Initially, there were tensions between local authorities and central government over who would foot the bill for this huge operation - in May, the policing costs in the still working area of Nottingham were running at £2 million per week, including £1.8 million on police overtime and £20,000 on billeting. By October, home secretary Leon Brittan was forced to announce extra funding at the Tory party conference.

Measures like this were, however, tweaks in the secret plan to take on and defeat the miners that had been honed over a period of years by the Tories. The contrast with the National Union of Mineworkers could not have been starker. The strike started in a localised, fragmented manner that - combined with the NUM leadership’s initial refusal to make the action national - was to lead to a hardening of divisions in the union. It started in spring 1984, against a backdrop of huge coal stocks and a shift of energy production to nuclear power stations - a deliberate policy of the Tories since their election in 1979.

Despite this, the strike was to shake Thatcher and her party. It could have won. The key to victory, however, was the political understanding that this could not be fought as a run-of-the-mill industrial dispute like so many of the past - even if on a larger scale. The miners needed a new brand of politics.

In this article from May 1984 issue of The Leninist, forerunner of the Weekly Worker, we identified three political themes that revealed themselves as the central, interconnected weaknesses of the strike over the heroic months of struggle that were to come.

First, the need to overcome sectional trade union consciousness. If, as more or less every speaker on every platform you listened to reiterated, the miners’ strike was “a fight for all workers”, then the task was to bring all workers out alongside the miners in a “united workers’ front”, as another article in the same issue of TL put it.

Second, that nationalist illusions in the common interest of workers and bosses alike in the health of ‘our’ economy - and in particular the nationalised sectors of it - were fatal.

Third, illusions in the supposed neutrality of the state held by miners and their supporters.

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1. Sowing illusions about trade unionism

While the Euro industrial organiser, Pete Carter, has been strangely silent about the miners’ strike apart from a few pious calls to mobilise the ‘com­munities’, perhaps because he cannot stomach the ‘bully boy’ tactics of the flying pickets; the rest of the opportunists have fallen uncritically behind the trade union leadership in general and the National Union of Mineworkers in particular.¹

The problem with this is twofold. Firstly, even the best, the most honest trade union leader is limited by the nature of trade union politics, which, while it seeks to enhance the conditions of the workers, cannot present a systematic challenge to the capitalist system itself. Secondly, we must plainly state that most trade union leaders have no intention of challeng­ing the capitalist system - indeed many of them are fully committed to it. During industrial disputes most trade union leaders are quite capable of making militant declarations of ‘solidarity’ but when it comes to implementing that solidarity many fail to deliver. What is more, if a struggle looks like challenging the capitalist state itself, most desert the field of battle and run for cover.

It was to overcome the innate limitations of even the most extreme form of militant trade unionism that our Communist Party was established. Its founders fully realised the limits of trade union politics: they knew that for the working class to win liberation required a vanguard party which, using Marxism-Leninism as a guide, could not only point the class in a revolutionary direction, but take an active day-to-day lead. This heritage has been totally abandoned by all the opportunist tendencies in the Com­munist Party.

Because of this, instead of acting as a vanguard for the miners, pointing out to them that their struggle must go to the point of challenging the capitalist state if it is to succeed, they have joined the ranks of the cheer­leaders.

This might have some limited effect on the morale of those in the thick of the fight, but this can only be limited, for what the miners need is not flattery, but direct aid from the rest of the working class.

This is where the vanguard party comes in: it does not content itself with uncritical tailing of the miners’ leaders. It warns that offers of solidarity are meaningless unless the rank and file have been mobilised. Above all the vanguard party can act as the general staff of the class in the developing class war.

It is because of this perspective that we do not agree with the idea that ‘ballots are weapons of the bosses’; we do not rejoice with joy every time a trade union leader proclaims his ‘solidarity’ with the miners, as the Morning Star does even when the opposite is the case, as it was with that rightwing excuse for a workers’ leader, Bill Sirs.²

We call upon trade unionists to support their leaders only as long as they fight for the interests of the working class as a whole. At the same time it is vital to begin to organise the militant minority independently of the leadership; this is the way to really ensure solidarity means solidarity from unions such as Aslef, the TGWU, the National Union of Railwaymen.³ This is the way to fight the likes of Ray Chadburn in Nottingham, the way to unite the miners.⁴

It can also be the key to obtaining solidarity from rightwing unions such as the EEPTU, and forcing the TUC off the fence and forcing it to call a general strike against all pit closures and against the anti-trade union laws.⁵

2. Sowing illusions about nationalised industries

Most reformists project the idea that Britain is somehow ‘ours’. Thus on the balance of payments, or the develop­ment of North Sea oil, they talk endlessly about ‘our’ balance of payments and ‘our’ North Sea oil. This idea applies especially to the nationalised industries; therefore a state take­over of shipbuilding, or steel, or British Leyland, is proclaimed as a great victory for socialism, which workers ought to defend as if they were islands of socialism in the sea of capitalism.

It is this fallacy which underpins the opportunists’ ‘solidarity’ with the miners. They contend that the miners are defending ‘our industrial base’ that ‘Pit closures will mean disastrous consequences for Britain’. So in the place of class solidarity they place ‘national interest’ and appeals to patriotism.

