Faced with the wholesale destruction of pit communities, Britain’s miners and their supporters waged a struggle that has gone down as one of the most heroic moments in working-class history.
Despite being considered divorced from the coalfield communities in every imaginable way, the wave of enthusiasm shown for the miners’ struggle by London’s diverse workforces and communities proved to be a decisive form of support.
To advance the miners’ fight in Britain, some 6,000 Australian miners sacrificed their own jobs. Their heroic stance was one of many international actions in defence of British mining communities.
Against Thatcher’s plans to starve the miners back to work, the political and physical sustenance of the miners’ strike was wholly dependent on the skills and determination of thousands of working-class women.
Since the release of Pride a decade ago, the story of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners has become legendary. Now, in what’s likely to be its final year, members reflect on defeats and unexpected victories.
The County Durham pit village of Easington spent the strike year as a miniature police state as officers flocked in to enforce Thatcher’s assault. Four decades on, the scars run deep.
The period of defeat following the miners’ strike has been marked by an ideological retreat from class across the labour movement. Our task is to put the agency of working people at the centre of socialist politics.
Forty years on from the strike which sent their communities spiralling into poverty, former miners are still fighting for a rightful share of their pensions against a government that doesn’t want to give it up.
Seumas Milne speaks to Tribune on the 30th anniversary of his book The Enemy Within, which cast a shocking light on the British state’s ferocious secret offensive against the miners and their leaders.
The Tory project of deindustrialisation was a catastrophe for workers. It smashed the confidence of the socialist movement, which can’t become aloof to its historic demands for decent, dignified work.
South Asians in Britain were all too familiar with state violence at the time of the miners’ strike. That shared experience led them out onto the picket lines and into fundraising efforts, seeking to forge unity through joint struggle.
From the Red Riding Quartet to GB84, David Peace exposed the seedy underbelly of Britain's Establishment with rare candour. In this interview with Alex Niven, the seminal novelist discusses his youth in a mining town, the complexities of post-war Britain, and the need for socialists and artists to move beyond defeatism.
In 1916, the English diplomat Roger Casement was stripped of his knighthood and executed for his participation in the Easter Rising. His homosexuality, uncovered in the trial, still defines his contested legacy.
A new essay collection by veteran music critic Simon Reynolds tracks how electronic music’s future-forward tendency became sounds that eulogised progress in the twenty-first century.
A new documentary celebrates London’s iconoclastic Scala cinema, whose all-nighters and cult programming in the Thatcher era shaped British cinema to this day. But what is its legacy in the 2020s, and what are the movie histories that remain untold?
