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A new conflict between old adversaries: the National Union of Mineworkers and the Conservative government, 1992-93

Jeremy Tranmer
p. 323-334

Résumé

This article examines the confrontation between the Conservative government and the miners in the winter of 1992-3. It will argue that, although the miners managed to force John Major onto the defensive, they were ultimately unsuccessful as they were unable to put a stop to the government’s pit closure plan. It will also suggest that the dispute was unusual in that it was not a traditional labour movement conflict. It concealed a number of issues which were important to other sections of the British population and it had no clear winner.

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Texte intégral

Introduction

  • 1  Only the protests in January and February 1991 against the Gulf War generated a similar level of p (...)

1It was widely assumed that the strike of 1984/1985 would be the last time that the miners would clash with a Conservative government. The year-long strike had ended in defeat for the miners, who were unable to prevent Margaret Thatcher’s government and the National Coal Board from closing pits and drastically reducing the size of the workforce. One of the most militant sections of the labour movement appeared to have been tamed once and for all. Furthermore, Margaret Thatcher had been replaced as Prime minister by John Major, who presented himself as being more moderate and consensual than his predecessor. Yet one of the largest mass movements of opposition to the Major government was that of the miners during the winter of 1992/93.1 For a short period of time the future of the coal industry gripped the nation as the miners and their supporters attempted to rally support against the government’s pit closure plans. A mere six months after being elected, the Major government plumbed new depths of unpopularity, and, in a curious turn of events, the controversial leader of the miners Arthur Scargill was temporarily transformed into a national hero. However, the miners’ campaign gradually lost momentum, and the government was able to implement its plans successfully.

2The dispute has often been forgotten by historians of the Major years and by other commentators, which is unfortunate since it reveals a great deal about British politics, trade unionism and industrial relations in the early 1990s. This article will present the main events of late 1992/early 1993 before suggesting why they have been largely overlooked. It will then look at the specificities of the conflict as well as its political and symbolic significance, arguing that it was in many ways a conflict of a new type.

The forgotten conflict

  • 2  It was estimated that another 70,000 jobs would be lost in other sectors servicing the mining indu (...)
  • 3  The following week the government received over 20,000 letters protesting against its energy polic (...)
  • 4  The shock created by the announcement was also due to the fact that the Conservative Party electio (...)
  • 5  The historian J.R. Richards notes that the Cheltenham demonstration attracted over 3,000 people, i (...)
  • 6  Unlike his predecessor, John Major only had a small majority in parliament. As a result, he was vu (...)

3On 13th October 1992, President of the Board Trade Michael Heseltine announced the government and British Coal’s decision to close 31 pits with losses of over 30,000 jobs.2 The plan would lead to the closure of over half of Britain’s deep mines (six of them were to close within a week) and result in over half of the country’s miners losing their jobs. It would cost over one billion pounds in redundancy payments, the miners being offered £23,000 each. However, miners who went on strike to protest against the government would lose part of their redundancy payment. The scale and brutality of the government’s project led to a public outcry3 and calls for it to be shelved.4 Even sections of the Conservative press including the Daily Mail expressed sympathy with the miners, and demonstrations with a strong middle-class presence were organized in parts of the country such as Cheltenham where there were no mines and no significant labour movement presence.5 The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) ruled out industrial action and instead turned for advice and assistance to the Trades Union Congress (TUC). The TUC subsequently launched a ‘Jobs and Recovery’ campaign to exploit the widespread discontent with government policy and called for a national demonstration on 25th October. It also lobbied Conservative members of parliament, several of whom, including Elizabeth Peacock and Winston Churchill, had expressed opposition to the government’s plans.6 In the meantime the Labour Party demanded a moratorium on pit closures while an independent investigation into the future of coal was carried out.

  • 7  Despite the freeze, British Coal refused to let work continue in the ten collieries it had earmark (...)
  • 8  Throughout the conflict the NUM maintained its total opposition to any pit closures and job losses (...)

