The Miners' Strike - A Personal Memoir by Kim Howells

Apart from memories and museums,

hardly anything remains in Wales of our once-great coal mining industry.

Most of our pits have been flattened and grassed over.

But 30 years ago, pits like this one, right across Britain,

witnessed a titanic struggle to stay open.

For an entire year, 150,000 miners and their families

held out against a government

led by Margaret Thatcher, determined to shrink the industry

and to crush the power of the National Union of Mineworkers.

It was a watershed moment in the history of post-war Britain.

I was heavily involved at the centre of the strike

and in this film, I want to tell the inside story

of that 12-month battle.

It was a bitter conflict,

which was symbolised by the leading warriors on each side -

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and NUM President Arthur Scargill.

Their unbending opposition to each other was echoed

among their officers and troops.

We could not have a group of politically-motivated

industrial workers holding the country to ransom.

We could either roll over and let them kick us to death,

or we had to stand up and fight.

APPLAUSE

Day after day, for a whole year, I saw close up the heroism

and the anger of men and women who sustained the strike, often

in the face of massive pressure from the forces of the State.

There were men coming into my office, just down the road in Swansea,

in tears.

In tears.

Their houses were being repossessed, their marriages were breaking up...

Nobody who grew up in mining communities could fail to be

moved by these experiences.

But I do want to raise some awkward questions...

About the problem of trying to sustain a national strike

when there hadn't been a national ballot.

About a flawed national leadership that sometimes seemed to be absent.

About the logic and wisdom of demanding

a huge increase in coal production when it was clear

that the key markets for coal were already in steep decline.

Not all of my friends from the strike will agree with me

when we talk about this.

But they'll always be my friends. From an epic struggle that failed.

For 21 years, until 2010, I was MP for Pontypridd,

here in the heart of the South Wales coalfield.

And for a chunk of that time,

I was a Minister in the governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

But in my long-haired militant days, I'd been a student activist

and then an academic.

By 1984, I was working here in Pontypridd

for the South Wales area of the National Union of Mineworkers.

I was a research officer, providing material for the executive.

Especially for the area president, Emlyn Williams.

APPLAUSE

In the political climate created by Mrs Thatcher's Conservatives,

you didn't need to be a prophet to see the storm clouds gathering

over the coalfield.

The storm hit us in March 1984.

The strike was brought on by the announcement of 20 pit closures and

a massive reduction in coal output.

The announcement was made by Ian MacGregor,

the chairman of the National Coal Board.

We knew him as Mrs Thatcher's hit man - the boss who had delivered

huge job cuts in the British Steel Corporation.

We had no doubt that he intended exactly the same thing

for the coal industry and we were determined that we were

going to defend our jobs and our communities.

At the beginning of the strike there were 170 collieries across Britain,

with almost 200,000 working miners.

The recently released Cabinet papers for 1984 reveal that the

Conservative Government and Ian MacGregor secretly intended

to close 70 of these pits as quickly as possible.

So, Scargill was right, people say. Though the truth is

we all knew that the hit list was much bigger

than the 20 pits that were announced.

But in South Wales there were serious misgivings

about our chances of success.

An uncertainty about the wisdom of using strike action.

To understand why,

you have to go back into the story of the previous decade.

The miners were the bogeymen of Conservative governments

because of their successful strikes in the 1970s.

And then in 1981, they forced Mrs Thatcher's first major U-turn,

facing down a proposal to close 23 pits across Britain.

It was a defeat never to be forgotten by a Prime Minister

who was determined to fight another day and this time, to win.

But it's important to remember that pit closures had been

common for 30 years before the 1980s.

And it was often hard to get solidarity from other miners

when you were trying to save a pit.

In Wales, there was a famous example of colliery closure

in the year immediately before the strike.

This used to be the Lewis Merthyr pit.

It's now the Rhondda Heritage Park.

In 1983 it was occupied by its workforce

in the battle to keep it open.

The South Wales miners appealed for help to their brothers

in the Midlands, Yorkshire and the northern coalfields.

The fact that that help didn't materialise

was to have consequences months later when,

on the 5th March 1984, strikes broke out in Yorkshire

over the closure of its Cottonwood Colliery.

Within a week, a strike was rolling across the country

in opposition to what were called the MacGregor closures.

At the start of the strike, NUM members in South Wales

were reluctant to come out.

In a vote taken on the first weekend,

18 out of 28 pits voted against the strike.

But Emlyn Williams believed that this area vote

could be turned around.

I'm sure that the South Wales miners will respond

because we are not talking about Yorkshire,

we are talking about the MacGregor plan to annihilate

at least a third of the South Wales coalfields within 12 months.

But most of the men Emlyn represented had no real confidence

about going into a strike without miners across the British coalfields

voting for it in a national ballot.

We work on Monday, but we will not go through any pickets.

None whatsoever.

-What was the mood of the meeting?

-We want a national ballot.

To relive how we changed the mood in South Wales,

I'm meeting up with two NUM comrades from the time.

