By Eamon Dyas
Over the past year there have been several exhibitions and events in the UK commemorating the 40th anniversary of the British miners’ strike including “One Year! Photographs from the Miners’ Strike 1984-85: An exhibition based on the Martin Parr Foundation’s collection” which has toured various UK venues. Martin Parr has been an active recorder of British social life through his photography since the 1970s and some of his photographs relating to the miners’ strike has also formed part of an exhibition in Vienna entitled “Streik! 40 Jahre Grosser Britischer Bergarbeiter Streik (1984/85)”. The Österreichischer Gewerkschaftsbund (the Austrian Trade Union Federation) in Vienna was the location of this small exhibition. The exhibition consisted of photographs from various sources, including the police, taken during the 1984-5 Miners’ strike and was sponsored by the Institut für Historische Sozialforschung (IHSF) in Vienna and the Martin Parr Foundation.
As far as I know the exhibition in Vienna is the only one in the EU which commemorated the anniversary of the strike on the basis of significant support from a domestic trade union movement. There has also been a three-day international conference under the auspices of The Institute for Social Movements at the Ruhr University in Bochum in Germany which took place between 19th and 21st March this year but that was to a large extent one that was sponsored by an academic institution.
I had not attended any of the events in the UK but found it intriguing that there should be one held in such an important location as the Austrian Trade Union Federation and so while on a recent visit to Vienna I decided to take a look. The first thing I noticed was how welcoming the Austrian Trade Union Federation building was. Also, as soon as you enter the building there is no mistaking the fact that you are in a place that lives and breathes trade unionism. There are many information panels and various readily-available leaflets reminding the visitor of how important the trade union movement has been in achieving so much of what is taken for granted in modern working and social conditions.
The photographs used in the Streak! exhibition were for the most part new to me and the visitor could not but be moved by the way they depicted the heroic resistance of the mining communities in the wake of the privations and state-inflicted violence endured during the strike. There was also a section recording the efforts by Austrian workers to collect funds for food parcels and the provision of holidays in Austria for the children of the miners – an example of trade union solidarity that was heartwarming to see.
However, as I walked through the exhibition it struck me that the way that the strike has generally been depicted as part of the modern left’s iconography fails to set the real significance of the strike in a proper historical context. In that sense the publicity explaining the Viennese exhibition could not but repeat the general consensus of what the strike is believed to represent. The exhibition describes the strike as follows:
“The British Miners’ Strike in 1984-85 went down in history. An entire industry fought for survival in a bitter dispute with the Thatcher administration – and lost. When the strike collapsed after one year, the world had changed – not only in Great Britain. The neoliberal shift had been implemented.”
It is thus seen as an event on which the future of not only the trade union movement in Britain pivoted but also that of the capitalist order. The defeat of the miners was something from which the trade union movement in Britain never recovered and which was to provide the opportunity for the emergence of the new capitalist neoliberal order with implications for the world of labour beyond Britain. But, attractive as this explanation might be, it is too simplistic. No one event involving the British trade union movement’s activities in the realm of industrial action during this period could be said to encapsulate the fate of the wider working class movement. That fate was set by the decisions taken by what was in effect a political decision taken by the trade union movement in 1977 and which was to result in the assumption of power by the Conservative government in 1979.
A strong trade union movement and a declining industrial economy
On the eve of the 1979 General Election trade union membership in Britain stood at 13.3 million. This represented 55% of the total employed workforce and was the highest it has ever achieved. But this historic milestone was not a true representation of the trade union movement’s actual strength for there was a fatal weakness at its heart.
By 1979, the efforts of the trade union movement in improving wages and conditions had contributed to a dramatic increase in the standard of life of the working members of society when measured against their circumstances before the Second World War. Even allowing for the corroding effect of inflation, by 1979 there had been a five-times improvement in the wages of miners since their circumstances in 1938. There had also been a three-times improvement in the wages of agricultural workers, railwaymen and factory workers over the same time-frame. As to the material measures of the standard of living, there had been a tenfold increase in car ownership, a hundredfold increase in foreign travel, with TV and washing machines, telephones and central heating also becoming the norm.