4 On 19th October, as the cabinet discussed the growing crisis, over 100,000 miners, their families and their supporters gathered in London to express their anger. Six days later the national demonstration in London attracted over 200,000 people, whose main slogan was ‘Sack Major not the Miners’. The government reacted by announcing a freeze of its closure plans and a Department of Trade and Industry review of the mining industry to establish whether new markets could be found for British coal.7 Nevertheless, six Conservatives MPs voted against the new proposal (another five abstained), and the campaign to prevent pit closures continued. The NUM leader Arthur Scargill undertook a speaking tour of the country to defend British industry; the Scottish NUM organized a month-long march from Glasgow to London led by George Bolton, with rallies in cities en route; celebrities called on the public to switch off their electricity for five minutes at an agreed time and to put a candle in their windows. The NUM shunned the compromise solution proposed by British Coal, according to which thirteen collieries would be saved if men agreed to work longer shifts in order to increase production by keeping the mines open longer.8 The government suffered further embarrassment when, just before Christmas, the High Court ruled that its proposals were in breach of employment law as it had not consulted the miners before announcing its decision and insisted that no colliery could be closed until the statutory review process had been carried out. The miners had been granted an unexpected reprieve.

  • 9  The Socialist Workers Party was particularly vocal in its support for a general strike. For a pres (...)

5As the government review dragged on and the TUC resisted calls from the left for a general strike,9 the NUM floated the idea of a South African-style ‘stay-away’ day throughout British industry. The TUC rejected this as, under legislation adopted by Margaret Thatcher, solidarity strikes were illegal and could lead to unions being taken to court and having part of their funds seized. Discussions between the NUM and other unions eventually broke down, leaving the miners on their own. On 25th March the government published its much awaited White Paper. The new proposal contained plans for subsidies of £500 million for British Coal to find new markets and £200 million of regional aid for the areas most badly hit by job losses. However to the dismay of the miners, thirteen pits were given a temporary reprieve of two years, while eighteen were to be shut rapidly. The plan was adopted in Parliament with only four Conservative MPs voting against it and three abstaining.

  • 10  The exact voting figures were 12,913 in favour of strike action and 8,465 against. J.R. Richards, (...)
  • 11  British Coal responded to the first one-day strike by introducing administrative measures to make (...)
  • 12  P. Routledge, 1994, p. 249.
  • 13  J.R. Richards, 1996, p. 221.

6An NUM delegate conference subsequently voted in favour of a one-day strike on 2nd April,10 which led to stoppages of varying length in the vast majority of pits.11 A second one-day strike was organized a fortnight later, but it was markedly less successful than the first. Symbolic activity was also undertaken in favour of the miners. A group of Women Against Pit Closure activists, including Scargill’s wife Anne, secretly joined a visit of the last-remaining mine in Lancashire but refused to go back up and stayed in the pit for three days. Nevertheless, by February 1993 over 8,000 miners had accepted redundancy payments and left the industry, weakening the position of the NUM.12The following month the High Court reversed its previous decision and accepted that the government had fully informed the miners of its plans and had carried out a serious review. This signalled the end of the conflict and left the miners staring defeat in the face. By February 1994, the pit closure programme had been fully implemented and only sixteen functioning deep mines remained in Britain.13

  • 14  The aim of the Exchange Rate Mechanism was to force member states of the European Union to maintai (...)

7 Even though the confrontation between the miners and the government lasted over six months, it has received relatively little attention. It has been ignored or downgraded in many accounts of the 1990s as a result of the other problems faced by John Major. It began only a month after ‘Black Wednesday’ when, on 16th September, the United Kingdom was obliged to devalue the pound and leave the European Exchange Rate Mechanism.14 This event damaged the credibility of the government as well as the traditional claim of the party that it was capable of managing the economy more efficiently than Labour. It is generally accepted to have been a turning point in the recent history of the Conservative Party and as such has been studied in detail. The miners’ dispute coincided with the internal problems of the government and the Conservative Party concerning the Maastricht Treaty. The Conservative Party conference of early October 1992 revealed the extent of the divisions, as did the parliamentary debate on the Treaty a month later. Although the Treaty was officially adopted, the Conservatives remained divided from top to bottom for the rest of John Major’s term in office. Unsurprisingly the various debates over Europe have been covered in great detail by historians and political scientists. These events, along with the various sleaze scandals which broke out later, have therefore tended to overshadow the confrontation with the miners. In many histories of the labour movement, it is assumed that the strike of 1984/5 was the last major dispute in the mining industry, particularly as it was a defining moment of the Thatcher years. Consequently numerous accounts of the strike exist, but events in the industry after 1985 have been glossed over.

