Political journalism expert explains miners’ strike significance on BBC show

A 35-year career in political journalism led to a Leicester academic being called on to explain the significance of the 1984-5 miners’ strike, as its 40^th anniversary was marked by BBC Leicester this week.

Tor Clark, Associate Professor in Journalism at the University of Leicester, told the Ady Dayman Breakfast Show (starts 1h 11m) on BBC Radio Leicester on Wednesday 6 March, exactly 40 years since the strike was declared, that the conflict marked the end of a confrontational style of Government-trade union relations, which had lasted around 30 years by then.

He said: “Defeat for the miners in 1985 can now be seen as something of the end of the era when trade unions had expected to have a significant voice in the running of their industries and indeed wider government policy - and went on strike if that didn’t happen.”

Back in 1984 Clark was an A level student in Yorkshire – the heart of the conflict – but started work as a political journalist three years after it concluded, when scars were still raw, and was working in that role as the Government later closed all coal mines in the early 1990s.

He has also contributed historical background and an explanation of the key controversial issue at the heart of the strike – the national ballot that never happened – to a seven-part podcast on BBC Sounds by BBC Leicester journalist Jo Bostock, who grew up in the mining community of Coalville, location of four working mines in 1984.

Leicestershire was unusual during the strike in that only 30 miners actually joined the strike, the rest of the county’s pitmen continued to attend their pits because they felt the strike had not been legitimised by a national ballot.

Clark added: “The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) under its charismatic but militant president, Arthur Scargill, had held a couple of national ballots on strike action before 1984 and lost them.

“When the strike started in Yorkshire in protest at the proposed closure of the Cortonwood colliery, it quickly spread to the whole of that county and beyond, with the NUM centrally authorising the action, but refusing to hold a national ballot as was its custom.

“It is thought the NUM’s leadership feared they would lose such a ballot and lose the momentum of their members’ protests against pit closures, but historians have since speculated that they were likely to have won a ballot held immediately in March 1984.”

Mrs Thatcher’s Conservative government had won a landslide election victory in the year before and were preparing for what they regarded as an inevitable conflict with the 200,000-strong miners’ union.

Scargill consistently and loudly voiced his displeasure with Mrs Thatcher’s government and vowed to use trade union power to bring it down.

The UK coal industry had been the backbone of its industrial might over previous centuries, employing thousands of people in communities revolving around their collieries, but by 1984 its future was uncertain and its coal increasingly uneconomic to extract from the remaining mines because of cheap foreign imports and cheaper alternative sources of energy.

A conflict was inevitable.

Clark added: “The miners’ strike is today shrouded in nostalgia and emotion, and that doesn’t help our understanding. We now know coal was not going to be viable long term, but the miners’ strike hastened its end by weakening the power of the trade unions to negotiate its gradual closure and measures to support the communities affected.

“The National Coal Board – urged on by the Government of the day – wanted to close uneconomic pits too fast and the NUM didn’t want to close them at all, viewing coal production as vital to the national economy, even if it was not economically viable in many places.

“The tragedy was the way it happened ripped the heart out of the communities built around coal. Looking back on it, there must have been a better way.

“The miners themselves were a brave, proud and skilled workforce but they were let down on all sides, by a government who didn’t prepare for the end of their industry and by a leadership in their own union, who used them as political shock troops.

“It’s no wonder there is still such recrimination and this is still such an issue 40 years later.”

Excerpts from the BBC series The Miners’ Strike: The 40 Year Scar (Leicester) by Jo Bostock are being aired on BBC Leicester all this week and are available on BBC Sounds.

The series also features archive recordings from Radio Leicester digitised and preserved by the East Midlands Oral History Archive project, Sounds for the Future, funded by the National Lottery Heritage Find

Tor Clark is Associate Professor in Journalism and former BA Journalism programme director at the University of Leicester. He has been a political journalist since 1988 and since then has covered eight UK general elections, the last four with BBC Leicester.