But there had been a flip side to this apparent affluence. The value of the pound had halved against the dollar, British exports which still made up nearly 20% of world exports in the late 1950s had declined to 10% by 1979. During the same period national per capita income, which had been 40% above the Western European average in the late 1950s was below that average in the late 1970s. The countries constituting the EEC more than doubled their Gross Domestic Product (GDP) since 1958 while that of the UK had increased by only 60%. Average growth rates among European countries since the war showed over 5% for Belgium, Italy, France, Luxembourg, Germany and the Netherlands, while that of Britain was averaging less than 3%. Crucially, industrial production in Britain had also only increased at half the rate of that of those other EEC countries.
A House of Lords briefing paper described the situation as follows:
“This enhancement in living standards was underpinned by strong wage settlements, with 1976 and 1977 the only years in the decade where wage growth did not outstrip inflation. However, increasing labour costs contributed to the acceleration of sectoral shifts which began in the 1960s. Private sectors where labour compensation made up a high share of total costs, such as manufacturing (78%), transport, storage and communication (70%), and distribution, hotels and catering (66%), declined. Whereas private sectors where labour compensation made up a low share of total costs, such as financial services, business services, rent and real estate (33%) or oil and natural gas extraction (6%), expanded.
“In 1970, manufacturing was by far the largest sector of the economy, contributing 30.1% of total output, whereas financial services, business services, rent and real estate, the next largest sector grouping, contributed 17.8%. However, by 1979, these positions had almost reversed. Manufacturing fell by 6.7 percentage points (its largest fall in any decade before or since) to 23.4%, whereas financial services, business services, rent and real estate rose to 22.1%. It would be in the 1980s that the latter would officially overtake the former to become the largest sector grouping; however, the roots of this reversal are evidently much deeper.”
This issue of a weakening manufacturing sector became a feature of the economic debate in Britain during the 1960s and 1970s. A significant reason for this was the lack of investment and that in turn was deemed to be the relatively low rates of return on such investments. A House of Lords paper on the economy in the 1960s showed that the rate of return on capital invested in industry fell from 28.8% in 1960 to 19.4% in 1967. The same House of Lords paper explained the reasons as follows:
“Intensifying competition appeared to be one factor behind this pressure on profit margins. For example, the UK’s share of global exports fell from 8.1% in 1960 to 6.4% in 1969, as the shares of industrial economies defeated in the second world war, such as Germany and Japan, recovered strongly.”
(https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/the-uk-economy-in-the-1960s/)
However, it also pointed to another reason closer to home:
“Another factor was the growth of industrial tensions and the uprooting of the system of industrial relations which had been in place since the war. The highly centralised, industry-wide collective bargaining system of that period was increasingly being usurped by employer-level agreement, creating a ‘fragmented’ and ‘strike-prone’ bargaining system. This reduced the possibility of a bargain between capital and labour at the national level which kept pay in line with productivity growth and maintained profit margins.” (Ibid.)
The extent of this breakdown was measured not only by the number of strikes (which outside the coal industry had increased from 635 in 1957 to 2,131 in 1968) but also by the fact that most of the industrial disputes in the latter part of the 1960s were unofficial. It was this issue that Wilson’s Labour government attempted to address through Barbara Castle’s “In Place of Strife” in 1969 but which had to be abandoned in the wake of opposition from the trade unions and a significant opposition among Labour MPs. Consequently, when the Labour Party went to the electorate the next year it was an issue which remained unresolved.
By 1970 the Conservatives had decided that one of the reason for the weakness in British competitiveness was governmental control of areas of the economy that should be left to the discipline of the market as well as a rampant trade union movement that was driving up costs. In early 1970 in preparation for the coming general election the Tory shadow cabinet held a conference at Selsdon Park.
“What emerged from that conference sounded like a commitment to radical change which would replace managerial government with a different manner of ruling, emphasising the role of government in maintaining law and order and generally setting the framework for an economy regulated by the market. When the Heath Government took office in 1970, it was accordingly expected to disband all the planning, restructuring and subsidising boards, to reduce taxation, to muzzle the trade unions, to discard an incomes policy, and generally to restore a competitive economy.” (The Anatomy of Thatcherism, by Shirley Robin Letwin. Published by Fontana, London, 1992, p.73).
