Miners strike ends but fight goes on

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By HAYDEN PERRY and MICHAEL SCHREIBER LONDON-In a dramatic meeting in London on March 3, amid cries of defiance and tears, National Union of Miners (NUM) delegates voted to end the longest miners' strike in British history.

After 51 weeks on the picket line, they have gone back to work without a contract, without agreement on pit closures or on amnesty for miners fired for various alleged offenses during the The majority vote for going back to work was razor-thin, 98-91, reflecting the deep division in the union. Miners from Scotland, Yorkshire, and Kent wanted to continue the strike. Among other reasons, they would not abandon their fired brothers. They must win amnesty for them, they said.

"The strike is over but the dispute continues, announced NUM President Arthur Scargill. "The fight will go on."

Overwhelming pressure was put on the miners by the Thatcher government, which ran the nationalized mines through the National Coal Board (NCB). The aim of the government is to make the coal industry "profitable" with a view to selling the best mines off to private investors.

The NCB hired Ian McGregor, an American industrialist and banker, who had already rationalized the British steel industry at the cost of thousands of steelworkers' jobs. McGregor had similar plans for Britain's coal miners.

For McGregor, hard-headed economics dictated that he close high-cost "The repression of the miners has shown the public that class and wealth still rule."

mines and open new mines where productivity would be much higher. Miners would have to be laid off, but that was the cost of "progress."

For the miners, pit closures meant the destruction of entire communities. In England today, with 3 million unemNIM ties" put forth by Thatcher and still be welcome inside the Labour Party.

Kinnock and Thatcher both fear the broad left that has coalesced around support for the miners' strike. The miners' strike was a political event that has changed the relationship of class forces in Britain.

For years the country had been ruled by a degree of consensus that kept the class struggle muted. Now the ruthless repression of the miners has shown the British public that class and wealth still rule. Sympathy for the miners has grown; support for Thatcher has dropped, according to the latest polls.

Tony Benn, the main leader of the left wing of the Labour Party, described the effects of the strike on the party itself when he told a miners' defense rally last December, "What has happened has been to establish in every single constituency party miners' groups and women's action groups that have no intention whatever of disbanding when the strike is over. They are instruments ready and able to support any issue that is in the interest of working people."

The development and interlocking of different movements in support of the miners was illustrated on March 9 when 15,000 cheering people attended an International Women's Day rally in Chesterfield, Derbyshire. Scargill told the rally, which was called by the Women. Against Pit Closures movement, "If there's one thing the union's got to do, it's to say to the women's support groups: This is not the end. It's the beginning."

Although the miners feel betrayed by the TUC, though they are financially exhausted and have returned to work, they are not demoralized. At many pits they marched to work behind their union banners and with their union band playing.

The miners' refusal to capitulate at the end of the longest mass strike in European history has produced a major change in the fighting capacity of the British labor movement. A large and militant left wing that includes trade unionists, women's groups, and Labour Party activists is being consolidated. As Scargill put it, the fight will go on.