General   (General discussion, talk about anything.)

From the New Statesman.

Full piece here.

Strike

Same pit, same seam, same club, same shop, same school, same family, same street – whichever side you were on, there was no alternative but to keep with it, nowhere to travel but in the direction of your own self-respect. Eight months into the strike and with winter coming on, benefits being cut and state planners targeting striking families to break their will, the cracks began to appear. The NUM was subjected to huge fines for contempt of court: Scargill had kept calling the strike “official” and “national” when everybody could see it wasn’t. Nacods (National Association of Colliery Overmen, Deputies and Shotfirers), which kept the pits safe, and open, withdrew support after yet more internecine wrangling. Then two young Merthyr miners were convicted of the murder of a Cardiff taxi driver ferrying a man to work. They had dropped a concrete block on his car from a bridge. They hadn’t meant to kill him but the moral damage was done. The strike began to crumble in January and by the end of March it was all over – although civil wars never end all at once. Strikers who were taken back were put on unpopular shifts in pointless parts of the pit. One of my former students wrote his dissertation by the light of his Davy lamp.