Collieries, communities and the miners' strike in Scotland, 1984-85

Collieries, communities and the miners' strike in Scotland, 1984-85

Collieries, communities and the miners' strike in Scotland, 1984-85

Collieries, communities and the miners' strike in Scotland, 1984-85

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Overview

This book analyses the 1984-5 miners’ strike by focusing on its vital Scottish dimensions, especially the role of workplace politics and community mobilisation. The year-long strike began in Scotland, with workers defending the moral economy of the coalfields, and resisting pit closures and management attacks on trade unionism. The book relates the strike to an analysis of changing coalfield community and industrial structures from the 1960s to the 1980s. It challenges the stereotyped view that the strike began in March 1984 as a confrontation between Arthur Scargill, the miners’ leader, and Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government. Before this point, in fact, 50 per cent of Scottish miners were already on strike or engaged in a significant pit-level dispute with their managers, who were far more confrontational than their counterparts in England and Wales. The book explores the key features of the strike that followed in Scotland: the unusual industrial politics; the strong initial pattern of general solidarity; and then the emergence of varieties of pit-level commitment. These were shaped by differential access to community-level moral and material resources, including the economic and cultural role of women, and pre-strike pit-level economic performance. Against the trend elsewhere, notably in the English Midlands, relatively good performance prior to 1984 was a positive factor in building strike endurance in Scotland. The book shows that the outcome of the strike was also distinctive in Scotland, with an unusually high level of victimisation of activists, and the acceleration of deindustrialisation consolidating support for devolution, contributing to the establishment of the Scottish Parliament in 1999.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780719086328
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Publication date: 11/01/2012
Series: Critical Labour Movement Studies
Pages: 208
Product dimensions: 6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Jim Phillips is Senior Lecturer in Economic and Social History at the University of Glasgow

Table of Contents

Series editors' foreword viii

List of tables and boxes ix

Abbreviations xi

Acknowledgements xiii

Introduction: rethinking the miners' strike of 1984-85 1

I Origins and outbreak 19

1 Collieries, communities and coalfield politics 21

2 Closures and workplace conflict: the origins of the strike 53

II The strike 81

3 The Scottish industrial politics of the strike 83

4 Communities and commitment 110

5 Ending and aftermath 143

6 Legacy and conclusion 165

Bibliography 177

Index 188

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