On This Day: Miners call off longest strike in British history after losing battle with Thatcher

MARCH 3, 1985: Britain’s longest running industrial dispute ended after almost 120,000 coal miners called off their failed year-long strike on this day in 1985.

The walkout, which had become increasingly violent and bitterly divided the country, failed after Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher refused to cave in to their demands.

The national executive of the National Union of Mineworkers voted 98 to 91 for a return to work despite failing to reach a deal over pit closures.

Leader Arthur Scargill, who had vowed to also use the strike to 'roll back the years of Thatcherism', was first cheered and then jeered by miners as he made his statement.

Many of the workers, who had braved cold and rain to wait for news outside the Trades Union Congress headquarters in London, wept as they heard the news.

Others, who had risked losing all their limited savings and property to continue striking, defiantly chanted: 'We will not go back to work'.

Scargill, an avowed Marxist who hoped for a general strike that would bring down the Tory government, said: 'We have decided to go back for a whole range of reasons.

'One of the reasons is that the trade union movement of Britain with a few notable exceptions has left this union isolated.

'Another reason is that we face not an employer but a government aided and abetted by the judiciary, the police and you people in the media and at the end of this time our people are suffering tremendous hardship.'

Mrs Thatcher, who foiled the strike by secretly stockpiling coal beforehand, said she was relieved it was over and added: 'I want a prosperous coal industry.

'The miners would have been back earlier if the strike had not been kept going by intimidation and I am very glad now they can go back.'

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Most miners marched to work two days later behind brass bands in processions that – when viewed today – highlight how much British working class society has changed.

Others in Scotland and Kent voted to defy their union and continue striking until the state-run National Coal Board reinstated 700 miners fired during the dispute.

But Ian McGregor, the trenchant chairman of the NCB, refused to rehire the men who had mostly been sacked for picket-line violence.

He also pushed ahead with plans to close 20 pits and axe 20,000 jobs – the decision that had sparked the strike in the first place – and was emboldened to make more cuts.

Within a decade, more than 100,000 miners had lost their jobs after the industry was privatised and there are now only three British pits out of a total of 174 in 1984.

As much as the strike was about jobs, it also represented a clash of personalities, ideologies and societies.

Mrs Thatcher was a fierce opponent of socialism and was determined to rid a union movement that she believed was destroying the country.

Mr Scargill, who was head of the most powerful union, in turn made no secret of hoping to rid Britain of its most right-wing Conservative leader in modern history.

The two stubborn figures developed a mutual loathing after she had been a lone voice among Tory ministers during the 1974 miners’ strike when she wanted to resist.

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The 1984 miners strike, which Mrs Thatcher had waited until she was at the peak of her power to deal with, also highlighted deep divisions in a changing society.

On the one hand, there was a growing, individualistic, consumer society centred in the more prosperous south of England who preferred to pay mortgages for their newly-purchased council homes or fund holidays than support a trade union and strike.

On the other were traditional working class communities in the depressed industrial heartlands of northern England, south Wales and central Scotland.

Cuts and rising unemployment ensured that remaining workforces remained highly unionised and increasingly opposed to a government that they saw as against them.

And the 1984 strike sparked a bitter division between these two different societies – and ultimately highlighted which one would dominate.

The industrial action, which cost the treasury at least £1.5billion in lost earnings policing and extra money to run oil power stations, was initially widely backed.

Supporters wearing 'coal not dole' badges took to the streets across Britain to raise money, while others took in thousands of 'evacuee' miners’ children.

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But from the start of the strike – on March 12, 1984 - it was undermined by a controversial decision not to stage industrial action without holding a national ballot.

Instead, he told regional branches to decide – with those in Nottinghamshire voting against but later facing 'flying picketers' from elsewhere trying to close their pits.

This lost the NUM official support from other unions and the Labour Party, whose leader Neil Kinnock, a miner’s son, had called for a national ballot.

The strike also became increasingly violent – notably with 5,000 strikers clashed with 5,000 police officers in the so-called Battle of Orgreave in South Yorkshire.

Miners who returned to work also faced attacks – and in one case a taxi driver taking a 'scab' to a pit was killed by a brick though his car window.

In the end though, it was the government’s readiness – including as its willingness to send thousands of police from London to mining areas - that thwarted the strike.

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And as the strike seemed increasingly unwinnable, the slow trickle of men returning to mines turned into a flood after they were lured back by big bonuses.

At the start of the industrial dispute, 144,000 workers – 73.7% of the total 196,000 workforce – walked out and by the end that figure had dropped to 117,000.

Yet in some areas - notably Kent, with the only pits in southern England, and South Wales, participation never dropped below 93%.