The well-known activist Tyrone O'Sullivan

and the South Wales vice president in 1984, Terry Thomas.

If ever there was an example that the power of the unions

is the members of the unions themselves.

Because when the first meetings took place, in general

it was the union officials that were

talking at meetings and speaking to the men.

But after that, when the decision went by,

as you say, the majority of lodges, not to strike...

Then when the ordinary miners themselves went out to speak to them

in the coming days, the decisions were changed.

It altered the decision.

Tyrone, you were a lodge official, what did you do to get people out,

to make them join the strike?

I phoned you up, Kim. I said, "Look, Kim, I don't know where every

"pit is in the coalfield, I could do with some maps and plans.

"Could I meet you up in Hirwaun?"

So what we did, I phoned the other lodges up,

got the seven lodges to turn up. You came along.

You said, "Look, here are the maps and plans.

"I can get you to these pits."

So I said, "Right, that's where we are.

"Let's go back to our communities and fill the buses."

My first pit was Maesteg.

One of the things that we were proudest of

was the fact that we were the most democratic of trade unions.

-And yet, here we were, the three of us, in a way...

-Yeah.

..doing something which was outside of the rules of that union.

-No, it wasn't.

-Listen, I went and picketed pits on the Monday morning

even though the South Wales area clearly was against taking

strike action. That's undemocratic, isn't it?

We changed the rules.

There was to be no more national ballots.

We had changed that within our own union.

Democratically, through conferences.

We no longer needed national ballots.

Terry's the expert on that

because he sat through all of the legal procedures.

You went to the High Court

to hear Lord Justice Scott make a ruling of it.

He was part of the establishment.

He was very supportive of the Thatcher Government

and as far as I'm concerned,

he couldn't find a way of saying that that strike was illegal.

And that sums it up for me.

We had the NUM rule book saying it was legal.

We had the High Court judge up in the Old Bailey saying it was legal.

What more can you want than that?

I've got no doubt it was used as a negative against us,

why didn't we have a national ballot?

From the constitution, we were right.

But you could not risk it because you had this huge

position in Leicester and the white-collar workers. No, no.

It would've been lovely to have had, Kim.

But we just couldn't have won it.

Whatever doubts that existed in South Wales prior to the strike,

the traditions of union solidarity galvanised the workforce into action

once it was under way.

THEY CHANT

Spring 1984 was full of headlong activity

as we organised Welsh miners to picket in other areas,

particularly in the English Midlands,

where the majority of miners were refusing to join the strike.

That's all I'm asking you. Come out with us, boys.

If you all come out together we could win the bloody fight.

We don't believe in the strike.

-Why not?

-It's undemocratic.

How many times have we had a vote on pit closures?

It was a major operation.

It was my job to mobilise 4,000 - 5,000 pickets who travelled

all over England and put pressure on power stations and working mines.

We went flat out, trying to force an early resolution of the strike.

The Conservative Government had passed an employment act

to restrict picketing activity.

We were constantly defying it,

especially when we picketed other industries.

It could be cloak and dagger stuff.

We learned quickly how to avoid police roadblocks by using

remote mountain-top roads and back lanes.

The police couldn't cover them all.

But in bad weather, and keeping the use of headlights to a minimum,

sometimes it made for dangerous driving.

There were times when the police managed to block off all

routes to pits.

But that didn't stop up either.

We'd gather in the darkness before dawn,

and make our way silently up through the forests

and over the high moorland on foot to avoid the roadblocks.

# Here we go, here we go, here we go

# Here we go, here we go... #

Of course, there was exhilaration in all of this.

But there were already disturbing signs that this strike might go

terribly wrong and exact terrible human cost.

On the front line of the strike in Nottinghamshire

and the rest of the Midlands,

picketing miners were hurling abuse and rocks at working miners.

The workforce was disastrously divided,

fighting itself instead of its opponents.

THEY BLEAT LIKE SHEEP

The people at this bloody colliery are going to

sell your youngsters' jobs out.

They're looking for redundancy, all right?

And they'll bloody sell you out, every one of them will.

INDISTINCT SHOUTS

In May 1984 I wrote a document for the NUM leaders in Pontypridd.

I said that there was a lack of strategic focus in the way

the strike was being led by Arthur Scargill and his lieutenants

based in the national headquarters in Sheffield.

I started to question the emphasis on the

mass picketing of working collieries.

And many of us believed that Scargill's all or nothing approach

of no pit closures was clearly absurd

given the condition of many ageing pits.

As national president of this union, I'll tell you the terms.

No pit closures. No manpower reductions.

CHEERING

The South Wales leadership

and its magnificent members across the coalfield

knew that our only chance of winning was to starve the power stations

and the steelworks of coal.

It meant that we had to build special alliances with

workers in power stations like this one at Aberthaw.

And, of course, on the railways, in the dockyards,

and in the steelworks.

But these careful approaches to other industrial workers

were blocked by Mr Scargill and his deputies.

They were content to let the pithead battles run.

And all the while, the huge stockpiles of coal were being

shipped into the power stations and the electricity kept flowing.

