Tom Nairn writes:

The contributors to these two books look back at the strike with a mixture of rage and regret. They feel that something vital was at stake, and then lost in the defeat. Their commemorations are intended both to remind readers of this, and to suggest the possibility of a reprise today. Beckett and Hencke have put great effort into describing the background to the NUM’s final surrender in their concluding chapter, ‘Not an Industrial Dispute, But a War’. Both books emphasise the government’s deployment of huge numbers of police and their use of violence and force, and straightforwardly blame the NUM president for poor generalship: ‘The miners trusted Arthur Scargill with . . . everything they had, and he let them down, bravely shouting, “Onwards and forwards, brothers, the future lies ahead,” without thinking through the dangers and hardships into which he was leading them.’ In his contribution to Shafted, the journalist Paul Routledge — the author of a biography of Scargill — concludes dolefully that the ‘war is over. Nothing is gained by remaining in the trenches of 1984, powerful though those experiences and memories are.’

(LRB 8 October 2009)

Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom | 176 pp. |ISBN: 9781898240051