The enemy within
Posted on 05/03/2024
Lessons for today from the creative solidarity that developed during the 1984-5 miner’s strike
In 1985, activist-sociologist Huw Benyon put together Digging Deeper, a collection of reports and analyses from the frontline of the 1984-5 miners’ strike. On the fortieth anniversary of the start of the strike, it is interesting to revisit his book, which captures very well the mood of living through this significant time:
The miners’ strike of 1984-85 is a landmark in the political and economic development of post-war Britain. In the breadth of the issues involved, and in the drama of its action, it stands out – even to the casual observer – as a major social and political event. In its compass it is quite staggering. Initiated by a threat to cut capacity and jobs in the coal industry, it is the first major strike of any duration to be fought over the question of employment. Viewed in the context of the near calamitous decline of jobs in manufacturing industry, and the sharp rise in unemployment, the strike stands like a beacon. In the sincerity of the people involved – women and men – as they talk about the threat to mining villages, to ‘whole communities’ and to the futures of their children, the strike evokes a deeply human response. Since March 1984 this response has been forthcoming from supporters, in groups and as individuals, throughout Britain and Europe. The yellow stickers of the NUM: Dig Deep for the Miners, Coal not Dole, have spread far beyond the coalfields (from introduction).
The collection consisted of observational and participative writing rooted in the experience of the events described. Instant too, written as those events unfolded. Contributors ranged across academics, left-wing journalists, members of the National Union of Miners (NUM), officials as well as rank and file members, and activists in the various miners’ support campaigns. There is a currency about the writing that still rings true today.
The 1984-85 strike did indeed prove to be a landmark, but in all the wrong ways. It was a major social and political defeat for a single trade union, the labour movement more widely, communities and an entire body of ideas. We are still living with the consequences of four decades on.
Does this take away from what was achieved in those twelve months? No, not a bit of it. This strike was a special event, which saw the spectacular revival of support and solidarity as a key element of left and labour movement organisational culture. Of course, for some this culture of solidarity had never gone away. But 1984-85 was of a type and scale that should be thought of more of as a reinvention than a revival.
Doreen Massey and Hilary Wainwright’s contribution to the book, ‘Beyond the Coalfields: The Work of the Miners’ Support Groups’, is a brilliant account of this phenomenon. The opening paragraph was a dig (sic) that was pretty obviously aimed at Beatrix Campbell, Eric Hobsbawm and Stuart Hall, writers and thinkers closely identified with the magazine Marxism Today.
The miners’ strike seems to epitomise those aspects of the labour movement and class politics that certain interpreters have found ‘old fashioned’, sectional, and by implication, bankrupt. Male manual workers, the old working class with a vengeance, fighting to save jobs in what is officially described as a declining industry, state-owned and located in isolated declining regions.
Their contribution expertly tracked the reasons for, and lessons of, the Miners Support Groups that sprang up all over the country. These groups, they argued, went well beyond the limitations of the traditional versions of campaigning on the left. Noting that ‘the strike could easily be seen as an old politics, slogging away in its own redoubts, far away from where the “rest of us” live’, they described a response entirely different from this, and located it geographically, within the big cities that shared a socio-economic and commonality that had been accelerated by the impact of Thatcherism. These cities included ‘a great mix of industries, including services, and a variety of jobs’, and many of those in work were ‘on low pay, in casual occupations, working in small firms’, while in many areas levels of unionisation were low.
The cities’ populations were reflected in the diversity of the support groups:
An enormously diverse population: in many cities ethnic minorities, gay and lesbian communities, women’s groups and ‘alternative’ networks of many kinds form an important element. The trade union movement is also different from that in the coalfields. Here its very industrial variety has been the basis for a tradition of local links and networks. Public sector and white-collar unions are especially important.
In a chapter celebrating the politics of solidarity, Doreen and Hilary were also charting the politics of difference, and they were quite clear that this difference had strengthened support for what they called, in contrast, ‘Coalfield Labourism’. As they noted, this support was ‘often anarchistic, socially adventurous, with a commitment to politics outside the workplace as well as within’.
This was their critical, yet nuanced, response to Eric Hobsbawm’s essay ‘The Forward March of Labour Halted?’, published in Marxism Today in 1978 in which he had identified ‘sectionalism’ as a core failing of the post-war labour movement. In essence they shared his critique, but they had faith that, on the ground, there were many who in practice had broken with sectionalism; and the metropolitan support for the miners was a brilliant example. In London, Merseyside, Southampton, Cardiff, Manchester, York, Glasgow, Edinburgh, basically everywhere, something had stirred in the course of these twelve months that had broken with the failed model of sectionalism and put something better in its place.
Nor was this support limited solely to the ‘big cities’: it stretched also to what Doreen and Hilary dubbed ‘Thatcherland’ – the kinds of places where the main opposition to the Tories wasn’t Labour but the SDP-Liberal Alliance. Cambridge, St Albans, Milton Keynes and Somerset for starters.
What were the factors that had caused this surge that had been so absent in Labour’s General Election campaign of 1983? They included the resonance of the miners’ struggle with the public, the sense of a common cause; the finding of new allies; new forms of organisation; local initiatives that were part of a loose yet national response; the practical focus of collecting food; the emotional impact of delivering that food. In these and many other ways, a politics had emerged of ‘preaching to the unconverted’, as Doreen and Hilary put it.
They concluded, perhaps understandably, with what proved to be a degree of over-confidence in what would follow: ‘Labour movement politics will never be the same again’. This optimism was rooted in a belief that something new and different was emerging that would serve as a challenge to a version of left politics which, they argued, was a retreat from class: ‘Something radically different has emerged out of a movement in support of what was seen as an “old” struggle. Many thought this impossible. They have argued that the Left must move with the times – that “old-fashioned class struggles” are doomed to isolation without resonance or relevance to present-day socialist politics.’
Despite their critique of Hobsbawm, Doreen and Hilary shared with him a recognition of labourism’s deeply embedded resistance to change, and a trade union sectionalism that denied industrial action the breadth of support that was needed to win; but they argued that this could, and would, be overcome by what they characterised as an enduring commitment to ‘class politics’. And this would be the means towards a fusion of the ‘old’ and the ‘new’. The past forty years are testament to how difficult a process this is. But their summation helps us understand why it remains worth trying: ‘It is not a question of either industrial action or the new social movements, nor is it one of just adding the two together. What is important is a recognition of a mutual dependence and a new openness to influence, of the one upon the other.’
True then, true today, and that is what makes for being an ‘Enemy Within’. Then and now.
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