The Miners Go Back Defeated: What Scargill’s Loss Means for Black Britain

Key Developments at a Glance

• 3 March 1985: NUM votes to return to work without settlement; miners’ strike ends in defeat after twelve months; Thatcher’s most significant domestic victory confirmed.
• Pit closure programme resumes; mining communities across Yorkshire, Wales, and the North face accelerated decline; trade union movement weakened structurally.
• Bradford City fire May 11: 56 killed in stadium blaze; national sporting tragedy prompts safety review across British football grounds.
• Heysel stadium disaster May 29: 39 killed when English fans charge Juventus supporters; British clubs banned from European competition; community shares national shame.
• Caribbean community’s links to trade union movement put miners’ defeat in a wider industrial relations context; public sector unions brace for next confrontation.
• Edward Seaga PM Jamaica; IMF programme continues; diaspora remittances remain critical lifeline to island families facing economic adjustment.

The first half of 1985 is dominated by the ending of the miners’ strike and the political consequences that flow from it. The strike, which began in March 1984 when British Coal announced twenty pit closures, has lasted twelve months. It has been the most prolonged and bitter industrial dispute in post-war British history. On 3 March 1985, a delegate conference of the NUM votes, by 98 votes to 91, to return to work without a negotiated agreement. The delegates make clear that they are voting for a tactical retreat, not a surrender of principles; but the effect is the same. The miners return to work, the pit closure programme resumes, and the Thatcher government has won the contest it regarded, from the beginning, as the decisive battle of its programme to restructure the British economy and break the power of organised labour.

The Meaning of the Miners’ Defeat for Black Britain

The Caribbean community’s relationship to the miners’ strike is more complex than a simple solidarity calculation would suggest. The mining industry employs very few Caribbean community members; the mining communities of Yorkshire, South Wales, and the North of England are culturally remote from the urban Caribbean communities of London, Birmingham, and Bristol. But the miners’ strike is understood by much of the Caribbean community as a conflict about something larger than coal: it is about whether organised labour can resist the programme of a government determined to shift the balance of economic power in Britain decisively and permanently away from workers and toward capital.

The Caribbean community in Britain is heavily dependent on public sector employment — in the NHS, in local government, in public transport — and on the public services that the trade union movement has historically defended. The defeat of the NUM strengthens the Thatcher government’s position in every subsequent industrial confrontation, weakens the TUC as an institution, and removes the most powerful argument against the public sector programme that the government has been pursuing since 1979. The community draws its own conclusions about what the miners’ defeat will mean for the public services on which it depends.

Bradford and Heysel: Sporting Catastrophe

Two sporting disasters in the space of eighteen days cast a shadow over the summer of 1985. On 11 May, fire sweeps through the main stand at Bradford City’s Valley Parade ground, killing fifty-six people in minutes. The fire, which begins in rubbish accumulated beneath the stand, spreads with catastrophic speed; the safety failures that allow it to happen are the subject of a subsequent inquiry. The Caribbean community participates in the national mourning. On 29 May, at the Heysel stadium in Brussels, thirty-nine people — most of them Juventus supporters, most of them Italian — are killed when English fans, predominantly Liverpool supporters, charge a section of the crowd before the European Cup Final. The Heysel disaster produces an immediate ban on English clubs from European competition and a national reckoning with the culture of violence that has developed in and around English football.

Jamaica and the Diaspora

In Jamaica, the Seaga government’s economic programme has now been running for four years. The island has stabilised its external debt position, but at a social cost that is reflected in rising poverty rates, cuts to social spending, and the devaluation of the Jamaican dollar to levels that make life materially harder for Jamaicans on fixed incomes. The diaspora in Britain maintains the remittance flows that are essential to family survival on the island, and the community in Britain follows Jamaican political debate with the dual attention of people who vote in British elections but whose economic and family ties to Jamaica remain strong. Michael Manley’s PNP, in opposition since 1980, continues to develop its policy platform for the election that must come by 1988.

Sources: Jamaica Information Service; The Gleaner; Jamaica Observer; Caribbean National Weekly; New Nation; The Voice; BBC News; Reuters; AP; The Guardian; Commission for Racial Equality; CARICOM Secretariat; Jamaica High Commission London; National Union of Mineworkers; TUC; Home Office (UK).

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