It’s twenty years since the start of the miner’s strike and the papers are full of retrospective pieces. One of the best is this piece by Seumas Milne from Saturday’s Guardian.
The miner’s strike was one of the most devastating episodes from recent(ish) political history and it’s very worrying to see that even now (under a supposedly Labour government) the strikers and, especially, their leaders are still so demonised in the popular media.
At the time, no-one came close to estimating how quickly the British coal-mining industry would be killed off. At the start of 1984 the UK had 170 working pits. Now we have just 20.