I was desperately worried

after almost three months of strike action, that the huge sacrifices

made by the miners and their families would come to nothing

if we didn't have clear objectives beyond appearing to be waging

televised medieval battles against the forces

of Mrs Thatcher's Government.

I was not alone in having these anxieties.

Maerdy in the Rhondda was one of the great centres of strike activity.

But even here,

there were doubts about the strategic leadership of the strike.

Ivor England was the secretary of the NUM lodge,

and I meet up with him on the site of the former Mardy pit.

I had great reservations.

One of the reservations was that the older miners weren't happy

about engaging in a struggle that they didn't know

how the hell to get out of.

Particularly with Arthur Scargill at the helm.

-You recommended this guy.

-Yes, indeed.

And, of course, you know...

Reservations, yeah.

I went around campaigning for him all over the place.

So we're both guilty men, in that sense.

Yes, yes. When Arthur came along, he said, compromise - you cannot.

Consultation is out.

Consultation between them and us doesn't work.

There's got to be a way that the miners' union is strong,

is going to fight, is going to fight against ALL pit closures.

It's going to fight...regardless of what THEY say,

pit closures have got to be fought.

That was an unreal situation. There was a feeling amongst all the men,

"We're going too far on this. We cannot win them all."

Not all miners were in favour. There were miners breaking away here,

there were miners breaking away there,

there were people happy to go to work, there were South Wales

miners and Yorkshire miners who were opposing them on the picket line,

shouting and screaming as they said.

There was people starting to say, "This is going too far now.

"You're actually challenging Government."

It's time to step out of the closely-knit world of the coalfield

and turn to the Conservative Government of Margaret Thatcher.

She had led her party to victory at elections in 1979 and 1983,

and was fervently committed to breaking the power of the unions

and shrinking the public sector.

Throughout the strike, her cabinet was meeting on a war footing,

monitoring events and driving forward the offensive

against the miners.

I'm meeting with Michael Heseltine

who was a key figure in that Thatcher Cabinet.

Lord Heseltine, in 1984...

we had the impression very much in the coalfields that this

action by the Government,

the announcement of the closure list, the reduction in coal output,

was revenge really for the strikes of 1972 and 1974.

Is that true?

HE CHUCKLES I think what you say is true, that's what you felt.

But, of course, it's a complete misreading of history.

It wasn't a question of revenge or anything of that sort.

It was sucking the lifeblood out of the British economy.

You can argue about whose fault it was, but it had to be addressed.

You couldn't accept that sections of society were above the law.

Was the NUM a special case? Was it especially politically motivated?

Certainly, it was. But it also was regarded as a difficult place

because it had the economy by the stranglehold.

The ability to bring the country's economy to a standstill

was absolutely within the hands of a tiny number

of politically-motivated miners.

The subsidy to the coalmines that came from the Government,

from the public purse, amounted to almost £1 billion

by the start of the strike in 1984.

Was that the main driver within the Government to do

something about this?

No. No. It was the issue of who governs. The rule of law.

And it's quite wrong to see this as a phenomenon

of the Conservative Government.

This was a problem for all post-war governments.

It's an astonishingly frank answer from Michael Heseltine

about his government's carefully prepared confrontation

with the miners.

The police force was prepared and there were huge amounts of coal

piled up in the stockyards around the country.

The Conservatives were absolutely determined not to be

outflanked by the miners, as they had been in 1981.

INDISTINCT SHOUTS That was the essence of the strategy.

That if Scargill is going to fight this battle,

it's got to be fought at a time of our choosing and not his.

And by the time the strike began in '84,

every pit had huge piles of surface coal.

Every power station had huge piles of coal.

There was no way that Arthur Scargill would have voluntarily chosen

to fight on those conditions at that time,

particularly with the mild weather coming.

One of the first things that the Thatcher Government did

was to start changing the law on picketing,

in order to counteract the effectiveness of flying pickets, for example.

Was this part of a wider programme about tackling trade union power?

Certainly. Let us have no doubt about it.

This was an issue that had to be gripped.

We could not have a group of politically-motivated,

and they were heavily motivated, industrial workers

holding the country to ransom.

The development of the law to curb trade union power

was a central tenet of Mrs Thatcher's governments.

And in fairness, the laws were never dismantled

by the Labour governments in which I served.

Mr President, what we have seen in this country is

the emergence of an organised revolutionary minority

who are prepared to exploit industrial disputes,

but whose real aim is the breakdown of law and order

and the destruction of democratic parliamentary government.

Michael Heseltine was never the harshest face

of Thatcherite ideology.

But talking to him reminds you again of the massive power of the State.

Especially over state-controlled industries.

This time the Tories were ready for the miners

and for a struggle that was to be the climax of their campaign

against union power.

In the summer of 1984, it was clear that we were in for a long haul

in a strike that was to be the longest lasting

and most painful since the legendary events of 1926.

The general strike of 1926 is the only other industrial action

in the 20th century to compare with the miners' strike

for length and hardship.

And, like in the soup kitchens of 1926, women were

crucial in providing support to hard-pressed striking families.

