I started in local newspapers when I was 17 and rose up the ranks, eventually working at The Times as a parliamentary reporter. That got me a break in the BBC in 1972. I got a job with BBC Radio and from then I had the most momentous decade of my life, which was the 1980s. It was a period of great industrial upheaval, of ministers taking on the unions, breaking up the nationalised industries. It was a dramatic pivot that culminated in the miners’ strike. Looking back on my career, sixty-plus years, it was my decade on the frontline in industrial reporting that still comes back. That period, undoubtedly, had the greatest impact on me.

There might be talks at the National Coal Board [NCB] between the miners’ union and the NCB. It could have been covering the steel dispute at the British Steel headquarters. It could have been the local authority employers, and you’d spend all day there. And what you’d be trying to do was to talk to people as they came in and out. Sometimes, you’d spend the day up in Sheffield, where the National Union of Mineworkers had its headquarters, just talking to the national executive in the summer season. Of course, you would all go to the trade union conferences. At the Labour Party conference, the unions played such a big part. It was a tremendous responsibility, and the work was non-stop. There was a great demand for news because so many of these strikes were all-out strikes, sometimes [lasting] thirteen weeks, sometimes even longer. If the petrol tanker drivers went on strike, and the petrol station started drying up, you knew you were the news item, and you knew you’d spend all day in the talks.

My job was to find out what was going on within the unions. It would mean doorstepping meetings of unions, meetings of unions versus management. I would spend countless hours. You’ve got to hang around until the end of the meeting and hopefully get, what we call, a click, get somebody to say something. So, it did mean hours and hours on doorsteps. And it meant chasing trade union leaders around the country. For me on the radio side, my great value was that I would actually have to hang around and record what was said. I could replay recordings to my colleagues. We’d analyse how a union leader responded. It isn’t just the words, it’s the tone and atmosphere. Does this sound menacing? Does this sound as though they’re conceding? Are they sitting on the fence?

We shared information. It was interesting for me to see how the papers were going to interpret a story, because they were more in tune with the Conservative government of the day. Of course, the newspapers mostly supported the Tories. Last month, a man called Bernard Ingham, who was Mrs Thatcher’s press secretary, passed away. He had contempt for unions. He had contempt for industrial hacks. But, of course, he had great influence with the political correspondents. I needed to know how the popular papers were going to respond to this because that would influence the way I wrote the story. Was there really any chance of a settlement?

Most of the unions felt that the mass media was against them. They did soften towards members of the industrial labour group. It was special for me, because I would be getting some of them to say something in their own voice, and they knew that this couldn’t be doctored. When it came to the newspapers, members of the industrial group, even those who worked on papers like The Sun, The Mail, and The Telegraph, still prided themselves on the accuracy of the copy. Any quote they were using, any fact they were claiming, impacted their reputations because they’d have to go back and see these union fellas the next day. What they couldn’t control, of course, was the way in which this information was presented in the newspapers and the headlines, and the trade union leaders understood this.

Even now forty years later, I get the echoes of what it must have been like towards the end of the miners’ strike. The government was manipulating what was called the return to work, because Mrs Thatcher was quite clear — once the miners were back at work, she was going to declare a victory. The big areas like Scotland and Wales agreed that they were going to accept a return to work without an agreement. I was doing the Monday morning broadcast, when the new faces would report for work. A lot of them were the more elderly men, the people who wanted out; they were being told that if you came back to work now you’d get a better redundancy payment than if you stayed out. So, I was reporting this, it would be my voice on Monday morning on Radio Two.

I went up to something called the South Yorkshire Festival, a sort of a mini miners’ gala held up in Sheffield. Miners approached me and said, ‘We’d be in the cafe on the morning just setting off on picket line duty and your bloody voice would be saying the new faces had returned to work.’ The broadcast journalists became cheerleaders for the return to work because the agenda had been set by the government, getting the men back to work on Monday morning. And all the hacks and photographers would be at the pit gates filming the new people coming to work. We couldn’t not reflect what was happening. I think the union movement recognised that there was an attempt by a lot of us in the labour and industrial groups to do a proper job. But, as I said, there wasn’t that recognition that the dice were loaded against the unions.