A conflict of a new type

  • 15  For a more detailed study of the changes in the NUM’s strategy, see J. Tranmer, June 2003, pp. 106 (...)
  • 16  This is not to suggest that they had not existed previously. It was, however, relatively unusual f (...)
  • 17  Over 200,000 people attended the London demonstration, which ended in rioting and clashes between (...)
  • 18  The strike of 1984/85 had already attracted the support of many pop musicians, such as Billy Bragg (...)
  • 19  Red Wedge was a collection of musicians who campaigned for the Labour Party, particularly in the r (...)
  • 20  A die-in is a form of protest which involved lying down in the street and pretending to be dead. I (...)

8The lack of attention given to the 1992/3 dispute is unfortunate as it could be argued that it was in many ways a conflict of a new type. Firstly, it was not a traditional mining dispute. Even though it was an industrial conflict, most activity occurred away from the workplace. The relatively minor role played by strike action and the lack of picketing are the most obvious signs of this, making the conflict strikingly different to those of 1972, 1974 and 1984/5.15 The sole occupation of a mine was in fact undertaken by women supporters of the miners. The importance of mass demonstrations away from the workplace was also a new development.16 However, in the context of the early 1990s, it was not surprising. As recently as 1989/90 the demonstrations against the Poll Tax, especially the demonstration in London of 31st March 1990,17 had brought considerable pressure to bear on the Thatcher government, weakening it and contributing to Margaret Thatcher’s downfall. Mass movements had also brought down the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe between 1989 and 1991. Mass protest was thus deemed to be a potentially dangerous weapon which could cripple or even topple governments. The participation of celebrities as a group was a novel event in an industrial dispute,18 suggesting the influence of Red Wedge in the late 1980s.19 Their call for people to turn off their electricity and to light candles was equally unusual and was reminiscent of the symbolic activities of the various new social movements that had appeared since the late 1960s. Members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, for example, had a penchant for symbolic gestures, such as die-ins,20 which allowed large numbers of people to participate and raised awareness of a particular issue. The conflict was therefore characterized by a blurring of the traditional distinctions between the strategies and actions of the labour movement and those of the new social movements.

  • 21  For instance, secondary picketing, i.e. going to a company’s premises to try to persuade its worke (...)
  • 22  The so-called ‘dash for gas’ in the later 1980s and early 1990s had resulted in a fall in demand f (...)
  • 23  This trend was not limited to the right-wing of the NUM which was suspicious of Scargill and his a (...)
  • 24  A. Scargill, 1994.

9To a certain extent, the clash between the miners and the government was almost bound to break new ground as the legal situation facing trade unions had changed dramatically,21 and by the early 1990s the coal industry was only a minor part of the energy industry.22 It would have been difficult for the miners to have implemented a more orthodox strategy. If they had undertaken mass picketing, the NUM would have been fined. And if they had stopped coal production by strike action, it would have had little impact because of changes in the energy industry. The miners’ new strategy was therefore, at least to a certain extent, a sign of weakness. Moreover, sections of the leadership of the NUM attempted to learn from the defeat of 1984/85 and stressed the need to develop a new, innovative strategy.23 Nevertheless, the appearance of novel elements in the dispute was not inevitable. Miners at all levels of the NUM, including Scargill himself, had advocated immediate industrial action irrespective of legal considerations and of the NUM’s declining industrial muscle.24 They were defeated as a result of the strengthened position of more flexible elements within the union. However, the latter were clearly within the combative traditions of the union and refused to seek a compromise solution with their employers or the government. The NUM’s position can be interpreted as a form of the ‘new realism’ espoused by most of the trade union movement from the mid to late-1980s onwards, but a variety significantly further to the left than that of other unions. The miners’ strategy therefore reflected the changed environment in which they operated as well as the changing politics of the NUM.

  • 25  The NUM’s framing of the dispute in terms of the defence of British industry rather than its membe (...)
  • 26  It could even be argued that ironically the support that the miners received from some surprising (...)
  • 27  W. Hutton, 1995.  
  • 28  There was in any case a certain amount of latent sympathy for the miners simply because they under (...)