But this was a different age

with more women in work

and with women from Wales active in a number of political causes.

In this strike, women would join the picket lines, confront the police,

and evade surveillance by security forces.

I've come to the impressive Dove Community Workshop and Cafe

at Banwen in the Dulais Valley,

high up in the west of the coalfield,

where I'm meeting Mair Francis and Christine Powell

to reflect on the powerful change in women's roles.

I think most of the people that were active in the support group

realised that they couldn't succeed

unless they had the support of the women.

Not just in the background providing food or... In some areas there were

soup kitchens.

We didn't want that. We wanted the women to be involved,

to make decisions alongside the men.

And you made contact, of course,

with people from all kinds of backgrounds, didn't you?

Tell me about some of those, Chris.

Gays and lesbians supported the miners in London.

You've got to remember this is 1984,

a lot of the boys around here still had '70s sideboards,

longish hair, and men were men and women were glad.

And then the first time they came down

and it got through the valley...

"All these gays are coming down!"

But it was funny. The attitudes that changed after that

because those guys were standing on the underground platforms in London

and rattling buckets for the miners in the middle of London.

-MEGAPHONE:

-'The miners' struggle is their struggle...'

Across the coalfields, women's groups were feeding

and sustaining families.

The Dulais women alone fed 1,000 families throughout

the year-long strike.

It was a major operation, partly funded by other sympathetic unions.

They put the money directly into the local shop in the village

-and a lot of the food came from there.

-And then with Tesco.

Bread from the bakery.

This Austin Metro's got 269 loaves of bread in it.

And 269 pints of milk.

And so you distributed this food out to the distribution centres...

Yeah, and then the parcels were made up.

-Then the parcels were made up.

-Which included the Valley Star.

Which was the publication that was produced every week...

-You published that?

-Yes.

Which was all the information about what was taking place.

So if there was a march or rally or some morale-boosting occasion,

-that's how you'd let people know that it was on?

-Yes.

Some things, yes.

But some things... we went on a sponsored swim.

-How do you mean?

-A sponsored swim was code for a picket.

Oh, I see. Brilliant. So this was to foil MI5 and the local police?

Well, it was the funny clicks that were on my telephone every time

I picked it up or put it down. Put it that way.

So we went... It was nothing to be picked up at 4:30 in the morning

to go on a "sponsored swim."

Right. Yes. That must have been very interesting for the eavesdroppers.

Yes.

Well, tell me now about the way you reached out from collecting

and distributing food,

creating what became called "an alternative welfare state."

When did you start moving on to women being on picket lines

with the men, with the striking miners?

The first picket, it was a demonstration I went on

when our friend Mrs Thatcher was coming to address

the Welsh Conservative Party in Porthcawl.

That's the famous occasion when the eggs were thrown at her

and they went on her dress.

PEOPLE JEERING

It was the first experience I've had of the atmosphere of a mob.

I wouldn't say we were a mob,

but I could see how atmosphere can change, you know, herd behaviour.

We were all having a laugh and chatting away with the policemen,

and then obviously something came down the line that she was coming.

And as one, the language altered, shall we say?

LOUD JEERING

That was my first experience of that and I shall never forget.

I can feel that feeling now.

# ..Alone

# You'll never walk alone... #

The inspirational work of women is an unforgettable memory

from the strike.

But we still have to remember that this was a strike that failed.

I'm heading north to Yorkshire, which was the power base

of the NUM's president Arthur Scargill

and the scene of bitter conflicts in that angry summer of 1984.

But on the way, I'm passing through the Northeast Wales coalfield,

where the mood was very different from my home patch in South Wales.

There were only two pits in this coalfield -

Point of Ayr and Bersham.

But they were both sharply divided over the question of holding

a national ballot.

Coming here to the site of the Bersham Colliery

brings back uncomfortable memories of the harsh

divisions between miners.

The 1984 strike was a battle for survival.

The future of thousands of jobs were at stake.

Unsurprisingly, attitudes hardened with the passing of the months.

And there's no doubt that there were people in this area who suffered

real hatred because of their positions on the strike.

The miners' leaders were struggling to hold the workforce together

and were accused of not pushing a hard enough line.

And miners who called for a national ballot were vilified.

But there's no doubt that the most bitter scenes of conflict between

miners were seen in the tense border areas between South Yorkshire

and Nottinghamshire.

This was the key coalfield for deciding the course

and outcome of the strike.

The most notorious battle of the strike was at a coking plant

serving the steel industry.

The events at Orgreave near Sheffield on June 18th, 1984

loom large in the history of the strike.

This used to be an open-cast mine

as well as the site of the coking plant.

But it's now been much redeveloped. Perhaps a symbol of the way

in which the mining industry and the strike are slipping out

of popular memory.

But on the 18th June, 1984, this was a medieval battlefield,

where around 8,000 miners were herded into an arena

of confrontation by 4,500 police,

including a large contingent of mounted police.

Miners have always expressed their surprise that they weren't

turned away by the police that day, as they had been

so often during the strike.

