ONCE OUR strike began, single strikers found they were entitled to zero social security pay. The regulations falsely assumed that strikers would receive £15, later £16, weekly from their union in strike pay. Government was aware that this assumption was false, yet it fitted the Ridley Plan ethos of washing the state’s hands of responsibility for paying strikers. 

The NUM had no history of giving strike pay to our huge membership, so in real life, families had to live on state benefits set at pittance level under the pretence that their usual breadwinner had ceased to exist. As these supposed ghosts still needed food and clothing, families had to stretch a paltry amount of money even further. 

Forty years later the wife of a former miner still remembers bitterly that to provide for her family, including herself and her husband, a four-year-old child and a baby she received £11.75 each week. Another Derbyshire mining family still remembers receiving between £13 and £15 each week for a family with two children and a baby.

I heard of at least two miners’ families who were reduced to selling some of their basic household goods on Chesterfield flea market. Alterations to benefit regulations, which government could implement without a vote in Parliament, ensured that death grants were not payable to strikers’ families. That led to heartbreaking cases such as the family who had to bury their baby in someone else’s coffin because they could not afford to buy their own. 

There was such an outcry about similar cases that the government adjusted its rules, although the new regulations did not in fact make life easier for strikers’ families. David Willetts, an adviser in Thatcher’s policy unit, pointed out to the politicians: “It would be politically neat to bring out one amendment which both gave concessions for funeral expenses and tightened up the regime for mortgage interest payments.”

So Willetts persuaded the government to relax one cruel social security rule while another was being tightened, making it much harder to access money to keep up mortgage interest payments. In due course Willetts was rewarded for this underhand piece of meanness by his adoption as a Tory parliamentary candidate, his promotion to ministerial rank, then his elevation to the House of Lords, where he still sits. 

Generous pay for MPs, ministerial salaries and perks, followed by the largesse of the House of Lords payment system, have all guaranteed him a comfortable life for the past 40 years. During the 1984-5 strike his advice to government about how to tighten the financial screws on mining families caused such terrible hardship that mining families sometimes broke apart under the strain. 

Miner’s wife Kate Alvey has spoken publicly about the painful effects on family life of Willetts’ “politically neat” proposal. She recalled that because she had a part-time job the family’s state benefits amounted to a Giro for 19 pence, although they had two young children. Their mortgage repayments grew so far in arrears that the company threatened to repossess their home, sending people round to measure it up as part of that process. Her husband remained on strike with her full support and her enduring involvement in the Chesterfield Women’s Action Group, but not every family was able to maintain its resolve and survive under those enormous pressures.

Poverty was not the only enemy of family life. The vicious government abuse being hurled at our strikers, amplified with relish by mass media, sometimes encouraged or even caused women to leave their men who stayed out on strike. This was a particular problem in Nottinghamshire, our second-largest coalfield, where the strike was always weak. There, such abandoned men were sent for support to the women’s groups, whose approach to consolation I privately thought could only be described as very bracing. They would tell the men: if she’s left you because you’re on strike then she’s not worth anything anyway…

Monopolies and Mergers Commission (MMC) report

Our more innocent citizens might have believed the Monopolies and Mergers Commission to be protecting us from possible abuses by big business, but in fact it was used to attack the nationalised coal industry instead. 

Government instructed the MMC to investigate whether the Coal Board could improve its efficiency and so reduce costs. The commission recommended both pit closures and reorganisation of the industry into smaller accounting units, which would make it easier to claim that a particular pit was uneconomic. 

Government refused to acknowledge that a particular colliery could appear uneconomic at one point, if geological problems had cropped up or expensive new equipment had just been installed, yet the same pit could switch quickly to showing a profit once production increased because of investment, or because a geological problem had been overcome. 

Although more investment tended to bring increased production and better financial returns, government had been underinvesting in the coal industry for a long time. Their aim, to close many collieries and privatise the rest, was driven by an ideology that today we call neoliberalism. 

Crudely expressed, they believed that private business was always good, while nationalised industries were merely a damaging drain on the public purse.

Part three of our four-part serialisation will be in next weekend’s paper.

Recollections of the Miners’ Strike by Hilary Cave, a joint Morning Star, Manifesto Press book is available now from our shop at bit.ly/ strikeHC.