Ian Lavery argues that it was vital to defend the miners 25 years ago, and it is still vital to support them now
AS WE approach the 25th anniversary of the great miners’ strike of 1984/85, many will take another opportunity to analyse its effects which are still being felt today – and are being felt increasingly with each passing year. For anyone to believe that the strike and the issues involved were all settled in 1985 when the strike ended is quite simply to ignore the energy crisis now facing us and the looming energy poverty that is proving extremely difficult to quantify fully and plan for – even following two Government energy reviews.
All the problems of indigenous oil and gas depletion, the importation of gas – we are now a net importer of energy –- and the importation of 43 million tonnes of coal in 2007, mainly for Russia, stem from the politically-driven decimation of Britain’s mining industry. In a statement to the House of Commons in 2007, energy and climate change minister Mike O’Brien said: “The value of coal (and other solid fuel) imports was provisionally £2,072.3 million. The value of exports was provisionally £65.3 million.”
In other words, he was alluding to a deficit of more than £2 billion in one year. Yet the truth is that in the 12 years 1996 to 2007 inclusive we have imported almost 373 million tonnes of coal and burnt it to keep the lights on in this country. It is an alarming fact that the percentage of imported coal has grown massively in that time. In 1996, imports of coal were around 26 per cent of the total coal burnt in Britain, but rose rapidly until in 2007 imports represented a colossal 72 per cent. In the same period, our indigenous production, including opencast, fell from 71 per cent to 24 per cent. It can easily be seen that we have simply closed our coalmines and exported the production along with miners’ jobs.
These costs have to be added to the massive bill taxpayers had to meet for the Tory Government using all the powers of the state to fight the miners, but it is the miners who have been proved right.
They had to take cruel beatings and suffer considerable hardship alleviated only by the heroic efforts of Women Against Pit Closures who set up a whole new social security system that helped to sustain miners, their families and the strike itself.
It should never be forgotten that Margaret Thatcher denied it was her purpose to decimate Britain’s mining industry while the leadership of the National Union of Mineworkers insisted that the plan was to butcher it.
Thatcher’s intentions were obvious: a well-trained and highly-motivated police force, the accumulation of massive coal stocks and the recruitment of highly-paid scab lorry drivers prepared to drive through picket lines – and even then the miners fought valiantly for a whole year.
The aftermath of the strike was that pits were closed rapidly – and would have closed even more quickly, but for the continued resistance of the NUM.
In the years that have passed, we have seen mining communities devastated; there is crime and drugs where there was pride, endeavour and achievement. Industries that supported mining went to the wall, power stations closed and thousands of livelihoods were lost. National assets such as gas were squandered to make up for the loss of coal production until today there is little gas left and our coalmines are closed – both assets squandered at the same time, along with the skills of Britain’s highly-trained mining workforce.
Against this background, it is laughable for the Tory Government of the 1980s and 1990s to claim a victory. It was a pyrrhic victory at best and a catastrophic failure at worst, as we pick up massive gas and electricity bills and scour the world to beg for gas and coal supplies at ever-increasing costs to keep the lights on.
Currently, we live a pipedream that renewable energy will somehow come to our rescue. This ignores the simple fact that, in 2007, renewables met only between 1-1.5 per cent of global energy generation – hardly enough to boil a kettle. Meanwhile, beneath our feet, Thatcher’s legacy to the nation is massive quantities of sterilised coal reserves that any other nation would have used in order to spare indigenous gas reserves, using them only for domestic consumption.
Was the strike worth it? Many writers, commentators and middle-class academics who never took part in the strike will claim it was ill-conceived or wrongly-led, but never say how we should have fought the pit closure programme.
Should we have let the industry be destroyed without a whimper? Would negotiating with Thatcher have saved the pits, given her paranoid determination to smash the NUM?
It was a simple matter of fight or lose without a fight. We decided to fight. We have pride in that struggle, because it gave us dignity that our critics – some on the left – fail to understand.
Day in and day out in, miners will tell you how proud they were of their part in the great strike and how their resistance to Thatcher and her devotion to the free market continues to this day when the system she believed in and forced on us is collapsing all around us.
In Britain now there are considerable coal reserves that can still be exploited, given the political will. Coal is not the fuel of the past; indeed it is the fuel of the present and the future. There has been a steady rise in coal consumption worldwide over the past 40 years. In 2007, world coal consumption was 214 per cent higher than it was in 1965. This will continue to rise in the years ahead, with China, India and Brazil fuelling their economic development and the United States turning to coal in order to cut its over-reliance on imported oil.
Clean coal technology is the only way to ensure that carbon emissions are cut. it can be the way forward for Britain’s coal industry and the answer to our deepening energy crisis.
The great miners’ strike is a proud episode in the history of the NUM. We were right then and we are right now. So with the 25th anniversary approaching and as president of this great union, I have one eye on the past and the 1984/85 titanic struggle, but also I have an eye to the future and will continue to fight for the resurgence of Britain’s deep-mine coal industry with its potential to provide energy security well into the future.
Ian Lavery is president of the National Union of Mineworkers
