1984–85 UK miners' strike

What was the strike about?

On 6 March 1984 the National Coal Board announced that, to reduce subsidies, 20 pits would close with the loss of 20,000 jobs. Many pit villages had almost no other employment. The Coal Board's chairman, Ian MacGregor, had already halved the workforce of British Steel in two years. Arthur Scargill, president of the National Union of Mineworkers, said the government meant to close more than 70 pits; the government and MacGregor denied it. Cabinet papers released in 2014 show that MacGregor wished to close 75 pits over three years.

The issue was whether a pit that made no profit could be closed. The government saw subsidies as a brake on the economy and reckoned that coal could be imported more cheaply from Australia, the United States and Colombia. Scargill replied that there was no such thing as an uneconomic pit and that none should close except through geological exhaustion or for safety. The Oxford economist Andrew Glyn concluded that, given mining's weight in local economies, no closure could benefit government revenue.

Why did the Thatcher government prepare for this fight?

The miners' strike of 1974 had brought down Heath's Conservative government. In a 1977 report the Conservative MP Nicholas Ridley set out how the next Conservative government could fight and defeat a major strike in a nationalised industry: choose the field of battle, build up coal stocks at power stations, recruit non-union drivers, cut off money to strikers and train a large mobile squad of police. This is the Ridley Plan.

In February 1981 the government announced plans to close 23 pits, then backed down before the threat of a national strike, since coal stocks would last only six weeks. It went on to build up six months' stocks, convert some power stations to burn heavy fuel oil, and organise the deployment of police from other forces. The Social Security Act 1980 also barred strikers' dependants from "urgent needs" payments, which the government described as restoring "a fairer bargaining balance".

Why did a national ballot become the issue?

Under union rules a national strike needed 55 percent in a ballot. Strike motions failed three times, in January and October 1982 and March 1983. In 1984 the executive used Rule 41, under which it could back strikes area by area, and on 19 April a delegate conference voted 69 to 54 against a national ballot. The arguments were clear: on one side, that "safe" areas should not be allowed to ballot others out of jobs; on the other, that without a ballot there was no legitimacy to bind the members.

The result was fatal. In Yorkshire, Scotland, South Wales, Kent and North East England nearly everyone struck, but in Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire and other Midlands areas most miners kept working; more than a fifth of all mineworkers worked from the very start. Strikers sent "flying pickets" from Yorkshire, mobile crowds of pickets who went to other areas to stop people going to work, and clashes with working miners deepened. In September 1984 the High Court ruled that the strike without a national ballot broke the union's constitution, and when the union would not pay its fine its assets were ordered to be sequestered. Members from Nottinghamshire and elsewhere later split to form the Union of Democratic Mineworkers (UDM).

How did the strike unfold, and what decided it?

This was the most violent industrial dispute in Britain of the twentieth century. On 18 June 1984 at the Orgreave coking plant about 5,000 pickets faced the same number of police, and fighting spread after police on horseback charged with truncheons drawn; 51 pickets and 72 police were injured. Ninety-five pickets were charged with riot or violent disorder, but the trials collapsed when the police evidence was deemed unreliable, and in 1991 South Yorkshire Police paid £425,000 to 39 miners. Over the whole strike 11,291 people were arrested and 8,392 charged, and at least 9,000 mineworkers were dismissed. Six people died: the pickets David Jones and Joe Green, three teenagers picking coal from a waste heap, and the taxi driver David Wilkie, who was driving a working miner and was killed by a concrete post dropped from a bridge by two striking miners.

The outcome was decided outside the pits too. Few unions gave official support. The steel union kept handling coke, the electricians' union actively opposed the strike, and non-union drivers crossed picket lines with coal. In autumn 1984 the pit deputies' union NACODS voted 81 percent to strike, which could have shut every pit, but called it off after government concessions; MacGregor later admitted that a NACODS strike would probably have forced a compromise. The Labour leader Neil Kinnock criticised the government but condemned the lack of a ballot and the violence, and kept his distance from Scargill. In July 1984 Thatcher compared union leaders to the enemy in the Falklands, calling them "the enemy within".

The strike also produced solidarity beyond the workplace. Women Against Pit Closures grew from miners' wives' communal kitchens and collections and brought 23,000 women to march in London on 11 August. Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, founded by the Communist Mark Ashton and others, raised about £22,500 from its London group alone. With the union's funds seized, money came from abroad: the Soviet trade union council gave £1.5 million, while Poland's Solidarity criticised Scargill, and the arrival of Polish coal at British power stations became an issue. The strike began to crumble in January 1985. On 3 March a union conference voted to return without even an agreement to reinstate sacked men, and at many pits miners marched back to work behind brass bands.

What did the defeat leave behind?

The Coal Board accelerated closures. More than 170 working pits in 1983 had shrunk to 15 at privatisation in December 1994, and the last deep colliery, Kellingley, closed on 18 December 2015. A 1994 European Union inquiry classed Grimethorpe in South Yorkshire as the poorest settlement in the country. Strikes fell sharply in 1985 and trade union power in general diminished.

The reckoning is not over. In 2022 the Scottish Parliament passed a law pardoning miners convicted of certain offences during the strike, and in July 2025 the British Home Secretary announced a national inquiry into Orgreave.

How is the defeat explained?

Many historians see Scargill's decisions as decisive, above all his reliance on flying pickets instead of a national ballot, which divided the union, turned opinion against it and strengthened the Coal Board and the government. The British Communist Party supported the strike but criticised Scargill's idea of winning alone through "a re-run of Saltley Gate" and resolved that aggressive picketing was dividing the working class.

The revolutionary socialists Alex Callinicos and Mike Simons answered differently in The Great Strike (1985). For them the miners were "absolutely right to fight", and defeat was not inevitable. Without a fight the defeat would have been at least as devastating, and a ballot, as a form of capitalist democracy that reduces workers to isolated individuals, risked a catastrophic "No". Yet they also fault Scargill for failing to campaign in Nottinghamshire in the first month, place the weight of the defeat on the union bureaucracy and the Labour leadership, and add that the weakness of workplace organisation "was undoubtedly one of the decisive features of the strike".

The strike is also read as one scene of the neoliberal turn: breaking union power to hand the conditions of pay and work over to the market was a core task of Thatcherism.