There are a few articles in the media,especially todays Guardian.
Some good memories from these involved in these articles..
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/mar/07/miners-strike-memorieshttp://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article5847315.eceOur Thatcher supporting TEF Posters will love the Guardian Editorial,but it trys to be objective in its analysis.
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A war no one deserved to win
Editorial
The Guardian, Saturday 7 March 2009
Distance simplifies, bleaching out subtler contours and human complexity. Thus, to many, peering back across 25 nation-changing years to the start of the 1984-85 miners' strike, the dispute now seems starkly Manichean, a contest between light and dark, neoliberalism and old solidarities, Thatcher and the unions, class and class, one side or the other. That is how the miners' leader Arthur Scargill portrayed it then and how he still portrays it in the article that we publish today.
Many in the former coalfields still see it that way too. The animosities engendered by the miners' strike will be carried to the grave, as they were after the 1926 conflict. To the unrepentant Mr Scargill, the conflict was a war for survival provoked by Margaret Thatcher's undoubted determination to break the unions, its tragic outcome entirely the product of cowardice, collaboration and betrayal for which he himself bears no shred of responsibility. Forgetting nothing and learning nothing, his inflexible message boils down to I told you so.
The real miners' strike, though, was not like that. Watch the increasingly grainy footage from the time and the recurring image is always of medieval combat between miners and the police. In practice, this was only rarely the case. After the violent spring and summer of 1984 the strike became a battle of attrition, with fewer clashes but full of coalfield suffering, that the late Peter Jenkins, in some of the finest reporting ever published in the Guardian, described as a feat of courage and endurance that earned the respect of the nation. Public opinion never wavered in opposition to the strike and its tactics, but the public's heart bled for the miners and their families. That is why the strike was such a searing and conflicted experience for so many who lived through those times.
The myth of the strike betrays the truth in other ways. Between the strikers and the government there were 49,000 determinedly non-striking miners, mainly in Nottinghamshire, whose refusal to strike without a national ballot set public opinion at odds with the strike but whom Mr Scargill never mentions except in terms of betrayal. Yet without understanding their objections, no one now can understand why the mass labour movement of the 1980s did not lift a finger on the miners' behalf. It was Mr Scargill's ruthless intransigence - always opposed to a national ballot, never conceding that there could ever be anything described as an uneconomic pit, and fighting to the last miner - which prevented the dispute from ending on any terms that compromised his revolutionary purity and which guaranteed that Mrs Thatcher's victory would be total. The two leaders deserved one another.
Between the 10,000 active pickets and the at times even larger numbers of police there were 120,000 men in the middle, the solid core of the striking miners who endured with their families in their villages, and who were undoubtedly the conflict's most tragic victims. It was they, as much as Mr Scargill's manipulations or the intimidation of the pickets, who kept the dispute going. They stood by their leader to the end. When the end came they were starved back to work. Lions led by donkeys indeed.
With other tactics, the miners might have won, or been able to manage their industry's decline more humanely; if that had happened, there might be a bright future for British coal today. But the great lesson of the strike was that the industrial class war as fought by Mr Scargill was over. The miners were on their own in a Britain that found it could get along without either coal or communities - and increasingly without unions too. In the end it was arguably more necessary for the government to prevail over the NUM than the reverse. But it was a war no one deserved to win and there was nothing just in Mrs Thatcher's victory. The wound has not yet been healed. There was no cause for celebration either then or now.