Instead, they were allowed to congregate near the coking plant

before being ushered into a large field,

where the police were massed at the bottom.

It was clearly a trap.

INDISTINCT SHOUTS 'Watch it, watch it.'

The police operation on the day involved officers

from forces around the country

who were drafted in to help handle the pickets.

This had been a major innovation of the Conservative Government.

Nationally directed deployment of the police to counteract

so-called flying pickets.

INDISTINCT SHOUTS

In the vicious skirmishes and charges, dozens of people,

both miners and officers, were injured.

The clashes led to more than 90 people being arrested.

There was a complete collapse in the prosecutions for riot

against 95 miners

and the South Yorkshire Police had to pay out

£425,000 to the miners who sued them.

What's more, the South Yorkshire Police referred itself

to the Police Complaints Commission in 2012

after a BBC documentary alleged that certain police officers

had colluded in writing their court statements.

It all left a bitter taste in the mouths of miners and their families.

But whatever disgraceful behaviour occurred that day

on the part of the forces of the State,

there are still big questions to ask about the leadership of the strike.

To do this, I've come to the current NUM headquarters,

which is housed in this lovely old Yorkshire area building.

It's a place full of ghosts

where the general secretary Chris Kitchen and his colleagues

look after only 1,000 members across five British pits.

That's compared with almost 200,000 members at the time of the strike.

Chris was a 17-year-old picketing foot soldier in 1984.

What does he think now of the leadership of the strike?

I think, looking back in hindsight,

there was very little room to manoeuvre

for the union and the leaders at the time.

I think it was orchestrated,

the timing wasn't of the NUM's choice,

I think we were backed into a corner.

We could either roll over and let them kick us to death

or we had to stand up and fight.

As a trade unionist,

you'll know that trade unionism is always about compromise.

You've got to give and take, and you come out with the best deal you can,

but the 1984 strike started

with the demand that there be no closures.

I mean, that was the wrong way to start it, wasn't it?

I think the sticking point was on the economic grounds.

The Government dug its heels in and said,

"If a pit's losing money, it has to shut."

The reality of mining is that a pit can lose money one year.

It might lose money two or three years on the trot,

but like any other business where you've got different outlets,

if you've got some that's losing money and some that's making money,

as long as overall you're breaking even or making money,

and, let's not forget, you were still retaining employment,

you were still getting good paid jobs

and keeping the communities alive.

In the Cabinet papers that were released in January,

it's very interesting that the focus of most of the discussion

at Cabinet level was about Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire

and Derbyshire, because this was the great centre, wasn't it,

of all of the problems that the Government saw,

of mass picketing and so on?

What did it feel like, living here then?

It felt like you were living in a police state.

I mean, living in a mining village

with most people on strike,

the amount of police presence,

trying to get about the country,

especially as the strike progressed

and obviously they gathered intelligence

and knew your registration number and the make and model of your car.

You were treated like a criminal and told where you can and can't go

in a country that's supposed to be a democratic country,

where everybody's got freedom of speech and freedom of movement.

By the early summer of 1984,

I was very worried and very upset

at the sight of these battles that were taking place every morning,

where one group of miners were screaming and yelling

at other groups of miners who where going to work.

There was terrible division there.

It seemed to me that that wasn't what trade union was about.

It wasn't what the trade union was about that I'd grown up with.

I think the way that the mass picketing evolved during the strike

was a direct consequence of how the picket lines were policed.

The first picket lines I started going on,

you'd got policemen in normal uniform

that linked hands.

And you'd got the ability that, you know,

you could get to talk to the strike-breakers

to put your argument forward, whether they listened to it or not.

Then the police presence started to build up.

Then we had the riot shields there. Instead of being confronted with

a line of policemen that were linking arms,

you were confronted with a row of Perspex

and the police officers behind were truncheon in hand,

ready to bob you on the head over the top.

When men, exhausted by the strike,

eventually started going back to work

after many months, I was alarmed by the hardline attitude

that called them scabs.

But Chris Kitchen is quite clear in his view.

My personal feeling is quite simple.

If you cross a picket line, you're a scab.

I can't...

honestly say that I can judge somebody

who wasn't in the same circumstances as me -

single, living at home,

with no bills and family relying on him,

then, as far as I'm concerned,

if I managed to stop out, then so should they.

I don't take that hardline view

with people who were married with kids and families,

but a scab is a scab, and the definition of a scab

is somebody that crosses a picket line.

Talking to Chris brought home to me

the scale of the conflict in South Yorkshire

and the passionate commitment that people had for the strike.

But it also reminded me how easy it was for a biased media

to present events like the Battle of Orgreave in June 1984

as the riotous disorder of a rabble.

In all of this noise and confrontation,

it was possible to lose a grip on the arguments

that underpinned the NUM's actions in the strike.

The social argument was about the damaging effects

of pit closures on communities.

The economic argument, based on the 1970s plan for coal,

was that you needed a major coal industry to power a country

that had been held over an oil barrel in the 1970s

and which could not trust the safety of nuclear energy.