10 Secondly, the dispute can be described as a surrogate conflict. Although the confrontation appeared at first sight to be about the coal industry, it concealed a number of other protests by the supporters of the miners. It can be seen as a delayed protest against Black Wednesday since it was the first opportunity for people to express collectively their anger at the government’s handling of the economy. This helps to explain the distinct middle class presence in the protest movement. The fact that the miners did not adopt a more traditional approach to the conflict made it easier for middle class elements to support it.25 Revealingly, once the miners engaged in limited strike action, they lost the support of dissident Conservatives as well as sections of the press.26 The middle classes as a whole were not so much committed to the cause of the miners as opposed to the government because of Black Wednesday. Supporting the miners was thus a way of punishing the government. The miners also attracted support because of the overall economic and social context. In October 1992 the United Kingdom was only just emerging from the recession and was in the process of becoming what Will Hutton later termed a 30/30/40 society, that is a society in which 30% of the population was excluded from the labour market, another 30% faced low-paid, part-time employment or job insecurity and only 40% was in relatively secure, full-time employment.27 In that situation, the miners personified the fate that many British people believed could be theirs.28 Moreover, coal had a certain symbolic importance. It represented a link with the era of the Industrial Revolution, when Britain was the world’s leading economic power and was in the process of amassing an empire, and with the economic and social certainties of the immediate post-war years when the coal industry was nationalized. The decision to close more than half of Britain’s few remaining mines severed this link. The spontaneous support that the miners received therefore revealed a sense of unease about the direction British society was taking.

  • 29  The fact that the plan had been masterminded by the staunchly pro-European Michael Heseltine enfla (...)

11For the trade union movement the dispute offered the opportunity to force the Conservatives into a u-turn for the first time since 1979 and to show that trade unionism still had a future in Britain. It allowed the Labour Party to show that it still existed as a political force after four successive failures in general elections and to dream of inflicting a rare parliamentary defeat on the Conservatives. The labour movement was thus able to channel its frustration and anger at the result of the 1992 election into support for the miners and a cause that they easily identified with. For floating voters who had reluctantly voted Conservative in 1992 and had regretted it afterwards, the confrontation was a chance to vent their spleen and to clear their consciences. The miners were also a stick for the Eurosceptical press to beat John Major with in order to punish him for signing the Maastricht Treaty.29 In other words, the dispute was not simply about coal, far from it, and had a profound political and symbolic significance.

  • 30  The Daily Mirror had accused Scargill of embezzling funds destined for the miners during the 1984 (...)

12Finally, it was a conflict which had no clear winners and only losers. The obvious losers were, of course, the miners. Although they forced the Conservatives into accepting a review of the coal industry and contributed to discrediting the government, they were unable to prevent pit closures and job losses. From 1992 onwards, mining was clearly in terminal decline. At first sight, the government would appear to have been the winner since it was able to implement its policy, suggesting that John Major was not as inept a leader as he is sometimes thought to have been. He played for time, avoiding making provocative statements and letting the miners’ campaign run out of steam. Yet by deciding to reduce the size of the coal industry in such a dramatic fashion, he nearly created a significant backbench revolt, seriously misjudged the mood of the general public and rehabilitated Arthur Scargill only two years after he had been vilified by the press.30 Furthermore, the coal dispute limited Major’s attempts to differentiate himself from his predecessor since he appeared to be carrying out the same policy as Margaret Thatcher. Consequently, the Prime Minister and his government, especially Michael Heseltine, were damaged and discredited politically by the conflict.

13The dispute reveals a great deal about the United Kingdom in the 1990s. It shows the weakness of the trade unions due to changes in the economy and in the balance of forces. They were unable to rely on traditional strategies but were incapable of translating widespread public sympathy into effective pressure on the government or on employers in general. This weakness led to the politics of partnership with employers that the TUC has advocated in recent years. The conflict also highlights the Major government’s unerring ability to shoot itself in the foot whenever it was given the opportunity to do so, as well as the growing volatility of the parliamentary Conservative Party. Furthermore, it underlines the elements of continuity between the policies of John Major and those of Margaret Thatcher. In fact, given the scale of the pit closure programme and the later privatization of what remained of the coal industry, Major would appear to have been more radical than his mentor. The 1992/93 dispute was not just a new clash between old adversaries, it was in fact the final conflict between them.

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Bibliographie

Adeney, M., Llloyd, J. (eds.), The Miner’s Strike, Loss Without Limit, London: Routlege and Keagan Paul, 1986.

Benyon, H., Digging Deep. Issues in The Miner’s Strike, London: Verso, 1985.

Bolton, G., Unions. A New Direction, London: Democratic Left, 1993.

Carter, P., Trade Unions: the new realities. The Communist View, London: CPGB, 1986.

Crick, M., Scargill and the Miners, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1985.

Gallic, D., Penn, R., Rose, M. (eds.), Trade Unionism in Recession, Oxford: OUP, 1996.

