Adam Boulton: It’s 40 years since the most gripping news story I have ever worked on
Never mind elections, wars, revolutions, scandals and deaths, this week marks the 40th anniversary of probably the most gripping news story I have ever worked on as a journalist.
Gripping because there were vital economic, political and social issues at stake in this country.
Gripping because two powerful and exceptionally talented political leaders, Margaret Thatcher and Arthur Scargill, faced off.
Gripping because, in their own way, both sides were right.
Gripping that everyone in the country was caught up in the 1984-1985 miners’ strike and conflicted about it.
Gripping above all, for me as a journalist at the start of my career, because the strike reshaped this nation for the future.
On 5 March 1984, 6,000 miners walked out in South Yorkshire at collieries in Cortonwood and Bullcliffe Wood. That day the National Coal Board (NCB) announced there would be “accelerated closure” of 20 pits.
On 12 March 1984, Arthur Scargill, the president of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), called a nationwide strike.
It became the biggest industrial dispute since the general strike in 1926, with 26 million working days lost. It did not come to an official end until a year later, on 3 March 1985.
The NUM and the NCB came into existence after the Second World War. They were part of the consensus, shared by both Labour and the Conservatives, that took much of heavy industry into public ownership.
Arthur Scargill in 1984. Pic: PA
Scargill was a radical left winger who believed a perfect socialist society had never been achieved. Even so, he was right that defeat for the miners would lead to the end of a whole way of life in which the state supported workers and their families, regardless of market forces.
Before the strike he had likened the Thatcher government to “the Nazis” and called for “extra parliamentary action” against “this totally undemocratic government”.
Prime minister Thatcher was right that the deep mine coal industry was uneconomic and subsidised by taxpayers and had been declining in Britain, Europe and North America for decades.
Read more:
Previous strikes and what they achieved
Lessons to be learned from strikes past, present and what they mean for the future
After 200 years, one of England’s last coal mines is closing (2020)
In Britain there were around a quarter of a million coal miners in 1984 compared to a million in 1922. The number of working collieries was down from over 1,000 to 173. Britain was already switching away from coal as the primary source of energy to natural gas and nuclear. Thatcher was subsequently one of the first leaders to recognise the danger of global warming through hydrocarbon emissions but this was not a principle issue at the time of the strike.
Margaret Thatcher visiting Wistow colliery in 1980. Pic: PA
It was a febrile time in British politics. The previous summer, in the wake of military victory in the Falklands conflict, the Conservatives won a massive majority in the general election.
By the summer of 1984, Mrs Thatcher was calling the NUM “the enemy within”. She intended to elaborate on this theme in her party conference speech in Brighton in October, but it was disrupted by the IRA bombing of the Grand Hotel.
Thatcher was committed to confronting trade union power.
She was well aware that a miners’ strike in the early 1970s had effectively destroyed Ted Heath’s Conservative government. During the three-day week in the winter of 1974 there were daily power cuts around the country. Ministers appealed to the public to wash in two inches of shared bath water. Mr Heath lost the 1974 General Election on the question “Who governs Britain?”.
Sheffield in 1984. Pic: PA
In the popular memory the 1984-1985 strike has been sentimentalised almost exclusively in favour of the strikers and their families. (James Graham’s recent TV series Sherwood is an exception).
During the strike the musician Billy Bragg and the filmmaker Ken Loach challenged audiences with the documentary Which Side Are You On?
Popular films since then, such as Billy Elliott, Brassed Off and Pride have centred on the solidarity of the mining communities and the aid they got from other anti-Thatcher movements including Women Against Pit Closures and Lesbians And Gays Support The Miners. The depth of the lingering passions is encapsulated in the Billy Elliot The Musical song Merry Christmas, Maggie Thatcher: “We celebrate today/ ‘Cause it’s one day closer to your death”.
In reality the miners were not united and the country was not united behind them.
Police and strikers at Orgreave Coking Plant near Rotherham in June 1984. Pic: PA
Scargill made the mistake of not holding a national ballot to strike. This meant that the Labour Party, then led by Neil Kinnock, a South Wales miner’s son, did not support the strike.
There was widespread public sympathy for the miners, who faced losing their livelihoods. But opinion polls during the strike showed greater, and strengthening, support for the employers over the strikers. Asked in December 1984 what they thought about the methods being used by the NUM and Scargill, 88% disapproved and 5% didn’t know.
There was near-unanimous backing for the strike in South Wales, Scotland, the North East, Yorkshire and Kent, where many of the richest seams were worked out. Other mining areas, especially Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire in the Midlands, did not go out on strike officially.
Communities were divided. Many angry confrontations took place as local strikers, joined by flying pickets, confronted police protecting those who drove or were bussed into work.
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In Yorkshire, violence between thousands of police and pickets shocked the nation in the so-called “Battle of Orgreave” outside a coking plant. A miner died in a similar confrontation in nearby Maltby. Official statistics record that 51 miners and 72 police were injured at Orgreave.
