Tomorrow Marx Memorial Library opens a series of public talks on the great struggle of Britain’s mining communities, which took place 30 years ago, examining their lessons for trade unionists and working people today.

We are pleased to announce that Seumas Milne, author of the definitive account of the British state’s machinations to defeat the miners, The Enemy Within — The Secret War Against the Miners, opens our lecture series speaking on the miners and the state.

In March this year — the 30th anniversary of the beginning of the 1984-5 miners’ strike — Milne republished an updated edition of his indispensable book, describing the miners’ strike as “the decisive social and economic confrontation of Britain’s post-war era.”

Cabinet papers released in January under the 30-year rule demonstrate that just as NUM president Arthur Scargill warned us in 1983, there was indeed a secret government hit list to close 75 collieries with the loss of 75,000 jobs when the strike began.

Thatcher lied about it to Parliament — as about so much else — and planned to send thousands of troops into the coalfields, as her government faced imminent defeat.

Seumas Milne writes: “A generation on, it is even clearer than it was at the time why the year-long struggle over the country’s energy supply took place, and what interests were really at stake.”

The course of world events since 1985 has reinforced the lesson that control over state energy policies, supplies and sources of hydrocarbons have become the determining factors of geopolitics.

The disastrous succession of western imperialist wars and “interventions” from Afghanistan to Iraq, Libya, Syria (a proxy for intervention against Iran) and Venezuela are reminders that neoliberal, globalised capitalism cannot tolerate states that develop energy policies independently of US and Western energy corporations.

The current ramping up of Western leaders’ hostility to Russian President Vladimir Putin and the western-backed coup in the Ukraine this year exposed the rifts between US imperialism, which is pursuing a policy of rapid destabilisation of Russian and Chinese interests, and the foreign policy interests of Germany, which relies on Russian energy to fuel its manufacturing export boom.

Thatcher’s chancellor Nigel Lawson described government preparations for the 1984-5 strike as “like rearming to face the threat of Hitler,” the same hackneyed cliché that Charles Windsor and David Cameron use today to attack Putin.

The Tories’ aim of humiliating and anathemising the miners and their leaders was a considered and concerted strategy of British state power to break the single greatest obstacle to corporate interests’ transformation of the economy.

Thatcher’s offensive ushered in the full-blown neoliberal model.

As Milne writes: “The battle over coal in the 1980s was really about power and class, not fuel. Success for the miners could not have turned the neoliberal tide, which was a global phenomenon. 

“But it would certainly have weakened Thatcher and put a brake on Labour’s rush for the ‘third way,’ which turned into new Labour’s embrace of the Thatcherite settlement.”

The miners’ strike was a battle for jobs and communities, but also the voice of a different kind of Britain, rooted in working-class solidarity and collective action. 

The crippling of the National Union of Mineworkers, the British labour movement’s best battalions, opened the way for anti-union laws and zero-hours contracts, falling real wages, payday loans and food banks of today.

Milne writes: “The government unleashed the full force of the state — a militarised police occupation of the coalfields, a commandeered and manipulated criminal justice system, mass sackings and jailings — and the use of MI5, GCHQ, the NSA and Special Branch to bug, infiltrate, smear, manipulate the media, and stage dirty tricks against the union and its leaders.”

In the 1990s the story broke of security service operations against the miners. 

Today, MI5 “counter-subversion” has been subcontracted to notorious undercover police units, while global blanket surveillance by GCHQ and the NSA and state collusion with mass corporate blacklisting of trade unionists continues, facilitated by the continuing weakness of the labour movement.

The lessons of this epochal struggle are an opportunity to understand how we got to this state of affairs and more importantly how we can change them.

Alex Gordon is chair of the Marx Memorial Library and Workers’ School

Seamas Milne’s talk on the Miners and the State takes place tomorrow from 6.30pm in the Main Hall, Marx House, 37a Clerkenwell Green, London EC1.