The strike of Britain's mineworkers in 1984 was a seminal event in the history of the country. It's defeat marked the effective victory of Margaret Thatcher in her attempt to destroy the power of the trade unions, which itself is a major factor in the subsequent widening of inequality in the country. On one hand, Arthur Scargill, the union leader, does not cut a sympathetic figure, and his position, that no pit should ever be closed on economic grounds, was an absurd one: on the other, the workers were striking for not just their own jobs, but for the life of their communities, towns that depended on their mines; and without doubt, the government saw the strike as not just a threat, but an opportunity to finish the unions off. This brilliant series shines a light on three stories from the strike: the way that a village was split between those who wanted to strike and those who wanted to work; the battle of Orgreave, where the police surpressed a protest by essentially treating the pickets as enemies of the state; and the wider issue of the anamalous position of the Nottinghamshire coalfield, where miners kept working throughout the strike. It's sympathetic to miners on all sides, many of whom who found themselves in an impossible position, not least the pro-strike, but anti-Scargill, leader of the Nottinghamshire miners, still an impressive figure at 90, but who at the time was villified by just about everyone. To call the strike a civil war would be going too far, but there are strong civil war vibes in these stories nonetheless. With hindsight, coal mining in the UK was always going to decline, to an extent that probably even Thatcher did not anticipate. The brutality of its death remains a tragedy.