For us the idea that because the coal industry has been nationalised it is somehow ‘ours’ is a dangerous illusion which can be positively lethal, since it ties the interests of the workers to the interests of state monopoly capitalism - for that is what the coal industry and other nationalised areas of the economy are. Unless the workers fully realise this they can find themselves sacrificed on the altar of capitalist production and the needs of profit.

The coal industry, like the railways, steel, the post office, British Leyland and a host of other areas of economic life, must be seen as the collective property of the capitalist class, not the British people, let alone the working class. Nationalised industries in general provide cheap raw materials and services to private industry. They are a method with which the capitalist class keep down their individual and their collective costs in order to boost their rates of profit.

Nationalised industries can have certain advantages for workers, but these should in no way be exaggerated, and certainly not elevated to the level where workers are called upon to consider their interests compatible with the interests of ‘our’ industry. Such a position has in it the seeds of defeat. For, whether we like it or not, capitalism is entering a period of crisis and intensified international competi­tion; this demands amongst other things that costs are cut drastically. It is this fact of capitalist life which demands the ‘pruning’ of the steel, car and shipbuilding industries down to the bone, as it demands massive closures today in the coal industry.

We can never win if we try to reconcile the interests of the working class with the interests of a capitalist system which is increasingly in crisis. In the face of arguments about profitability and efficiency we raise the slogan, Begin with what the working class needs, not what capitalism can afford.

3. Sowing illusions about the state

Few miners who have acted as flying pickets will have any illusions about the police. They know that they are vicious, determined and well drilled opponents, who, far from being neutral, act fully in the interests of MacGregor and the Tory government.⁶

And yet in the light of the experience of the miners’ strike, the National Graphical Association dispute with Eddie Shah, and the summer 81 riots, all the Eurocommunists can do is moan and groan, declare that the police are not being fair and that they ought to listen to the dire warnings about Britain drifting into becoming a ‘police state’.⁷ So in the midst of the miners’ strike (shortly after it was announced that the police had already arrested a total of 1,000 pickets) we have the Eurocommunist ‘expert’ on the police, Brenda Kirsch, writing with seeming naivety in the Morning Star in April, that we “should be discussing what type of policing we want” (April 14 1984).

Well, comrade Kirsch, we would say to you that the 1,000 arrested pickets, all those miners who have been prevented from moving into other areas because of police road blocks - indeed we would guess all militant miners who have struggled against the massed ranks of the thugs in blue - would agree with us when we say that it is not the type of policing we should be discussing: that is a diversion. What we should be discussing and organis­ing is how to combat the police as they are. Anything else can only weaken the miners’ fight. So in the place of Eurocommunist calls for the miners and the working class to discuss community policing we pose the need for workers’ defence corps to protect picket lines, meetings and demonstra­tions.

But it is not in just the case of the police that the opportunists sow illusions about the state, they do the same for the courts. It is not that they actually support what they do. It is more that they claim that with sweet reason, a petition or two and even a protest demonstration the nature of the beast can be fundamentally altered. Thus when the high court refused an application from two Kent miners to prevent the police turning miners back at the Dartford Tunnel, the Euros cried ‘Unjust, unjust’, but offered not the slightest practical measure to over­come police coercion in the here and now.

This approach by the Euros is, of course, based on their perspective of building socialism in Britain on the basis of reforming the state, the police, the army and the courts, through the use of parliament. We have always said that such a programme is utterly utopian, but, more important than that, that such a perspective actually diverts and disarms the working class and the Communist Party in the face of the real class struggle. In place of castles-in-the-sky reformism we pose practical revolutionary measures proved in the class war, proved in their practical success. Thus we say that the police, the army, the courts, parliament itself, are components of our enemy’s state machine, which it is our task to shatter, in order to replace with organs of a workers’ state based on workers’ councils, protected by a workers’ militia.

James Marshall

Notes

1. ‘Euro’ is an abbreviation of Eurocommunist - an opportunist trend on the extreme right wing of the ‘official’ world communist movement in the 1970s and 80s.
2. Bill Sirs led the largest trade union in the steel industry during this period, the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation. Despite the occasional verbiage about supporting the miners, he refused to offer any practical solidarity and - in a pristine example of the treacherous logic of sectionalist nationalism that dominated the movement - told Scargill, “I am not here to see the steel industry crucified on someone else’s altar”  (F Beckett, D Hencke  Marching to the fault line  London 2009, p66).
3. The NUR merged with the National Union of Seamen in 1990 to form today’s National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT).
4. Chadburn was the rightwing leader of the Notts area of the NUM.
5. The rightwing electricians union, the EEPTU, was expelled from the TUC after its scab role in the 1986 Wapping dispute.
6. Ian MacGregor was a belligerent union-busting American director who, after controversial stints at British Leyland and British Steel, was made head of the National Coal Board precisely in order to lead the assault on the miners.
7. Shah was the first owner to invoke Thatcher’s anti-union laws. In 1982, he defeated the print unions after a seven-month-long strikes that saw violent clashes outside his Warrington print works and Manchester news offices.