'The distinguished economist Huw Beynon

'was very active during the strike

'and he could see all round the disastrous decline

'in the market for coal.'

It's clear that the plan for coal was quite an optimistic one

based upon a huge hike in oil prices

through the Gulf States

and an assumption about manufacturing expansion

and also about domestic use of electricity,

and, of course, several things became unhinged on that,

particularly after '79, when big manufacturing started to close down,

big energy users started to close down,

so the steel market became squeezed,

the industrial market became squeezed,

the demand for electricity declined

and there became alternative sources of electricity production.

In the run up to the miners' strike in 1984,

and during the strike,

we were going around the country making the case for coal -

actually, the case for expanding coal production -

at a time of declining markets.

I mean, do you think we were deluded doing that?

There was still a case to be made for retaining coal production in Britain.

I think we realised, and certainly the pits realised,

that we were in a difficult situation

because everywhere around them, pits were closing.

Not only pits were closing. I was in the Northeast,

and everything else was closing!

So I think delusion is the wrong word, really.

It was a very, very difficult situation for people to deal with.

The strike changes everything.

Without a strike, there's negotiation, discussion,

disagreement. When you've got a strike, everything changes

because it becomes about power.

It becomes about power and how it's going to be settled.

So if the coal miners all drifted back to work,

there'll be no settlement...

This is the logic of the whole thing.

So if they starve them back, there'll be no settlement,

which is what happened.

Talking to Huw Beynon reminds me

of the massive loss of industrial employment

that had accelerated in the early years of Mrs Thatcher's governments.

In some ways, the coal jobs were only the final nail in the coffin

of heavy industry.

But in the year of the strike,

our focus was just on keeping going

and getting something solid for the miners.

August 1984 brought a huge challenge to us

in the South Wales NUM.

We had been heavily picketing the steelworks

and docks here in Port Talbot. We tried to control

everything that moved in and out of this huge industrial complex

to increase the impact of the strike.

# This Government had an idea

# And Parliament made it law

# Seems like it's illegal

# To fight for the union any more

# And which side are you on, boys?

# Which side are you on? #

But the so-called secondary picketing of other industries

had been made illegal by Conservative Government laws.

And these laws also empowered the courts

so seize our union funds

if we persisted in this illegal picketing.

It meant that the money that we needed

in order to keep the picketing going

and to sustain striking families

was frozen in the banks.

In other words, we couldn't get our hands on our own union funds.

But we carried on with our actions,

especially our efforts to disrupt and sabotage

the protected lorry convoys

endlessly trundling along the M4

and keeping steel output going.

The Government had come to arrangements

with private road hauliers

so that there'd be no disruption to steel production.

Blocking the convoys of lorries led us into considerable danger,

particularly at the Magor exit from the motorway in Gwent.

Day after day, the biggest road convoys seen in this country

in peacetime roared up off the motorway,

delivering coal and iron ore from the Port Talbot docks

to the steelworks at Llanwern.

Every day, with their arms linked,

the police would hold us back as we surged forward,

trying to stop the convoy.

It was a violent and dangerous business.

The lorry owners were paid big money

and we learned very quickly

that human bodies weren't designed

to stop 30 tonnes of steel rolling along a highway at speed,

guarded by the police.

SHOUTING

Sometimes we succeeded in delaying the convoy,

but we never stopped it for long.

And the very sight of it heading east and west along the M4

became a potent symbol of the Government's determination

to win at all costs.

But it wasn't all darkness and danger.

The Chartist march of the 1830s was resoundingly restaged

as a miners' protest through the Gwent Valleys.

And there was an extraordinary occupation

of the wonderful transporter bridge in Newport.

Stories were circulating that the wharves close to here

were being used to offload barges

of imported coal intended for the blast furnaces

at the nearby Llanwern steelworks.

Our plan was to seize that gondola, that steel platform,

and stop it midstream, suspended over the river,

so that nothing could sail in or out.

When a team of specially chosen miners

from the valleys to the north of Newport

seized the bridge's control room,

all hell broke lose.

MEGAPHONE: You're committing a criminal conspiracy

in taking over this bridge.

If you don't disperse, you'll all be arrested.

A column of police charged the metal stairs

that led up to the control room.

At the front,

the police threw an oil barrel back over their shoulders

and it landed on the heads of their colleagues below.

Now, at the trial of the miners who'd seized the control room,

the police argued that it was the miners who'd thrown the barrel.

But, in fact, there was a film, a news film,

and when it was shown to the court, the judge said,

"I want that news film guarded very carefully by the court.

"I don't want the police to have it because this is vital evidence."

Later on, the prosecution dropped that charge against the miners.

November 1984 was a hard and bitter month

in the story of the strike.

From the start of the month,

there was an increase in miners returning to work

though the numbers were still very small in Wales

and remained so until the end.

One of the pits struggling to hold the line

was Cynheidre in the west of the coalfield.

I'm meeting up with the former lodge chairman Tony Ciano

and the secretary, Gareth Gower,

and it's clear that the memory of scabs going back to work

still rankles with them.

