TELEVISION: Mining Memories
Strike: When Britain Went to War
“Strike: When Britain Went to War” (Channel 4, Saturday 24 January) revisited the politics and experience of the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike through a mixture of contemporary film, recent interviews, TV and music clips from the time. Other critics have complained that the programme was little more than “I Love 1984” with added politics. This reviewer disagrees: the chart hits and popular TV content genuinely helped bring back memories (some of Diana Princess of Wales’ haircuts were quite remarkable), and they were well integrated with the documentary theme. Alexei Sayle and Midge Ure provided entertaining but also relevant cultural context. Sayle’s tale of the generalised disgust greeting Wham’s appearance at a Miners’ Benefit Concert was particularly good. Even the clichés (police vs pickets to a backdrop of contemporary Frankie Goes to Hollywood hit “Two Tribes”) were played to good effect.
There will doubtless be other “Miners’ Strike Reunited” programmes to look forward to over the coming year – BBC 2’s drama department has its turn later this week with “The Miners’ Strike” (Tuesday 27 January, 9 pm) and hopefully there will also be a showing of Jeremy Deller’s reconstruction of the Orgreave picket line battles using English Civil War re-enactment enthusiasts.
Showing the same people twenty years apart was bound to produce some interesting contrasts. Tony Blair, shown in a 1984 TV interviewer, looked like a recent Oxford graduate and spoke in curiously clipped tones that would today bar him from being a Conservative PPC. Phil Woolas, then NUS president with a haircut similar to Blair’s, has kept the hair but now is more amiable armchair radical than genuine firebrand.
There were some notable omissions: Anne Scargill was a good choice of interviewee, plainly unreconstructed even twenty years on, but where was Arthur himself? And where was David Hart, property tycoon and some-time advisor to Michael Portillo? His own account places him at the centre of the anti-strike movement, directing operations from his suite at Claridges, but he was nowhere to be seen or referred to in this version of the story.
It was not clear whether the absence of the key figures of Thatcher and Scargill was a deliberate editorial choice, or one forced on the editorial team because one or more of them had refused to participate. That the film did not take on the air of “Hamlet without the Prince” is testament to the insight provided by many of the key interviewees. UDM founder Neil Greatrex, his wife and daughter; selected striking miners and others provided an effective mix of micro- and macro-political. Phil Woolas was moved to tears (even being filmed in 2004) by the triumphant return of one group of Welsh miners to work at the end of the strike, still holding high their banners in union solidarity – and anyone (whether a supporter or opponent of the strike) could see something impressive about the spirit being shown there. My own sympathy, and lump in throat, was much more with Mrs Greatrex, at home with her daughters and besieged by flying pickets, deploying her dog in the kitchen to keep her young daughter safe from marauding union thugs. Which is where it was some twenty years before, my youthful support for the working miners being more anti-bully than anti-leftist.
The immediacy of the news footage, and the strength of some of the images (of course, the police / picket confrontations, but also the union rallies, supporters’ protests and the wreck of the Welsh taxi whose driver was killed taking a strike-breaker into work), provided a clear reminder: this had been a very real political conflict and the “Britain at war” metaphor was only a slight stretch. The likeable and essentially harmless ageing leftists on show today were the same individuals who were then genuinely the Enemy Within. (Although today’s model may be more immediately pleasant, it’s easier to respect them in 1984 mode – although the unchanged ones, typified by Mrs Scargill, are perhaps a cause for more sorrow than anger.) Although Scargill’s revolutionary intentions were unworkable and unsupported by the majority within his own union or the broader Labour movement, they were real and threatening enough.
Neil Kinnock, arguably the highest profile interviewee obtained (other than Midge Ure of course) was thoughtful but resigned. From a potentially long list, he said that his greatest political mistake was not calling “publicly and frequently” for a national strike ballot. This might have made all the difference to the outcome of the dispute – an early ballot might well have produced convincing majorities for a strike across all regions, strengthening the NUM’s case and potentially swaying the minds of fair minded centrists.
In Kinnock’s account – and that of Woolas – Scargill was the author of his own demise, walking into an elaborate trap laid by Thatcher. There clearly was some careful planning by the government, not least in building up coal stockpiles so that not even an all-out strike would have stopped electricity production. But there was also firm resolve in the face of alarming events – shown most clearly in the remarkable poise with which Mrs Thatcher insisted that the Conservative conference would go on, shortly after the IRA bombing of the conference hotel but also in evidence in the miners’ strike.
Britain today would doubtless look very different had the strike gone the other way, as it so easily could. Although the Sun’s Kelvin MacKenzie might have been exaggerating a little when he said Scargill would take the country “literally back to the Dark Ages” the defeat of the strikers was a symbolically as well as practically important event in British industrial policy. If the strike had been successful in securing a significant climbdown by the government, it is hard to see the Thatcher landslide of 1987. And it was only after this that many of the now defining elements of the “Thatcher years” including tentative education and health reforms and utility privatisations took place.
Sharper framing of the dispute in both practical and ideological terms could have been achieved with greater use of contemporary speeches by both protagonists. The two hour documentary seemed to race past without sufficient reminders of the fundamentals: why were the mines being closed down, how much taxpayers’ money was the NCB losing? But this would doubtless have made less good drama than the gripping tales of “civil war” on the picket lines and the social context behind them. The cultural divides between London and Nottinghamshire, and (comically but touchingly revisited) between the miners and members of the “rainbow coalition” of supporters including Sikhs, gay pride activists and (most shocking of all) Oxford students, seemed enormous. The Met policemen billeted at the Black Dog pub in Grantham were received more like wartime GIs – lots of money and consequent appeal to local lasses — than the lads from only a hundred miles away. In some ways, it is hard to imagine that this (pre mobile phones, pre internet) was a mere twenty years ago, and hard to imagine contemporary parallels. With much of the old industrial Britain now gone, the social distinctions of region and class seem much less strong.
“Strike ..” certainly made compelling television viewing, both for those like me reliving the memories of the events of twenty years ago, but also for people to whom this was parallel or ancient history. Its makers should be congratulated for producing a documentary that captured and retained viewer interest, resisted taking an intrusive editorial line, and let the participants tell their own stories. Hopefully Channel 4 can be persuaded to let the same team address other historic political topics with equal immediacy – Wapping, the poll tax riots, the CND campaign at Greenham Common, the rise and fall of Militant. It is hard to see today’s politics of the consensual acceptance of the mediocre producing similar excitement twenty years hence.
Edward Hay spent much of the Miners' Strike studying for his O-Levels - with considerable success, too.
Edward Hay, January 25, 2004 06:08 PM