Coal Strike, Great Britain, 1984-1985

From 1984 until 1985, a major miners' strike shook the British coal industry in response to proposed closures of uneconomic pits. It was led by Arthur Scargill of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) against the National Coal Board (NCB), a government agency. Opposition to the strike was led by Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government, which wanted to reduce trade union power. The NUM was divided over the action, which began in Yorkshire and Scotland, and spread to many other coalfields nationally. More than a fifth of mineworkers, especially in the Nottingham area, continued working from the very beginning of the dispute; by late 1984 miners increasingly returned to work. Few major trade unions supported the NUM officially, though many of their ordinary members set up support groups raising money and collecting food for miners and their families. The absence of a national ballot by the NUM to support the national strike weakened wider official support from other trade unions. Violent confrontations between flying pickets and police characterised the year-long strike, which ended in a decisive victory for the Conservative government and allowed the closure of most of Britain's collieries (coal mines). Many observers regard the strike as "the most bitter industrial dispute in British history". The number of person-days of work lost to the strike was over 26 million, making it the largest since the 1926 General Strike. The journalist Seumas Milne said of the strike that "it has no real parallel – in size, duration and impact – anywhere in the world". The NCB was encouraged to gear itself towards reduced subsidies in the early 1980s. After a strike was narrowly averted in February 1981, pit closures and pay restraint led to unofficial strikes. The main strike started on 6 March 1984 with a walkout at Cortonwood Colliery, which led to the NUM's Yorkshire Area's sanctioning of a strike on the grounds of a ballot result from 1981 in the Yorkshire Area, which was later challenged in court. The NUM Executive Council relied on their Rule 41 to support strikes called by NUM regions; in some cases, the regional NUM executive declared a strike official after a regional ballot had returned a majority against striking. The NUM strategy was to cause a severe energy shortage of the sort that had won victory in the 1972 strike. The government strategy, designed by Thatcher, was threefold: to build up ample coal stocks, to keep as many miners at work as possible, and to use police to break up attacks by pickets on working miners. The critical element was the NUM's failure to hold a national strike ballot. The strike was ruled illegal in September 1984 in England and Wales, as no national ballot of NUM members had been held. The High Court of Scotland ruled that the strike was legal in Scotland: the case of Fettes v NUM Scottish Area found that the Scottish Area of the NUM had followed their rules for calling a strike. The national strike ended on 3 March 1985. It was a defining moment in British industrial relations, the NUM's defeat significantly weakening the trade union movement. It was a major victory for Thatcher and the Conservative Party, with the government able to consolidate its economic programme. The number of strikes fell sharply in 1985 as a result of the "demonstration effect" and trade union power in general diminished. Six deaths resulted from events related to the strike. The much-reduced coal industry was privatised in December 1994, ultimately becoming UK Coal. In 1983, Britain had 175 working pits, all of which had closed by the end of 2015. Poverty increased in former coal mining areas, and in 1994 Grimethorpe in South Yorkshire was the poorest settlement in the country.