Goodman, G., The Miner’s Strike, London: Pluto, 1985.

Howell, D., The Politics of the NUM. A Lancashire View, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989.

Hutton, W., The State We’re In, London: Random House, 1995.

Marsh, D., The New Politics of British Trade Unionism. Union Power and the Thatcher Legacy, London: Macmillan, 1992.

McIlroy, J., Trade Unions in Britain Today, Manchester: Manchester University Press, (1988), 1995.

Milne, S., The Enemy Within. M15, Maxwell and the Scargill Affair, London: Verso, 1994.

Ottey, R., The Strike. An Insider’s Story, London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1985.

Richards, A.J., Miners On Strike. Class Solidarity and Division in Great Britain, Oxford: Berg, 1996.

Routledge, P., Scargill. The Unauthorised Biography, London: Harper Collins, 1994.

Samuel, R., “An Open Conspiracy – Conservative Politics and the Miner’s Strike”,  Socialist Register, 1985-1986, London: Merlin.

Scargill, A. “History distorted”, Socialist Review, February 1994, http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/sr172/scargill.htm, consulted 1st November 2008.

Seddon, V., Women and the Pit Strike, London: Phoenix, (1997), 1998.

Seldon, A., Major. A Political Life, London: Phoenix, (1997), 1998.

Simons, M. “A battle undermined”, Socialist Review, December 1993, http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/sr170/simons.htm, consulted 1st November 2008.

Sked, A.,  Cook, C., Post-War Britain. A Political History. London: Penguin, (1979), 1993.

Thatcher, M., The Downing Street Years, London: Harper Collins, 1993.

Tranmer, J., “From flying pickets to mass demonstrations: the changing strategies of the British miners between 1972 and 1992” in K. Domange, L. Maguire, H. Rontix (eds), Les conflits individuels, sociaux et politiques dans le monde anglophone, expression et résolution, Cahier du CICC, no 15, June 2003, pp. 106-121.

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Notes

1  Only the protests in January and February 1991 against the Gulf War generated a similar level of popular mobilization.

2  It was estimated that another 70,000 jobs would be lost in other sectors servicing the mining industry such as the railways. For details of the government’s plans, see Seldon, A., 1998, pp. 330-335. For the miners’ response, see Routledge, P., 1994, pp. 232–254, and Richards, A.J., 1996, pp. 217-226.

3  The following week the government received over 20,000 letters protesting against its energy policy. A. Selsdon, 1998, p. 332.   

4  The shock created by the announcement was also due to the fact that the Conservative Party election manifesto had referred to the need to increase the productivity of British mines and to privatize them, but it had not mentioned pit closures. It was widely thought that the Conservatives had a vendetta against the miners, blaming them for the defeat of the Heath government during the 1974 strike. However, it seems more likely that the government wanted to make the mines more commercially competitive and therefore more attractive to potential buyers once they had been privatized.    

5  The historian J.R. Richards notes that the Cheltenham demonstration attracted over 3,000 people, including “Socialists Workers, Liberal Democrats, Conservatives and church leaders”. J.R. Richards, 1996, p. 219. Paul Routledge gives the example of a middle-class housewife crying on hearing the news of the government plan. P. Routledge, 1994, p. 232.

6  Unlike his predecessor, John Major only had a small majority in parliament. As a result, he was vulnerable to pressure from disgruntled backbenchers. After Heseltine’s announcement there was a distinct possibility of a backbench revolt forcing the government to change tack.     

7  Despite the freeze, British Coal refused to let work continue in the ten collieries it had earmarked for early closure. Miners were turned away every day but continued to receive their basic pay, leading to widespread demoralization.   

8  Throughout the conflict the NUM maintained its total opposition to any pit closures and job losses.  

9  The Socialist Workers Party was particularly vocal in its support for a general strike. For a presentation of its position and its analysis of the conflict, see M. Simons, 1993.

10  The exact voting figures were 12,913 in favour of strike action and 8,465 against. J.R. Richards, 1996, p. 223. Members of the rival Union of Democratic Mineworkers voted against strike action, preventing the miners from presenting a united front against the government.

11  British Coal responded to the first one-day strike by introducing administrative measures to make it more complicated and time-consuming for the NUM to collect its members’ dues. Previously union dues had been deducted automatically from miners’ wages. This was known as the ‘check-off system’ and had contributed to maintaining a high level of unionization in the industry since miners wishing to leave the union had to make a conscious decision to opt out of it. By ending this system, British Coal ensured that NUM officials would have to waste a considerable amount of time collecting dues themselves and that union membership would probably fall in the following months.     