It was impossible not to get caught in the existential drama.
A Sky News colleague recalls: “I remember my uncle being on strike when I was a kid and I stayed awake in the nights worrying that he wouldn’t be able to buy any dinner and that he’d starve.
“He’s since told me that he had a great time on the buses to London to protest and they had plenty of beer. He had a police officer pal who asked to stand opposite him during the riots so they wouldn’t kick each other too hard.”
Scargill had also miscalculated by calling the strike in the spring when demand for energy was going down. The government had learnt its lesson from previous strikes and ensured stockpiling for at least six months. Scargill liked to say that the visible mounds of coal were like the hair in his combover – piled high around the edges and bald in the middle. He was wrong.
Miners return to work at Betteshanger Colliery after the strike. Pic: PA
Later coal supplies resumed as more desperate miners went back to work, and their overseers in the separate NACODS union did not join the strike.
The government also tightened the law, including a squeeze on welfare payments to families, to make striking more difficult.
A breakaway Union of Democratic Mineworkers was formed. Working miners, encouraged by David Hart, a shadowy Thatcher advisor, went to court to successfully “sequester” the NUM’s assets, which prevented the union from funding the strike.
Meanwhile journalists exposed NUM officials were seeking financial support from the Soviet Union and Libya, although it is denied that any money was ever received.
The NUM was discredited. A return to work by defeated and desperate strikers became inevitable. Union power was decisively broken in de-industrialising Britain.
Scargill in Barnsley earlier this month. Pic: PA
Today all Britain’s coal pits are closed, although there is still some open cast mining in the reprivatised industry. Active NUM membership in 2022 was just 82.
To the shame of successive governments there is a legacy of social deprivation in many former mining areas. In a spirit of protest, those left behind there voted strongly for Brexit and then made up much of the “red wall” which switched from Labour to Boris Johnson’s Conservatives in 2019.
The Conservatives were elected twice more immediately after the strike, in 1987 and 1992.
At Westminster an early day motion has been tabled marking this anniversary, paying tribute to the men and women of the strike and demanding an inquiry into its policing. It has attracted the signatures of just 27 MPs, including Jeremy Corbyn and Ian Lavery, who succeeded Scargill as an NUM president.
Scargill is now president of the Socialist Labour Party and the International Miners’ Organisation. Aged 86 he is still making speeches, he supported Brexit and recently demanded solidarity with the Palestinians, according to The Socialist Worker.
For me there could have been no more useful education than reporting on, and seeing how others reported on, the personalities, the events and the issues of the great strike which divided the nation.
Rachel Reeves is fighting claims that she “lied” to the public about the state of the finances in the run-up to last Wednesday’s budget – in which she raised £26bn in taxes.
It follows a letter published by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), the official watchdog which draws up forecasts for the Treasury, published on Friday.
In it, OBR chair Richard Hughes (who is already under fire for the leak of the budget measures) said he’d taken the unusual step of revealing the forecasts it had submitted to Rachel Reeves in the 10 weeks before the budget, and which is normally shrouded in secrecy.
The OBR sent this table revealing its timings and outcomes of the fiscal forecasts reported to the Treasury
Sir Keir Starmer congratulates Rachel Reeves after the budget
The letter reveals this timeline, which has plunged the chancellor into trouble:
17 September – first forecast
At this point, it was already known that the UK’s growth forecast would be downgraded. The chancellor was told that the “increases in real wages and inflation” would offset the impact of the downgrade. The deficit forecast by the end of the parliament was £2.5bn.
20 October – second forecast
By this point, that deficit had turned into a small surplus of £2.1bn – i.e. the productivity downgrade has been wiped out and “both of the government’s fiscal targets were on course to be met”.
31 October – third forecast
The final one before the Treasury put forward its measures. The finances were now net positive with a £4.2bn surplus.
But the accusation is that Rachel Reeves was presenting an entirely different picture – that she had a significant black hole which needed to be filled.
13 October
Ms Reeves tells Sky’s deputy political editor Sam Coates the productivity downgrade has been challenging but added: “I won’t duck those challenges. Of course we’re looking at tax and spending.”
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27 October
With the Treasury now aware the deficit had been wiped out, the Financial Times was briefed about a “£20bn hit to public finances.”
4 November
Ms Reeves gave a dawn news conference in Downing Street, setting the stage for tax rises. She says she wants people “to understand the circumstances we are facing… productivity performance is weaker than previously thought”, adding that “we will all have to contribute”.
10 November
Ms Reeves tells BBC 5Live that sticking to Labour’s promises not to raise taxes would require “things like deep cuts in capital spending”. The stage seemed set for the nuclear option – the first income tax rise in decades.
13 November
After headlines about a plot to oust Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, the Financial Times reported that the chancellor had dropped plans to raise income tax because of improved forecasts [which we now know hadn’t changed since 31 October], putting the black hole closer to £20bn than £30bn.