It was very bad in the public consciousness. The Winter of Discontent was an era where unions could call people out for extensive periods of strikes. The grave diggers on Merseyside were called out and there were shots of coffins piled up waiting to be buried. They still appear regularly in papers fifty years later. They still reinforce the public interpretation that the country was going to the dogs in 1979, that unions had too much power — I’m just repeating the line that would be said. If you take, for example, the rubbish piling up in Leicester Square, they pulled out the refuse staff in Central London and, of course, Leicester Square and Trafalgar Square became rubbish tips. The petrol tanker drivers had been out and there were shortages of petrol.

It had all been preceded, of course, by the two earlier miners’ strikes. In the first miners’ strike of 1972, the big one, there were what we call rotor power cuts. So, what happened then was that whole areas would be told there’s no electricity. I was on Radio Leicester and my job as a reporter would be to list the schools that were not going to be open today because of the power cuts. My wife still insists on me keeping a primus stove up in the loft, and a lamp. Because, of course, if we had a power cut, she remembers cooking meals on a local primus stove. So it’s imprinted in our memories. Ever since, of course, the union movement has had this hanging around its neck. Every Tory newspaper reprints pictures of the coffins, of the rubbish in the Square, as reminders of what life would be like under a Labour government. During the Corbyn campaign, it was a regular montage.

It has been hard for the Tory newspapers to hang those same images around the union movement today. Just think of all those pictures of nurses and teachers. You look at the pictures of the people on the picket line, how diverse they are. Look how many women there are. And how many women general secretaries are out in the media. Pat Cullen [general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing] goes on TV and says all she wants to do is talk. They can’t re-run the pictures of cops charging into miners or rocks being thrown at buses, can they? When these mass demonstrations are being held, it’s different, isn’t it? When it comes to the next election, those images of nurses [and] ambulance workers on the picket line [and] women trade union leaders marching are going to be etched into the public consciousness. This is a totally different image to the one of union ‘barons’ out of control.

We should reflect on the way strikes are reported today. In the case of the rail disputes, you often get a transport correspondent covering the impact of the strike rather than the nitty-gritty details behind it. The other thing that disappoints me is that so many of the strikes are reported by political correspondents who have very limited knowledge of trade unions and industry. There’s no knowledge of union structures, for example. What we’re talking about in the RMT is quite significant. What has led to this position? If I was out on the street as a reporter, I would go to one of those big rail yards, I think Ashford in Kent, Swindon, Reading, [and] try to find out what rail workers are talking about.

Not well at all. What we’ve had is a political knockabout between Conservative politicians and trade union leaders. It’s a reflection of a changing era; we’ve had no real assessment of where these disputes are going. We just do not have a cohort of reporters who’ve got an interest in labour and trade union affairs, or who even know union leaders. There’s Alan Jones at the PA. He’s doing a practical service and does that very well. But we’ve got hardly anybody who has really made a point of finding out what’s going on in these disputes. I’m very unhappy about it. For example, I would love to hear from the media about what was going on in some of these big rail depots. I want to hear what railway workers themselves are thinking about these changes.

We’ve got little reporting out in the field. We’ve had some, to be fair, over the Amazon strike because, of course, there are young workers who use social media. But with these big old industrial strikes like post or rail, we’ve had very little assessment. You haven’t got anybody with an industrial employment background, largely because of the cutbacks in reporting. The political correspondent has become the jack of all trades, because you’ve got to have 24–7 coverage. There was an internal media report recently about the fact that political correspondents are increasingly doing economic stories and they’ve got no bloody economic interest. This is a real indictment of the media today: we just don’t have informed reporters.

I think there has been a revival. What it’s led to — and this is important — is a lot of young workers getting their first introduction to what organised labour can achieve. To see what organisation and campaigning can do.

You’ve got organising in new spaces, like we’re seeing with Amazon workers and taxi drivers. You’ve got a whole swathe of workers who are beginning to understand the importance of trade unions, like people working zero-hour contracts in the gig economy or young nurses. This new generation coming through, I think that their recollection of the winter of 2022 and 2023 will be [of] an intransigent government that wasn’t prepared to sit down and talk, and instead opted to clamp down through legislation.

Last month, I took part in a debate at the University of Essex: ‘Are trade unions a good thing for the country?’ I argued that they were and we won the debate. I said to these students, you’ve got a right to holiday pay, the minimum wage, and other rights and protections because of trade unions. I think there is a new generation coming along that understands the potential of organised labour.