The election of the Conservatives later in 1970 should have acted as a wake-up call for the trade union movement. As far as the wider society was concerned – and in modern economies there always is a wider society in which the working class functions – the trade union movement continued to be viewed as a necessary component of the power balance between capital and labour. However, the 1970 election was a verdict from the electorate that the trade union movement also needed to act responsibly within the terms set by the wider society. The turnout in that election at 72% was the lowest for thirty-five years and Labour Party support among manual workers fell from nearly 70% in the previous election to just over 57%. The swing to the Conservatives of 4.7% gave them 46.4% of the vote to Labour’s 43% and represented a loss of fifty-eight seats for Labour and an overall majority of 30 seats for the Conservatives.
But by the same token the Heath government soon found that there was a limit to the endorsement which it had received from an electorate – an electorate that was not yet prepared to accept a wholesale red-blooded adoption of the market and a state-led hobbling of the trade union movement.
“Within a year of Heath’s accession to office, ‘middle way’ policies (and ‘middle way’ problems) were clearly in evidence. The brief flirtation with an alternative had not produced a miracle. The Government was frightened by the growing inflation, strikes, rising wages and falling productivity. Although by 1970, the state was spending over half of the Gross National Product (GNP) there was no desire to cut public expenditure. Instead, ailing enterprises were rescued. Early in 1971, Rolls Royce’s aero-engines division was nationalised and soon after, subsidies to the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders were restored. Thanks to the Industry Act of 1972, the Department of Trade and Industry acquired new powers to support industrial projects which found favour with the Government. Later in 1972, legislation empowered the Government to freeze pay, prices, and dividends. Inflation rose to 13.5%, and finally the miners’ strike directed at the pay policy, brought down the government.” (Letwin, pp. 73-74).
The Heath Government had initially sought to confront the power of the trade unions through its 1971 Industrial Relations Act. That Act attempted to curtail the power of the unions by weakening the “closed shop” arrangement as well as the prohibition of “wildcat strikes”. It also gave collective agreements the force of law which left the unions subject to fines in the event of them breaking such agreements and it established the National Industrial Relations Court which had the authority to grant injunctions to prevent strikes. The Act was made difficult to implement by the refusal of the Trade Union Congress and the majority of individual unions to comply with its provisions and was subsequently repealed by the Labour government under Harold Wilson after the fall of the Heath government.
The strike which brought down the Heath government was the culmination of a number of major strikes that began in 1970 with the dockers’ strike (which led to the declaration of a state of emergency due to fears of food shortages), then the building workers’ strike in 1972 and the miners’ strike in 1972. In terms of the 1972 miners’s strike the response of the Heath government was tempered by the widespread sympathy of the public for the miners. That sympathy was based on the fact that the mining communities had been subject to a comprehensive programme of pit closures during the 1960s, and an acknowledgement that miners’ pay had fallen significantly behind that of other workers in recent years. However, Heath was eager to ensure that his government could not be directly associated with conceding the large pay claim which the miners were then demanding. His way out of this was dilemma was to initiate an Inquiry under Lord Wilberforce. That enquiry which was established in February 1972, a week later came up with a recommendation that consisted of a 27% pay rise. Lord Wilberforce’s justification for this was the unique nature of the miners’ work (“We know of no other job in which there is such a combination of danger, health, hazard, discomfort in working conditions, social inconvenience and community isolation”). This proved to be the basis on which the strike ended a few days later.
Although there was less justification of the subsequent miners’ strike in 1974 Heath remained reluctant to engage in a “fight to the death” with the miners without an electoral mandate and so he went to the electorate in February 1974 asking the question “Who Governs Britain?”. However, the answer from the electorate was not a conclusive one. The Conservatives won the largest number of votes but because of the foibles of the constituency electoral system the Labour Party won the largest number of seats. This was despite Labour’s share of the vote falling to 37.2% (nearly 6% lower than the 1970 election and the lowest since 1929). The Labour Party remained seventeen seats short of a majority and was forced to form a minority administration. As the party had gone to the electorate promising “Labour’s Way out of the Crisis” with the slogan “Back to Work with Labour” it was then compelled to concede to the miners’ demands thereby ensuring that the country did get “back to work”. In an attempt to ensure a working majority, in September 1974 the minority Labour government called another election which took place in October 1974. This did produce a Labour majority but only by the wafer-thin majority of three seats.