I remember the day they had the first wage packet.

And they were going out on the coach and waving their pay packets.

-The working miners were waving their pay packets at the pickets?

-Yes.

They weren't actually working. They wouldn't go underground.

They were just playing about on the surface.

Now, as autumn went into winter,

we heard from some people that the union was clinging onto the strike

by its fingernails. Was that what it was like in Cynheidre?

I don't think we were clinging by our fingernails.

We had drips and drabs,

but I think - me and Gareth were talking about it earlier -

up until Christmas, I don't think we had more than 50...

Gareth?

If that. ..men back in work.

Now, I remember a story about telegraph poles being used

to block the way for miners who wanted to return to work.

We couldn't stop them going to their work, to the colliery,

we tried to hinder them the best we could.

So one particular day, we decided to meet them.

There was a gang of us there

and we were all going along. All of a sudden,

there were telegraph poles at the side of the road.

So, we were walking along and somebody had the bright idea -

"If you put these across the road maybe we could stop the scabs

"coming through."

And their escorts... So, not me...

But I know the people involved -

they put the telegraph poles across the road...

and the next thing a chap... and bang, straight into it.

Of course, they took me into Llanelli - the police station...

-To the police station?

-To the police station.

I was there for God knows how long.

And were there many people who would come to you

who were clearly suffering hardship at the time?

There were... Yes.

We had a death in Pontyates, if I remember.

And I remember going up to Pontypridd to get them a burial.

Yes.

The family couldn't afford to bury them?

-No.

-No.

-They couldn't afford the funeral...

-so it was the South Wales Miners that paid for the funeral.

-Yeah.

Of course, you know, the Government at the time...

saw it fit that they weren't going to pay us any benefit,

so the only benefit we were having were the children

and the women in the house if they weren't working.

No single man was having a penny. And they were suffering.

The suffering of miners and their families made worse by the loss

of benefits was raising the level of anger and bitterness in

November 1984, now eight months into the strike.

You could feel the mood darkening all around you.

But for the national leaders of the NUM it was different.

They were being carried shoulder high from rally to rally.

There was a great rally here, in Aberavon, near the steelworks.

And Arthur Scargill, Peter Heathfield and Mick McGahey...

they told an adoring audience that never again would

they allow the union to be betrayed as it had been betrayed back in 1926

by the TUC and by other unions. It was madness because

we needed the TUC support, we needed the support of other unions.

And, all the while, things were becoming more and more difficult...

for people in the coalfields.

The November 13th rally at the Afan Lido Leisure Centre

was a frenzied event.

I remember, particularly, the moment when Norman Willis,

the general secretary of the TUC, condemned picket-line violence.

Violence creates more violence.

And out of that extra violence...

..is built, not solidarity...

but despair and defeatism.

DISSENT BOOING

Amongst the boos, a hangman's noose was let down from the gantry above.

It may have been a bad joke, but I found it deeply disturbing.

Then came the reply from Scargill, which was perfectly judged

to stir up his audience.

I am not prepared to condemn the actions of my members

whose only crime is fighting for the right to work,

fighting to save their pits, their jobs and the mining communities.

CHEERING

I'm privileged to lead you. I salute you.

The miners united will never be defeated!

CHEERING

The climate of the strike was becoming more heated and dangerous.

This is when the biggest tragedy of the strike in Wales happened.

Along this Heads of the Valleys Road that runs along the northern rim

of the South Wales coalfield, an employee of a taxi firm

was driving a working miner to Merthyr Vale Colliery

early one morning.

The driver's name was David Wilkie and he was killed when he was hit

by a concrete block pushed over the parapet of a bridge

by two young, striking miners.

I don't believe those two young miners intended to kill anyone.

But it was a tragedy that marked the darkest day of the whole strike.

Above all, it was a tragedy for Mr Wilkie's family.

It blighted the lives of the two young men who killed him

and who received long prison sentences.

It undermined public support for the miners and their families

who had already been on strike for eight, long, painful months.

It was a terrible moment that haunted this coalfield from

that day forward.

MUSIC: "Merry Xmas Everybody" by Slade

There was a welcome shift of focus in December 1984

as the NUM and the support groups in Wales made plans to give the best

Christmas possible to the families of striking miners.

Amazing things were achieved with toys and turkeys being

funded by support groups from places like Hampshire

and by other trade unions.

And there were even gifts received from as far afield as Sweden

and Italy.

But the magic of Christmas soon disappeared...

this was a winter without power cuts, the power stations

were able to keep going.

And across Britain miners were steadily drifting back to work

with no prospect of a negotiated end to the strike in sight.

Terry Thomas remembers the bitter

and tragic final months very clearly.

There were men coming into my office in tears.

Their houses were being repossessed.

Their marriages were breaking up.

There was one came - the wedding of his daughter had been planned

for a long, long time, even before the strike started -

that had gone. And he was crying in the office to me.

Not because he didn't believe...

in the strike.

Not because he didn't believe that we should defend our industry and

defend our communities, but because he didn't have anything else to give.

