A possible week in London in 1984: first thing on Monday morning on your way to work, you are greeted at your local tube station by a group of miners collecting donations for the coalfields. When you arrive in the office, your union rep is doing the rounds signing people up for a regular levy to support the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). She tells you that tomorrow lunchtime a speaker from Women Against Pit Closures will be coming in to talk about how the strike is going in their area. Later in the week, you drop off some books at the library, and put a few coins in the collection bucket to help out mining families. On Friday night, you go to a pub round the corner from your flat where bands are playing a fundraiser for the strike, and see the famous yellow and black Coal Not Dole stickers plastered everywhere. You wander home afterwards, singing ‘I’d Rather Be a Picket Than a Scab’ under your breath.

At times, it could feel like the miners’ strike was everywhere. It was door-to-door collections on housing estates, rallies in town halls, film showings at women’s centres, and pickets at the nearest power station. Alongside the industrial struggle, a large and diverse solidarity campaign developed, which Doreen Massey and Hilary Wainwright described at the time as having ‘as broad a social and geographical base as any post-war radical political movement’. At the heart of the campaign were the miners’ support groups that proliferated across the country, organising and coordinating activity in particular localities. The coalfields were often far from Britain’s major urban areas, but this support movement resonated throughout the cities. Millions of pounds in cash, along with trucks full of food and other essential supplies, flowed out of Manchester, Glasgow, Cardiff, and elsewhere to help keep the industrial dispute going.

Sometimes donations were made to a central NUM fund, which was then distributed to where it was needed. In other cases, the links were more direct. The London printworkers Brian Porter and Brian Donovan estimated that they travelled 10,000 miles taking money and goods to coalfield communities as far apart as Kent, South Wales, and Scotland. These personal experiences could be powerful. Porter and Donovan described the rapturous greeting they received on arriving at a social club in Ashington, Northumberland, as an experience ‘you’d have to be made of stone not to have been moved by’. People from the coalfields also travelled in the opposite direction. Many support groups ‘twinned’ with specific mining areas to sustain these kinds of direct relationships.

Life and, of course, politics, were in many ways different in Britain’s cities and coalfields during the 1980s. Both economically and socially, cities tended to be more heterogeneous than mining areas. Massey and Wainwright commented that urban politics was often ‘anarchistic, socially adventurous’, more at the radical than the labourist end of the movement. But there were common bonds as well. Many, of course, faced a shared adversary in Thatcherism. If there was one group the Conservatives seemed to fear and despise as much as powerful trade unions like the NUM, it was the urban left. The economic devastation facing the coalfields also had its analogue in the cities. Socialist historian Raphael Samuel described how ‘the spectre which Arthur Scargill conjures up when speaking is that of the urban disaster … of unemployed youth in the city — of Liverpool in particular’.

Others made different links. The hostile coverage of the miners’ strike in much of the media was recognised, for instance, by LGBT groups, who were often targeted by The Sun and others. Similarly, stories of state violence in the coalfields resonated particularly with racialised minorities who had been at the sharp end of police harassment in Britain for years. The influential Trinidadian activist and writer John La Rose noted that ‘during the strike the mineworkers learned what the black population have had to learn during 30 years of hard experience with the police and the courts’. But it wasn’t just a case of shared victimisation. La Rose also insisted that the strike had ‘aroused so much passion and attracted so much solidarity from black workers and unemployeds’ because of the ‘courage, determination and heroism of the miners and their families’.

Some of the connections made in 1984–5 were new, but they built on longer histories. Links between urban and coalfield activists had been made throughout the intense political and industrial struggles of the 1970s. Perhaps the most famous event of the successful 1972 miners’ strike, the Battle of Saltley Gate had seen thousands of Birmingham workers leave their factories to bolster miners’ pickets and shut down a crucial fuel depot in the city. In turn, miners came out for others. ‘We’ve always stood with anybody who wanted to fight,’ as Yorkshire NUM president Jack Taylor put it. Notably, thousands from the coalfields travelled to London in the summer of 1977 to support the Grunwick photo-processing factory workers in their dispute. Solidarity could travel back and forth between cities and coalfields; it was a mutual relationship.

