When Britain’s miners, beaten, wound their weary way back to work 30 years ago their tired steps should have been accompanied by the tolling of 1,000 church bells. The rest of us should have been applauding them. They had fought a last stand against a vile political system that would always deem the welfare of human beings to be superfluous when set against the needs of the market. The sense of desolation I felt that day has never left me.
The bitter consequences of the miners’ defeat have haunted Britain since: Margaret Thatcher let slip her dogs of war against society and laid economic waste to the north of England and the working-class strongholds of north Ayrshire and north and south Lanarkshire. These were the fortresses of the miners and Thatcher ensured that they would be economically razed so that never again could they rise up in defence of their jobs and communities. The economy of the southeast of England grew grotesquely fat as she concealed the receipts from North Sea oil to fund her so-called economic miracle and pay off the miners with £8bn.
Greed, corruption and the art of turning a blind eye to all manner of financial finagling and malfeasance settled like a swarm of locusts. In time the Labour party would be choked by them, ensuring that the neo-liberal values of Thatcherism, free now from all scrutiny and proper opposition, would always hold sway in the United Kingdom.
All the normal checks and constraints of economic decency and decorum were removed and, in the obscene scrum that followed, the gap between rich and poor became an unbridgable chasm. Profitable national assets were sold off cheaply and the traditional (and productive) heavy industries were wound down. The communities that they sustained were allowed to twist in the wind and to wither.
More than 240,000 children in Scotland living below the poverty line, the proliferation of food banks and distressingly reduced life expectancy in our poorest neighbourhoods have been the consequences of Thatcher’s unfettered capitalism and the betrayal of Labour in failing to oppose it. They had a chance to kill Thatcherism stone dead and bury her attack dogs when they won a three-term majority in 1997, but by then Labour had been taken over by the Great Deceiver and Gordon Brown was so blinded by his lust for power that he was rendered powerless to prevent it.
One of the myths of the Scottish independence referendum campaign was that Scotland became a divided country during it and that this was “a bad thing”. It was one of the lies distributed by a Unionist side eager to seize any opportunity to disguise the fact that Britain has been catastrophically divided for more than 35 years now. That it was disseminated even by writers on our leftwing and radical newspapers simply demonstrated how depressingly complete was Thatcher’s victory and subsequent hoodwinking of England. In Scotland, thankfully, there has been only a partial eclipse.
The credit crunch, built on the greed and corruption of bankers and hedge fund managers, only adversely affected those parts of the country excluded from the Conservative incubator. Don’t kid yourself that it even hit the sides of places such as Kensington and the Cotswolds. In other parts of the country small, profitable, family-run businesses which had provided employment for generations folded as these same banks withdrew all credit facilities. That the banks were then bailed out by us and permitted to resume their immoral behaviour would have led to popular revolt in many other countries; not though, in complacent, beaten and acquiescent Britain.
Incomes for the majority of Britons have fallen drastically in the last 30 years while the top 10% have never looked back since Thatcher cut the top rate of tax by almost half in her first two administrations. Her hollow creed of Help Thyself reached its apotheosis in the MPs’ expenses scandals, HSBC and the looks of bewildered contempt on the faces of Sir Malcolm Rifkind and Jack Straw last week. This all came to pass unopposed, not least because of the defeat of the miners in 1984-85.
The 30th anniversary of the end of the miners’ strike occurs on Tuesday. In the years since then it has emerged that MI5 infiltrated the senior ranks of the NUM and fed a stream of malicious falsehoods to the Robert Maxwell-owned Daily Mirror about dishonesty by Arthur Scargill. A quarter of a century after this was exposed many still remember the original smear while choosing to forget that coal provided more than 70% of the UK’s fuel until well into the 1990s.
The UK will never really remedy the wrongs suffered by the miners and the way in which their reputation has been so rubbished – and in such an organised and sinister fashion – by the UK political establishment. Scotland, though, has a chance to mark the anniversary by giving belated justice to the hundreds of Scottish miners wrongly fitted up by our own police force during the dispute. The Scottish Labour MSP Neil Findlay has researched the cases of many of these men, whose lives have been ruined by the lies of the Scottish police. His pleas to the SNP government have been constantly ignored, though. This isn’t surprising, as they have allowed Sir Stephen House, Chief Constable of Scotland, to turn our neighbourhood bobbies into a national SWAT team, clad in ridiculous short-sleeved tunics and black paramilitary-style combat boots and sporting cartoon truncheons.
Findlay’s case for a review of the conviction of 500 Scottish miners who were wrongfully criminalised by the police and judiciary was published in a report at the end of last year. It contains clear and corroborated evidence of police wrongdoing, upheld by the judiciary but ignored by the SNP. The Nationalists spent the entire referendum campaign composing poetry and psalms about how open, fair and accountable an independent or SNP-run Scotland would be. Unless they grant a judicial inquiry into these extremely disturbing cases then it will be clear that in an independent Scotland some of us will be more accountable than others.