12  P. Routledge, 1994, p. 249.

13  J.R. Richards, 1996, p. 221.

14  The aim of the Exchange Rate Mechanism was to force member states of the European Union to maintain their currencies within fixed limits in order to prevent fluctuations and pave the way for a single European currency.   

15  For a more detailed study of the changes in the NUM’s strategy, see J. Tranmer, June 2003, pp. 106-121.

16  This is not to suggest that they had not existed previously. It was, however, relatively unusual for a group of workers to organize a national demonstration in London on a Sunday in order to maximize support.

17  Over 200,000 people attended the London demonstration, which ended in rioting and clashes between demonstrators and the police.

18  The strike of 1984/85 had already attracted the support of many pop musicians, such as Billy Bragg and Paul Weller, as well as actors, including Tom Watt who starred in the TV series Eastenders.

19  Red Wedge was a collection of musicians who campaigned for the Labour Party, particularly in the run-up to the 1987 elections, organizing benefit concerts appearing in public with Labour politicians.  

20  A die-in is a form of protest which involved lying down in the street and pretending to be dead. It has been used in demonstrations against nuclear weapons and nuclear energy, for instance.

21  For instance, secondary picketing, i.e. going to a company’s premises to try to persuade its workers to participate in a dispute in which they are not directly concerned, was outlawed by Margaret Thatcher.

22  The so-called ‘dash for gas’ in the later 1980s and early 1990s had resulted in a fall in demand for coal.

23  This trend was not limited to the right-wing of the NUM which was suspicious of Scargill and his allies. One of the fiercest critics of the NUM’s traditional strategies was George Bolton who had been an active member of the Communist Party of Great Britain until its disappearance in 1991. In fact, Communists had already criticized the emphasis on picketing, for example, after the 1984/5 strike. See P. Carter, 1986.

24  A. Scargill, 1994.

25  The NUM’s framing of the dispute in terms of the defence of British industry rather than its members allowed it to act in the name of the nation as a whole and to reach out to the middle classes. It should also be borne in mind that it was also the first significant conflict of the post-Cold War era. In previous disputes, governments had attempted to tar the miners with the Communist brush, accusing the NUM of being infiltrated by Communists intent on wrecking the industry. This was particularly the case in 1974, and to a lesser extent in 1984, when the Communist Mick MacGahey was vice-president of the union. By 1992 MacGahey had retired, and the Communist Party as well as the Soviet Union had ceased to exist. The Conservatives could no longer frighten their middle class supporters by claiming that the coal industry was being disrupted by outside interference and suggesting that protest movement was not legitimate.

26  It could even be argued that ironically the support that the miners received from some surprising quarters was in fact a sign of their weakness. They were no longer the shock troops of the trade union movement but the underdogs in their conflict with the government.

27  W. Hutton, 1995.  

28  There was in any case a certain amount of latent sympathy for the miners simply because they undertook difficult, physical work in dangerous, dirty conditions.

29  The fact that the plan had been masterminded by the staunchly pro-European Michael Heseltine enflamed passions even further among right-wing Eurosceptical Tories. Some Conservatives were also angry as the government appeared to be betraying moderate miners who had opposed the NUM during the strike of 1984/85 and had founded the breakaway Union of Democratic Mineworkers (UDM). The government’s pit closure plan concerned mines in Nottinghamshire where the UDM had the support of a majority of miners.

30  The Daily Mirror had accused Scargill of embezzling funds destined for the miners during the 1984 strike and using them to pay off the mortgage on his house. He was proved later to have been innocent. For a detailed analysis of the case, see S. Milne, 1994.   

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Référence papier

Jeremy Tranmer, « A new conflict between old adversaries: the National Union of Mineworkers and the Conservative government, 1992-93 »Observatoire de la société britannique, 7 | 2009, 323-334.

Référence électronique

Jeremy Tranmer, « A new conflict between old adversaries: the National Union of Mineworkers and the Conservative government, 1992-93 »Observatoire de la société britannique [En ligne], 7 | 2009, mis en ligne le 01 février 2011, consulté le 01 avril 2023. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/osb/843 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/osb.843

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Jeremy Tranmer

Maître de Conférences à l’Université de Nancy

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