This is history told by ordinary people about those extraordinary months during the miners’ strike when you felt history’s tectonic plates move as our political and industrial landscape changed forever. Despite a plentiful supply of the black stuff underground, the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher believed many pits were uneconomic. They thought it would be cheaper to close them and import the coal we needed. They were also settling an old score, because, in 1974, Edward Heath had taken on the miners and lost.
Ten years later, rumours were rife about pit closures and government plans. The post-war settlement was being dismantled by the Thatcher Government as the old promise of full employment sank without trace. Preparations were made. Transatlantic industrial troubleshooter Ian MacGregor, fresh from his triumphs at British Steel, was running the National Coal Board. Coal was stockpiled. North Sea oil and gas could subsidise unemployment. It was, in effect, an ideological war, part of her master plan for the castration of union power and the creation of a shiny new free market programme.
This documentary account, from the frontline, is full of fascinating detail, telling anecdotes, pathos and tragedy, brought to life by imaginative use of documentary footage and carefully selected interview material, and plenty of Tony Benn and Arthur Scargill in full flow. What makes this DVD so effective and moving is it’s free from punditry, professional commentators and other prima donnas. It’s the voice of the people, for the most part, especially the considerable role played by women and families. The rank and file gave their loyalty and effort and you’d have to be made of stone not to be moved by it all.
When Michael Heseltine announced the pit closures during John Major’s Government, I spent several days in Grimethorpe while making a film on brass bands for BBC2, the final sequence of which we shot at the Manchester Museum of Labour History. The emotional weight of what I’d seen and heard rendered me almost incapable of delivering my final voiceover. Dole Not Coal should be supplemented with a close reading of Marching to the Fault Line: The 1984 Miners’ Strike and the Death of Industrial Britain by Francis Beckett and David Hencke and seen in schools and colleges. It’s a terrible story, whoever tells it.
