Socialist party Liverpool The city that dared to fight

The aim of this paper is to examine the defeat of the 1984-1985 miners’ strike and assess whether an alternative strategy could have yielded a successful outcome for the miners or if the writing was on the wall from the outset. It will look at the consequences of the government’s ideological neoliberal victory and the long-term ramifications for the relationship between the British state and the British worker, arguing that through this political battle it was fundamentally altered to the detriment of worker’s rights and civil liberties. The Thatcher government purposefully dismantled and discredited the trade union movement, entrenching the values of meritocracy and a flexible labour market into the British economy. The legacy of these events can be seen in the suppression of wages and stagnation in the improvement of living standards, greatly damaging the economic autonomy and community integrity of working-class communities in the initial aftermath, resulting in widespread intergenerational poverty and extending to encompass middle-class professionals in the 21st century.

International Labour and Working-Class History, 2018

The Conservative Party has long faced concerns that in regard to the great British miners' strike of 1984-1985, senior Tories had, in fact, planned the confrontation as early as 1977, when still on the opposition benches. Historian John Savile pointed to the existence of the Ridley Report-a Conservative think-tank paper produced in 1977, which appeared to include a detailed blueprint on how to provoke, and secondly win, a battle against Britain's powerful miners' union. After Margaret Thatcher's second election victory, and her first landslide, in 1983, the Prime Minister populated the Downing Street Policy Unit with private-sector allies who looked to implement aspects of the report. Some of these allies had clear economic incentives in running down British coal. Nevertheless, the Policy Unit members were instrumental in determining government policy concerning all aspects of the strike, including preparation, policing, the law courts, financial concerns and the portrayal of the strike in the media. The campaign by Thatcher's Policy Unit resulted in a shattering blow for Britain's trade union movement from which it has yet to recover-just as the Ridley Report had predicted. The debate surrounding the British Miners' Strike of 1984-1985 has recently returned to the public's collective consciousness in the aftermath of the Hillsborough Inquest findings and the renewed calls for a similar inquest by the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign. Opinion regarding the strike remains deeply divided. 1 At the time, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher maintained publicly that she had no choice but to stand up to the country's most powerful union, the leaders of which, she argued, were ignoring economic necessity by trying to maintain a raft of uneconomic, nationalized industries. 2 President of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) Arthur Scargill in turn argued that the pit closure programs which led to the strike were part of a bigger Tory plan to destroy the British trade union movement by stealth-and in doing so massively decrease the influence of working-class organizations throughout the country. 3 Others involved in the strike were caught between these two polemics. Roy Ottey, a self-described "right-winger" on the NUM's Executive Committee, was fiercely committed to his union and his industry. In 1984, however, he felt that Scargill was leading the NUM to ruin on behalf of his own ideological imperatives. 4

The English Historical Review, 2019

It has sometimes been suggested that the government of Margaret Thatcher responded to the miners’ strike of 1984/5 with plans that had been conceived long in advance. This article argues that Conservatives certainly discussed the prospect of a strike from the mid-1970s. However, they did not have clearly worked-out plans or much confidence in their ability to win such a dispute, and they became even more cautious after their humiliating retreat when faced with the threat of a strike in February 1981. Stockpiling coal was, initially, designed to deter a strike rather than to defeat one. Only slowly did some Tories reconcile themselves to the prospect that there was likely to be a strike and that 1984 was the least bad time to face it. Furthermore, Margaret Thatcher herself was not always keen to confront the miners and many of those who did the most to prepare and execute government strategy were not Thatcherites; some were civil servants rather than politicians.

2017

This journal article will take a look at a collaborative project by artist/filmmaker Esther Johnson and filmmaker/writer Debbie Ballin titled Echoes of Protest. This research investigates the legacy of being involved in significant protest movements from a child’s perspective and seeks to understand the role protest can play in the lives of children, and to explore its aftermath. This article will draw upon oral testimony transcriptions and photography undertaken for this project to highlight a perspective of the 1984-85 UK Miners’ Strike that has seldom been explored. The stories collected are from adults remembering what it was like to grow up as a child during the Strike. They articulate the experience with a maturity they may have been unable to express at the time. The text will follow the research methodology, findings, discuss the editing process and invite contributors to reflect on their participation. Key words archive; cross-disciplinary research; documentary; exhibition;...

Labour History Review, 2014

Sociological Research Online, 2007

This paper is based on recent primary research interviews with women who were active in the 1984-1985 miners’ strike. The paper claims that one depiction of women's engagement in the strike has been privileged above others: activist women were miners’ wives who embarked on a linear passage from domesticity and political passivity into politicisation and then retreated from political engagement following the defeat. This depiction is based on a masculinist view which sees political action as organisationally based and which fails to recognise the importance of small scale and emotional political work which women did and continue to undertake within their communities. In reality many women were politically active and aware prior to the dispute though not necessarily in a traditional sense. Women's activism is characterised by continuity: those women who have maintained activism were likely to have been socially and/or politically active prior to the dispute.

NOTE: The final version of this paper can be found in British Politics, here - http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/s41293-016-0032-6 In modern discourse Liverpool is a by-word for anti-Tory sentiment, yet the city has not always been so inhospitable for the Conservatives. From the mid-18th century until the 1970s the Conservatives dominated the city council, and often held over half of the city’s parliamentary constituencies. Popular opinion ascribes this decline to Margaret Thatcher, Conservative Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990. However, upon closer inspection it is clear that decline began a decade before Thatcher gained power. This paper argues that Conservative decline in Liverpool was due to the increasing inability of socialisation to create new Conservative voters in the long term, coupled with dissatisfaction with the Heath government and a rejection of local party machines which were unresponsive to local issues. The Liberals, through their use of pavement politics, were able to exploit these issues and their surprising victory in the 1973 local election, when the whole council was up for election, allowed them to displace the Conservatives as the main opposition to Labour in many of the city’s wards. Thus began the strange death of Tory Liverpool.

Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire for the year .., 2022

Journal review of my latest book, "We shall not be moved: How Liverpool's working class fought redundancies, closures and cuts in the age of Thatcher."

2010