been in dispute for a year, the people who lasted to the end were very depressed."

Promises of economic regeneration to replace the lost mines, many of which sustained entire communities on their own, largely proved false, and what jobs did arrive tended to be low-skilled, unsuitable for highly-skilled miners whose abilities were not transferable.

The result has left many mining communities with a legacy of deep-seated social problems: unemployment, deprivation, poor health and drug abuse.

But the dispute also had the effect of politicising a generation, and evidence can be seen in the resurgence of interest in the Durham Miners' Gala, says Mr Wray.

From the late 80s, when the gala attracted less than 10,000 people, the event has been saved from the brink and is now revived, last year's seeing in excess of 70,000 people. The Durham Miners' Association also boast around 13,000 members, even though the county's last pit has long since closed.

"People are still paying to be in the union, and although some of that is because of insurance claims, even when they're settled people are retaining membership," says Mr Wray.

"Mining villages were just there to serve the mine and to suddenly have the heart ripped out was devastating, but the gala is an opportunity for them to come out and say that although their jobs and pits are gone, they're still there.

"The miners' banners have now become the focal point of the pit that has gone, and there is an attempt to retain these icons of the past, and try and get some pride from that, something for the communities to gather around as they once did."