No 387 Posted by fw, January 13, 2012
To put this and past posts in this Counterpower series in perspective, the purpose of the series is to help activists understand and overcome the tactics used by government and corporate power elites. It is said that if you know your opponents and know yourself, you can win a hundred battles without a single loss. If you only know yourself, but not your opponent, you may win or may lose. If you know neither yourself nor your opponent, you will always endanger yourself.
To set the scene for this post, Part 9 –
According to Wikipedia, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), once a powerful force not only in the British union movement, but also in British politics, is today a small union with little political power. “Its influence was destroyed by the failure of the 1984-85 strike and by the closing of most of Britain’s coal mines.”
This post summarizes how then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher decimated the NUM.
By way of background, a successful strike by mineworkers in 1972 weakened Edward Heath’s Conservative government, contributing to his party’s defeat in the 1974 general election. In a 1975 leadership review, Heath fell to Thatcher’s challenge, making her the first female Leader of the Conservative Party. In the 1979 general election, Thatcher led the party to victory, thus becoming the UK’s first female Prime Minister.
Thatcher took very personally the humiliating 1974 election defeat of the Conservatives, brought down by the triumph of the 1972 miners’ strike. As the new PM, Thatcher was determined to succeed where Heath had failed by eliminating unions as power players in British politics.
With the scene set, here’s a summary of the key elements of the tactics Thatcher used to destroy the NUM. These key elements were excerpted from Chapter 3 of Tim Gee’s excellent handbook for activists, Counterpower: Making Change Happen.
Of significance, although the Ridley Plan recommendations were leaked to The Economist and published on May 27, 1978, six years before the pivotal 1984-85 strike, the unions and in particular the NUM showed no interest in adapting or altering their own tactics in response.
In the ensuing struggle, the Thatcher government overpowered and outmaneuvered the mineworkers. Miners were isolated, divided, smeared and ruthlessly crushed. Here’s a sample of the Thatcher government’s hardball tactics used against the strikers, along with some of the strikers’ own Counterpower moves —
As difficult as it is to find any measure of solace from the sobering outcomes of the Thatcher-Mineworkers showdown, Gee offers these closing thoughts on Chapter 3, from which activists may find some measure of encouragement —
Miners’ Strike 1984. (About 5 minutes long). Uploaded Jan 11, 2009 by MinersStrike25Years . Video of the miners’ strike in 1984 to mark the 25th anniversary, this is some footage of the picket lines and the riots that ensued. During the strike the miners and their families displayed remarkable courage in the face of adversity.