Strategic Injustice and the 1984–85 Miners’ Strike in Scotland

Abstract

Justice was sorely experienced by Scottish miners in the strike against pit closures and redundancies in 1984–85. In Scotland strikers were arrested by police officers at twice the rate of those in England and Wales and were three times more likely to be dismissed from employment by the National Coal Board. Analysis uses Gramsci as guide: Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government was engaged in an anti-trade union war of position as well as a war of manoeuvre. In Scotland, despite the strike’s legality, police officers and NCB officials outmanoeuvred the strikers by criminalising and victimising their local leaders. Arrests and relatively innocuous public-order convictions were followed by punitive sackings which reinforced the government’s positional untruths about the strike. This targeted action was strategic: to defeat the strike; and weaken opposition to the closure of some collieries while intensifying production at others. The subsequent acceleration of deindustrialisation was a further injustice. In contributing to further political divergence within the UK, however, it provided a route to restorative justice for former strikers and their supporters in Scotland. In 2022 the Scottish Parliament provided a collective and posthumous pardon for more than 500 people with strike-related convictions in Scottish courts.