The ‘Social Contract’
These three general elections continued to show that the electorate remained concerned about the way in which the trade union movement was exercising its power but remained largely undecided as to how this concern was to translate into political reality. The Tory approach had been blunted by this concern in 1970 and Labour Party only appears to have been given a mandate on the back of the anarchy which the confrontation between the Heath government and the miners and power workers created in terms of the three-day week in 1974.
In 1974 the Labour Party appeared to offer a more acceptable solution, one that was based on cooperation rather than compulsion and the idea of a “social contract” rather than outright confrontation between the unions and the state. This ‘social contract’ took the form of the government agreeing to legislate into existence a range of ‘social wage’ benefits for which the trade unions on their part would agree to voluntary restraint on pay demands.
“An indication of this most radical deal ever in peace-time (it was modelled on war-time precedents), will be seen from the gains achieved by the unions for all workers. These included a new tripartite disputes resolution agency (ACAS), headed by a former union leader, with terms of reference based on a remit to promote collective bargaining. ACAS Codes of Practice on disciplinary and grievance procedures also set new standards for employers. They also established a tranche of radical new employment protections for workers, (e.g. unfair dismissal rights with industrial tribunal enforcement). They legislated for tough health and safety provision, enforced by safety representatives at the workplace, and a tripartite Health and Safety Executive ‘with teeth’. One of the less known but far-reaching changes was the Pensions Act of 1975, which set up a second tier earnings-related state pension for all workers with the potential to add 25% of earnings to the basic pension. Equally advanced was its partnership with occupational schemes, which led to a massive extension of collective bargaining to final salary occupational pensions especially to manual workers, which for the first time also gave them and their families access to significant death in service case sums and early retirement benefits. Pension fund trustees elected from the workforce was another feature.” (Democracy in the Workplace – the Bullock Report revisited. David Lea in conversation with Peter Akers. History and Policy, 9 June 2010).
Alongside the above, the Labour government committed to repeal the 1971 Industrial Relations Act, increase social spending and pensions, control prices, and work on proposals to extend trade union power in the workplace. All of this was part of a the ‘social contract’ between the Trade Union Congress and the government designed to stabilise the economy and control wage inflation and avoid the spiralling instances of industrial strikes.
The referendum on the European Community and the Bullock Report of 1977
Before this, on 1 January 1973, the Conservative government under Edward Heath had overseen the parliamentary ratification of Britain’s membership of the European Community. One of the commitments of the Labour Party during the 1974 election campaign was to offer the electorate the opportunity to have its say on this issue through a referendum and on 5 June 1975 that referendum resulted in a “yes” vote” of 67% and a dissenting vote of 33%.
Like other contributors to this magazine I campaigned for a “Yes” vote in that referendum. One of the reasons behind that decision was an awareness of the growing internationalisation of capital and the ability of corporations to shift resources between countries. From the British working class perspective this meant that the future industrial battles would be fought on an unequal basis with corporations being able to move their investments and resources abroad in the wake of industrial unrest. In that evolving scenario it was thought that a closer alliance between the British working class and European workers offered the possibility of a counter to such inequality. But aside from that there was the fact that Europe was also seen to offer a more accommodating environment for the extension of workers’ control in the workplace with the experience of West Germany and its system of worker participation providing an example by which British workers could advance their interests.
This perception was also consistent with the direction in which the European Commission appeared to be going at the time. In 1972 the Commission had issued its Draft Fifth Company Law Directive. This was designed to mandate employee participation in the supervisory boards of large companies within the European Community. (As things turned out the Draft Fifth Directive was never adopted and was formally dropped in 2001 with any prospect of its re-installation diminishing with every advance of the growing influence of neoliberal economics within the EU).
Nonetheless, it was in this overall context and as part of its commitment to the ‘social contract’ with the TUC that Wilson’s Labour government in December 1975 established the Committee of Enquiry into Industrial Democracy. The Committee of Enquiry was chaired by Alan Bullock and its terms of reference stated:
“Accepting the need for a radical extension of industrial democracy in the control of companies by means of representation on boards of directors, and accepting the essential role of trade union organisations in this process to consider how such an extension can best be achieved, taking into account in particular the proposals of Trades Union Congress report on industrial democracy as well as experience in Britain, the EEC and other countries. Having regard to the interests of the national economy, employees, investors and consumers, to analyse the implications of such representation for the efficient management of companies and for company law.” (Department of Trade Green Paper, based on the Bullock Report, 1977).
