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NUM Miners' Strike Campaign Videotape Project. 3, Solidarity (1984)

3,741 views · Published 23 April 2011 · 13:07 · Indexed 16 October 2026

Channel: Public Enquiry · 2011 · News & Politics

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Vintage tapes from the 1984/5 UK Miners' strike. This one particularly looking at the previous 1970s miners' strike and the vast support miners had from other trades unionists. Produced for the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) with financial help from groups and individuals from right across the social justice and trades union movement. 
It was recognised before the strike had even begun that mainstream press, newspapers, television and radio would be inherantly biased for the establishment and against the miners' struggle. Having said that there was an inherent contradiction in striking, that is closing pits, in order to keep them open. This fundamental problem smacked of lack of imagination by the NUM who, with hindsight, may have been better off occupying the pits to keep them working rather than going on strike. 
Anyway, hundreds of thousands of miners lost their jobs in this battle as one small part of a globalisation agenda hatched by Victor Rothschild and Margaret Thatcher which left British industry deccimated. 
Miners' Campaign Videotape Project 3 - Solidarity (1984)
The miners' strike of 1984/1985 was major industrial action affecting the British coal industry. It was a defining moment in British industrial relations, and its defeat significantly weakened the British trades union movement. It was also seen as a major political and ideological victory for Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative Party.

The strike became a symbolic struggle, since the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) was one of the strongest in the country, viewed by many, including Conservatives in power, as having brought down the Heath government in its 1974 strike. The strike ended with the miners' defeat and the Thatcher government able to consolidate its free market programme. The political power of the NUM was broken permanently. The dispute exposed deep divisions in British society and caused considerable bitterness, especially in Northern England and in South Wales. Ten deaths resulted from events around the strike.
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