Labour politicians used to talk about the miners as “the backbone of the nation”. And not only politicians. The miners knew it for themselves. Note the definite article: the miners. One thing. One formation.
In 1984, I was teaching 20 Leicestershire and Derbyshire miners on day release. The course had taken an age to set up and six hours in a classroom full of smokers must have been contrary to the Factory Acts, but even though not one of them was on strike, the National Coal Board (NCB) cancelled their day release halfway through the term without a word of warning to them, or the two universities that taught the class, or the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) which had negotiated it, or the Workers’ Educational Association which had organised it, or Quest House in Loughborough which hosted it. I remember thinking that if the board could act so offhandedly in a piddling little thing like this, how will it act in a strike that was already taking all the wrong turns?
Content from our partners
