ONCE OUR strike began, single strikers found they were entitled to zero social security pay. The regulations falsely assumed that strikers would receive £15, later £16, weekly from their union in strike pay. Government was aware that this assumption was false, yet it fitted the Ridley Plan ethos of washing the state’s hands of responsibility for paying strikers. 

The NUM had no history of giving strike pay to our huge membership, so in real life, families had to live on state benefits set at pittance level under the pretence that their usual breadwinner had ceased to exist. As these supposed ghosts still needed food and clothing, families had to stretch a paltry amount of money even further. 

Forty years later the wife of a former miner still remembers bitterly that to provide for her family, including herself and her husband, a four-year-old child and a baby she received £11.75 each week. Another Derbyshire mining family still remembers receiving between £13 and £15 each week for a family with two children and a baby.