If there was significant novelty in the 1984–5 support movement, therefore, it’s important to recognise that it depended on existing networks, organisations, and spaces. These constituted what we could think of as the infrastructures of solidarity. The labour movement was, of course, pivotal in this regard. Trades councils often formed the basis for the miners’ support groups. Regional bodies of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), and in Scotland the Scottish Trades Union Congress (STUC), were also important in coordinating this work. On a smaller scale, the connections of left parties — Labour, Communist, and Trotskyist — played a notable role: providing a bed perhaps for a miner travelling to fundraise, or introducing them to a union rep at a local workplace who could arrange a meeting on the strike.

Networks of explicitly left spaces were crucial as sites where the support campaign was planned and fundraising took place. Bookshops rooted in the women’s, black, and LGBT movements, alongside more general left-wing ones, were essential resources for this work. So were the centres that were flourishing in Britain’s cities during this period: women’s, LGBT, and unemployed workers’ organisations; trade union resource centres; and more. In the coalfields, the miners’ welfare centres played a comparable, if not identical, role. The historian Stephen Brooke has argued that these physical spaces created something like ‘social democracy zones’ in metropolitan centres, in opposition to the ‘enterprise zones’ that characterised Thatcherite neoliberalism. With a slightly different political emphasis, Notts miner Brian Lawton commented that the Unemployed Workers’ Centres were ‘like little soviets’ during the strike.

The support movement was in many ways impressive and inspiring. But, given the ultimate failure of the strike, it’s important to think about the limitations of this solidarity. Many people in Britain were either ambivalent about the strike or explicitly hostile, and that included trade union members. When they were elected in 1979, the Conservatives tapped into significant public antipathy towards unions, which were often blamed for Britain’s economic problems and accused of being overly powerful. More specifically, the criticisms levelled at the miners by politicians, journalists, and others — about the lack of a national ballot, the political motivations of the NUM leadership, and violence on the picket lines — all fitted into existing narratives about the labour movement that had been repeated with growing intensity over at least the previous fifteen years. In this febrile anti-union atmosphere, significant sections of the public were primed to accept the case against the strike.

It wasn’t just an ideological issue, or a question of public popularity, though. When the miners won historic victories in 1972 and 1974, sympathetic action from energy and transport workers was crucial in enhancing the disruptive effect of the NUM’s action. There were some comparable examples of industrial solidarity in 1984–5 — train drivers not moving coal, for instance — but it was considerably more limited. The support movement helped sustain the coalfields for a year, which was essential, but it was less able to directly increase the impact of the strike.

It was harder to organise this kind of sympathetic action in part because of the acceleration of deindustrialisation and the rise of unemployment in the early 1980s. Industries with strong trade union traditions were being decimated, and those still in work were more fearful for their jobs. If we consider again the Battle of Saltley Gate, many of the Birmingham trade unionists involved worked in the car industry. But by the time of the 1984–5 strike, the city’s manufacturing sector was in rapid retreat and unemployment in Birmingham was over 20 percent. In that context, it was just much more difficult to imagine a similar event. Workers also faced a transformed legal landscape, in which solidarity industrial action had been effectively banned. The NUM didn’t always abide by the new rules, but they had a wider disciplining effect on the labour movement.

The ultimate failure of the miners’ strike was not, of course, solely down to the support movement. There was no silver bullet for winning the dispute. Yet, this history does tell us that we need to have an honest account of where power lies during industrial conflicts, how it can be mobilised, and what role a support movement can play in this task. It’s not always a question of pure will. Keeping in mind the wider constraints — legal, political, economic — could also help us avoid falling into destructive and futile recrimination.

But there are more positive lessons to be learnt from this history. The ability to create in 1984–5 concrete relationships of solidarity between big cities and smaller towns, and semi-urban and rural areas, should inspire us now. The divisions between these kinds of places, manifested powerfully in the 2019 general election, is something that the Left in Britain needs to find ways to bridge. The experience of the miners’ strike suggests important guiding principles for doing so. Solidarity should be a form of practical support, not merely an expression of sympathy. It can be a relationship of mutual aid, rather than one flowing in a single direction like charity. We need to be able to recognise commonalities without seeking to submerge differences. And, crucially, we can’t wait for struggles to break out. We need to always be building and sustaining the networks, organisations, and physical and virtual spaces on which a support movement relies. This is the task of building cultures of solidarity.