Members of the Inquiry included directors of major companies and banks as well as TUC and sympathetic academics. The involvement of the TUC in such an inquiry was something that went against the “instincts” of that body. Those instincts had been established by the highly influential General Secretary of the Trade Union Congress from 1960 to 1969, George Woodcock. He had always been a strong advocate of the idea of ‘voluntarist industrial relations’ where union representatives were ‘accountable to members and no one else’. That view continued to hold sway among many on the TUC General Council in 1977 and it was the influence of Jack Jones, General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union (T&GWU) as well as Clive Jenkins of the Association of Scientific, Technical and Managerial Staffs (ASTMS) that helped to neutralise that view and ensured the TUC’s involvement in the Enquiry.
Opposition to the idea of industrial democracy was also centred on the Communist Party of Great Britain which had a significant but disproportionate influence on the wider trade union movement at the time. The Communist Party was ideologically opposed to any re-arrangement of the management of companies that involved workers’ control or forms of wage restraints such as the ‘social contract’. Such things were believed to lead to the dilution of the class struggle and many trade union leaders took their stance on that basis. However, as one member of the Bullock Inquiry later put it:
“It was not a simple ‘left/right’ argument. The influential ‘right’ union leaders as in the EETPU, the late Frank Chapple, were also firmly opposed to the unions becoming embroiled in the running of companies, as well as to government income restraint policies. Thus both ‘left’ and ‘right’ were committed to the flourishing system of ‘free collective bargaining’ in which most unions then had a very strong bargaining position. Even those who favoured increasing union reach into the strategic direction of companies and industries (e.g. redundancy programmes), saw collective bargaining as the best method to secure joint regulation of broad company strategies for workers. They viewed with suspicion the continental works council route as a rival channel of representation, which in their eyes had a reputation for undermining union collective bargaining strength.” (Op. cit., History and Policy, 9 June 2010)
The terms of reference of the Bullock Inquiry compelled its members to look at
“the European experience and this was quite influential in their deliberations. West Germany had had its system of Co-Determination (worker representation on second-tier, ‘supervisory’ boards) imposed on them by the USSR and the UK, but with a booming economy, this had come to be seen as a successful model. Lea recalled that a major issue in their deliberations was over whether the workers’ representatives should sit on the lower of a two-tier structure or on a unitary board, and that it was at Jones’s insistence that the TUC representatives held out for the unitary option. The majority of the Committee members were also persuaded that all board members representation would have to be through recognised trade union channels.” (Ibid.)
This represented a significant advance on the German model and became a central part of the majority report of the Committee when it was published in 1977. The objectors were led by the representatives of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) and they favoured the option of worker representation on a second-tier structure such as existed in Germany but which would have significantly diluted the influence of worker representation on board decisions. This diluted proposal was rejected by the majority of the Committee of Enquiry and became part of the minority report.
So it was that those opposed to the majority Bullock Report covered the political spectrum of the right and the left as well as the business community and influential trade unionists. But given the willingness of the Labour government at the time to pursue methods that would have led to a diminution in instances of open industrial conflict, had there been a wider consensus even amongst the trade unionists and the political left the prospect of the proposals of the majority report finding its way into legislation was certainly high. As it was the opponents in the trade union movement and amongst the ideological left not only voiced their objections to those proposals but went on to actively exploit every opportunity to ignore their significance by insisting on a return to the “purity of the class conflict” through industrial action.
Events in the year before the publication of the Bullock Report, provided the opportunity for this “purity of the class struggle” sentiment to prevail. The growing economic crisis (the fall in the value of the pound and inflation hitting 21%) culminated in the IMF loan and the implementation of its associated conditions on cutting back government spending. The resultant reaction of the trade union movement was to effectively tear up the social contract and embark on a collective bargaining “free for all”. Individual trade unions sought to ensure that their members were compensated for the rise in inflation – even though they were aware that such actions would in turn contribute to furthering that inflation and result in a persistent “chasing of the inflationary tail”.