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Budget 2025: ‘It’s sickening’
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‘You’ve broken a manifesto pledge, haven’t you?’
The prime minister’s spokesperson has insisted Ms Reeves did not mislead voters and set out her choices, and the reasons for them, at the budget.
But the issue has had enormous cut-through, with newspapers giving it top billing.
The Sun’s Saturday front page headline – “Chancer of the Exchequer – fury at Reeves ‘lies’ over £30bn black hole” – will not have been pleasant reading for ministers.
She now has questions to answer about the chaotic run-up to the budget – of briefing and counter-briefing, which critics say now makes little sense.
Tory leader Kemi Badenoch said on Saturday: “We have learned that the chancellor misrepresented the OBR’s forecasts. She sold her ‘Benefits Street’ budget on a lie. Honesty matters… she has to go.”
Economist Paul Johnson, former director of the respected Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), told The Times the chancellor’s 4 November news briefing “probably was misleading. It was clearly intended to have an impact and confirm what independent forecasters like [the National Institute of Economic and Social Research] and the IFS had been saying”.
“It was designed to confirm a narrative that there was a fiscal hole that needed to be filled with significant tax rises. In fact, as she knew at the time, no such hole existed.”
Read more on budget fallout:
Reeves accused over forecasts
Hospitality ‘needs a lifeline’
Ms Reeves is doing a round of morning interviews on Sunday in which she’ll be grilled over which of her budget measures will generate economic growth (which the government claimed was its number one priority), why they have been unable to tackle rising welfare spending and now about why markets and voters were left confused by dire warnings.
She may claim that she never personally said there was a specific £30bn black hole or that the extra headroom generated by the tax rises will ensure she does not have to come back for more next year.
In an interview with The Saturday’s Guardian, Ms Reeves said she had “chosen to protect public spending” on schools and hospitals in the budget.
She confirmed an income tax rise had been looked at, and insisted that OBR forecasts “move around” after the Treasury has submitted its planned measures. There are plenty more questions to come.
Meanwhile, Sir Keir will use a speech on Monday to support Ms Reeves’ budget decisions and set out his long-term growth plans.
He will praise the budget for bearing down on the cost of living, ensuring economic stability through greater headroom, lower inflation and a commitment to fiscal rules, and protecting investment and public services.
Sir Keir will say “economic growth is beating the forecasts”, but that the government must go “further and faster” to encourage it.
Politics
Lammy says justice reforms will reduce victims’ suffering – as right to jury trial set to go in some cases
Victims will be put “front and centre” in reforms to be announced this week, the justice secretary has said, amid reports jury trials will be scrapped in some cases.
Sky News understands ministers have already been briefed on the changes, which would see a judge decide most cases on their own except for murder, rape or manslaughter – or those in the “public interest”.
The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) said the reforms would speed up justice and save victims from “years of torment and delay”.
Nearly 80,000 cases are currently waiting to be heard in crown courts, but a bid to limit the right to jury trial is likely to be divisive.
Shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick said Mr Lammy should “pull his finger out” to cut the backlog rather than “depriving British citizens of ancient liberties”.
“The right to be tried by our peers has existed for more than 800 years – it is not to be casually discarded when the spreadsheets turn red,” said Mr Jenrick.
Full details are expected in the coming days, but in a statement today Mr Lammy said he had “inherited a courts emergency; a justice system pushed to the brink”.
“We will not allow victims to suffer the way they did under the last government, we must put victims front and centre of the justice system,” he added.
Mr Lammy said thousands of lives were on hold due to the case backlog, a “rape victim being told their case won’t come before a court until 2029. A mother who has lost a child at the hands of a dangerous driver, waiting to see justice done”.
He said he wanted a system that “finally gives brave survivors the justice they deserve”.
The justice secretary will reportedly go further than a review recommended. Pic: PA
.However, it’s been reported Mr Lammy will go further than a review conducted by Sir Brian Leveson.
The retired judge backed the move for juries only in the most serious cases, but also proposed some lesser offences could go to a new intermediate court where a judge would be joined by two lay magistrates.
The Times said Mr Lammy had suggested in an internal memo he would remove the lay element from many serious offences that carry sentences of up to five years.
There are fears such a move could increase miscarriages of justice and racial discrimination.
Read more from Sky News:
Reeves fighting ‘lie’ claims as Starmer set to back budget
Your Party co-founder refuses to enter conference hall
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Work and pensions secretary speaks to Sky about justice reforms
Speaking to Sky News’ Politics Hub programme this week, work and pensions secretary Pat McFadden did not deny the changes were on the way.
The MoJ has laid the ground for the reforms by saying the court backlog could hit 100,000 by 2028 under the current system.
It said just 3% of cases are currently decided by a jury, with more than 90% already dealt with by magistrates alone.
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