Forty years have passed, but the cruelty of Margaret Thatcher’s vendetta against the miners isn’t over. Today, tens of thousands of former pit workers are losing billions in pension entitlements in a deal imposed on them decades ago.

Successive governments have taken £4.4 billion out of the miners’ pension fund. Retired workers, meanwhile, struggle on an average of £84 a week, with some widows receiving as little as £8.50. After suffering grim poverty during the year on strike — in one documented case from 1984, a child was buried in a coffin with a deceased stranger because the family had no money for their own funeral — campaigners now report cases of former miners being unable to afford to bury spouses. Some have been forced to move into their children’s homes, unable to afford their own.

There have been opportunities to right this wrong. Three years ago, the cross-party Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Select Committee called for £1.2 billion to be returned to the pension pot to address what its damning report called an ‘historic injustice’ — a change which would have handed at least 125,000 retired miners an increase in payments of £728 a year each. But Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, chancellor at the time the report was published, rejected the recommendation.

This scandal, in which the Treasury continues to take millions out of the fund without contributing a penny, stems from the privatisation of the Coal Board in 1994, which left the government acting as guarantor and ensuring a 50:50 split between the miners and the Treasury of any ‘surplus’ the fund accrued.

The deal was struck between the government and the fund’s trustees, which included representatives from the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and later those from the breakaway Union of Democratic Mineworkers (UDM), despite neither union signing off on the final deal. It was sold as a means of ensuring the government would maintain the value, plus inflationary increases, of pensions. The NUM says the split was ‘imposed’ and that there were no genuine negotiations. The select committee deemed the split ‘arbitrary’. Working miners contributed 5.25 percent of their pay to the scheme. The fund’s investments performed much better than expected, with huge revenues going to the Treasury, which has contributed nothing.

Close to 300,000 miners have died since privatisation, none of whom would have received the full benefit of the scheme’s success. All the remaining 130,000 expect to be dead by the time the fund is scheduled to be wound up in 2070, with the Treasury likely to scoop up the remaining balance — expected to be at least £1.6 billion. The government insists that the scheme is working well and that the 50:50 split is necessary to ensure sufficient funds to meet pension payments until it closes.

Chris Kitchen of the NUM says the miners were ‘totally misled and lied to’ at the time of privatisation. ‘It was “take it or lose it”,’ Charles Chiverton of the Mineworkers Pension Campaign Group told Tribune. ‘We were, and continue to be, mugged by gangster politicians in broad daylight.’ He adds that the rules are tied up tightly to inhibit any chance of change, and the problem is compounded by a culture of secrecy and lack of accountability. No other privatised industry has similarly iniquitous pension rules.

Having been victimised — again — by the Tories, the miners are now looking to the prospective Labour government for overdue justice. After the report of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, fifty MPs, including Ed Miliband, the current shadow energy secretary, signed a letter calling on the government for action, including the refunding of the £1.2 billion. A petition organised by campaigners attracted more than 100,000 signatures.

Labour’s 2019 election manifesto pledged to ‘end the injustice of the state taking 50 percent of the surplus and introduce new sharing arrangements so that 10 percent goes to government and 90 percent stays with scheme members’. But that would, of course, cost the Treasury — and while preparations for the next manifesto are shrouded in secrecy, Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ iron rule against spending pledges prevents colleagues such as Miliband and the former BEIS chair Darren Jones, now a shadow Treasury minister, speaking out of turn on any future government commitments.

When approached by Tribune, a Labour Party spokesperson would say only this:

There has been deep unfairness and injustice in the government’s approach to the Mineworkers’ Pension Scheme. There was no fair basis for the original surplus sharing arrangements. The Conservatives have failed to deliver justice to which miners are entitled. Labour believes there must be a comprehensive revision of the arrangements to make sure that miners get the fair share of the money to which they are entitled.

There’s no mention of paying back a lump sum, despite Reeves once pledging just that to the Sunday Mirror during its long campaign on the issue.

As Chiverton points out, this is the latest stage in an assault that will have affected many miners for most of their lives, from work in the pit to redundancy and retirement, and now even in the grave.

Forty years ago, the miners were forced into a year-long strike. Today our communities are destroyed. Most will never recover. Our pensions have been robbed too. Faceless government ministers hold the purse strings and control our finances until we are dead.

This, he says, is the last chance for some semblance of justice. The alternative is unconscionable: ‘A massive pot by the time the scheme closes — but nobody left to receive it.’