The outcome in terms of what became known as the “Winter of Discontent” in 1978-79 occurred the year after the publication of the Bullock Report. That report had presented the trade union movement with the opportunity to view its future beyond one that involved perpetual industrial action and social disruption and provide them with the opportunity to influence the decisions of board rooms in favour of workers. It was the failure of the trade unions to grasp that opportunity that left the way open in 1979 for images of mountains of garbage left in public spaces as a result of the strikes by refuse collectors and the lurid stories resulting from strikes by gravediggers in Liverpool and elsewhere to finally shift the attitude among the electorate from one which had believed in State accommodation with the trade unions through cooperation to one which concluded that the state needed to take them in hand.
That sentiment permeated the working class itself. The 1979 election showed an 11% swing from Labour to the Tories among the skilled working class and a 9% swing in the same direction among the unskilled working class. Even among trade unionists there was a drop in support for Labour that was part of a trend from the mid-1960s.
“Among trade unionists the proportion voting Labour had dwindled from 73% in 1964, to 66% by 1970, and now [1974] to 55% – a remarkable drop considering the extent to which Foot had conciliated the unions. The figure declined further to 53% in 1979.”(Speak for Britain: a new history of the Labour Party, by Martin Pugh. Published by Vintage Books, London 2011, p.352)
(Among skilled workers only 42% of them voted Labour in 1979 compared with 49% as recently as October 1974. Among manual workers 69% had voted Labour in 1966. This has fallen to 57% in 1970 and remained at that level in 1974 but then fell dramatically to 42% in 1979. See Pugh, p.361 and p.374).
It was in this context that the defeat of the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike can only be fully understood. Much has been made of the way in which the strike was led by Arthur Scargill and how that may have led to the defeat. The fact that earlier ballots, one of which was held in October 1982 and another in March 1983 had showed that 60% of miners opposed a strike (see Pugh p.376); the fact that he declared a strike in the face of significant opposition from some of the regions and without a national ballot in March 1984; the fact that it was called in springtime when demand for coal was diminishing and that coal stocks at the power stations had been significantly increased in the previous months in anticipation of a strike. All of these factors undoubtedly contributed to the failure of the strike. But the strike was doomed from the outset not necessarily because of the incompetence and strategic mistakes of the ideologically driven Arthur Scargill who had been an avid opponent of the workers’ control proposals by Bullock in 1977 (in 1980 he was co-author of a pamphlet “The Myth of Workers’ Control”). It failed because the wider society had by then decided that the strikes represented a battle which threatened a return to the industrial anarchy and social upheaval of the past.
This is not to say that there was not widespread sympathy for the plight of the miners but that was not the same as solidarity. That sympathy was based on humane considerations and not with the objectives which the likes of Arthur Scargill and Mick McGahey had set as the ultimate objective of the strike – to bring down the Thatcher government. The same sentiment which contributed to the findings of the Wilberforce Inquiry in recommending a generous wage settlement in 1972 (an appreciation of the unique and demanding nature of the work of the miners) continued to exist in 1984 among the wider population but the social mood had changed and Arthur Scargill’s assertion of the symbolic nature of the dispute was out of kilter with that change.
In the lexicon of the left the miners’ strike has assumed the significance it has because it continues to be viewed as the last effort to bring down the Thatcher government and restore the trade union movement to the golden age of the “purity of the class struggle” of the 1970s. But that is precisely why it failed. By 1984 the wider society had passed its verdict on that age with the election of the Thatcher government in 1979. It did that after it had decided that the trade union movement had not shown the capacity to exercise its power in a way which went beyond the pursuit of sectional interests and social disruption. If we were to look at a point when this change assumed the status of a reality we can see it in the way the trade union movement failed to take the opportunities offered to it in the 1977 Bullock Report.
It was the determination of the coal mining communities, together with the support they received from the left that ensured it went on for so long and it was that duration that provided it with the heroic status it achieved. A critical part of that determination was also the unique nature of the coal-mining industry. That uniqueness was something that it previously shared to some extent with the traditional industries of the past like the cotton industry of Lancashire and the steel industry of Sheffield – a workforce whose sense of community extended beyond the mine shafts or the factory floor and into the housing neighbourhoods around them. The shared history of the mining communities and their continuity through families and shared tragedies helped forge a strong sense of solidarity which was more powerful than the normal sense of class solidarity found on factory floors. But in the end even that could not ensure a victory over the sentiments of a society that had already moved on by 1984 and therein lies the real tragedy of the 1984-85 coal strike.
Labour Affairs 