He had given all he had to give.

And the question I posed at national level...

..what happens...

..when more than 50% of the members of the NUM have gone back to work?

Who, then, do we represent?

And the answer that I received...

from the national president -

"The hard core will stay out."

No money. I'm up to my neck in debt.

And I want to pay it off.

But this lodge did vote on Saturday to continue the strike.

Yes, it was 111 to 80.

But I said before that meeting I'd decided that I would go back to work

and there's a lot more of us with me.

The rank and file executive and elected officials

of the South Wales Miners showed extraordinary courage and leadership

in late February, early March of 1985.

By then, thousands of miners across all of the coalfields

had abandoned the strike and were returning to work.

In the face of this - the NUM president, Arthur Scargill,

and his chief lieutenants seemed incapable of doing anything

other than urging the miners who were still on strike

to stand firm. Only South Wales with 90% of its miners still on strike

had the courage and determination to step in and fill that vacuum.

On St David's Day, 1985

the South Wales area passed

a resolution for a return to work without a settlement,

which its delegates then had to present to a national conference

in London, two days later. It was a bitter event.

CLAMOUR AND SHOUTING

After coming down from that rostrum

and moving a resolution for a return to work...

which the conference supported, the conference voted in favour

of the South Wales' recommendation that we return to work...

to march out of that conference, to be spat at,

kicked and called "scabs"

after leading the strike for a whole 12 months...

that was the definition of the mob... the mob that was outside.

SHOUTING

March 5th saw the entire coalfield return to work.

-BAND PLAYS

-Some of the most famous scenes in Wales took place

at the Mardy Colliery, where a brass band led a huge procession of

miners, their families and supporters.

CHEERING

We marched up the road and I'm playing trombone in the front.

I played in the local colliery band. We marched, or walked up the road

and that was the end of the miners' strike.

It was a highly-emotional event.

But we were staring into a future of mass pit closures,

a process that was always on the cards,

but which might have been made worse by the strike itself.

Heavy industry largely disappeared in Wales.

But were we right in the strike when we said that the communities would disappear too?

The people of the coalfield were convinced that this would be

the case - close a pit, kill a community.

I mean, let's be honest, a lot of us... Who's going to buy our houses?

Nobody is going to give us a half what the houses are worth now

cos we've done them up. No, cos there's no money in the valley.

Close this pit, they may as well flood the valley cos there's nothing there,

nothing at all. It wouldn't surprise me to know they want to flood

the valley because take the pit away, and I'm telling you,

they may as well make a reservoir out of it cos there's nothing.

But I think we have to remember that by the 1980s

very few communities were actually dependent on work in the mines.

You have to ask how big an impact there's been across

the whole of South Wales from the loss of 20,000 coal jobs

and the closure of 22 pits in the 1980s alone.

But many are convinced that there's been a disastrous decline

in the quality of employment,

which was once provided by coal and steel.

There have been some very negative impacts of the absence of that

kind of work, I think. Particularly the unemployment rate of young boys.

That's the brilliance of those industries that they took

unskilled boys from school

and they trained them and developed

them and the rest of it. And in the surveys that were done

showed that people who went into other jobs

would largely go into jobs that were £100 a week less, really.

I was talking with someone up in Blaenau the other day and they said,

"What's Blaenau like now?" And I said, "Well,

"there's all the shops closed and there's nothing for the kids to do."

They just...

And people complain that they're walking round the streets, well, what else can they do?

But I'm struck by the way communities have adapted.

And one of the strongest examples of tenacious survival

has been the Dove Workshop in Banwen.

We knew that we couldn't do it on our own.

We'd have to work in partnership with other providers.

Like the university, the colleges...

the Workers' Educational Association, the local authority

and we learnt all that from the strike.

We thought, "Well, it worked in the strike"

and so we can transfer those experiences to setting up

a workshop for women and women it was for

and women were going to run it and make the decisions.

It's now become a social enterprise,

which meets the needs of everybody in the community -

men, women and children.

Making this film has brought back to me vivid memories

of the passionate commitment with which so many

extraordinary men and women defended their jobs and their communities

30 years ago.

It many ways it's futile now to try

and argue about what might have happened to the coal industry

had the Government and Arthur Scargill been more prepared

to negotiate and to compromise.

The big truth is Margaret Thatcher had taken enormous care in choosing

the right moment to take on the miners in the late winter of 1984.

Because this was a political battle, one designed to destroy

the excessive power of trade unions

and whose outcome has never been overturned by Labour governments.

There would have been neither freedom nor order in Britain if we'd

given in to violence.

There'd have been no hope for any prosperous industry

if people had gone on strike, really, for bigger and bigger

subsidies from the taxpayer.

As for us on the miners' side we were sucked into a confrontation

with the State that, despite the most mighty and heroic

resistance by men and women across coalfields like South Wales,

we were never going to win.

The miners' strike had changed British history.

The once mighty coal industry shrank into insignificance.

And the whole of the trade union movement

reeled from the hammer blow.

In many ways, it has never recovered.