The Aberpergwm Mine, thirty kilometers north of Swansea, is the closest you get in these lands to a trip back in time. The only deep one that remains open, after numerous closures, bankruptcies and vicissitudes, now under private ownership, keeps in its bowels like a treasure that no one wants eight million tons of superior quality anthracite, the only place from all over Western Europe where it still continues to be mined.
But above all, it is a tribute to the times when coal was the engine of the industrial revolution. Wales received a huge influx of population, a quarter of a million people came to work in the mines, and now depressed places like Glynneath, Blaenavon, Merthyr Tydfil and the Rhondda Valley were not only prosperous, but the their names were familiar in the farthest reaches of the empire. Without coal, some historians think, Cardiff would still be a village and the country perhaps a rural province in the west of England, like Cornwall.
By 1900, a third of global coal exports came from the mines of the Welsh valleys, and the demand to power factories, locomotives or steamships was insatiable. The industry was nationalized in 1947, after the Second World War, and in 1984, when the great miners’ strike began, it was already in full crisis, many wells had been closed and the working week reduced to three days to save electricity had been a decisive factor in the downfall of Edward Heath’s Conservative government. Even so, they were the heart of many localities.
After the fragile and turbulent Labor governments of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, Margaret Thatcher arrived in 1979 with the firm intention of ending powerful unions cornering the nation, closing all unprofitable mines (most, every ton of coal that was mined cost four pounds per taxpayer at the time) and transform the UK economy from manufacturing to services.
What followed was an unequal and fratricidal war, on the one hand, between the workers and the government (which, anticipating what was coming, had stored all the coal it could) and, on the other, between the miners themselves (the most radical in Yorkshire against the most moderate in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, those who wanted the strike and those who did not). The term scab (‘squirrel’) was coined to stigmatize those who went to work against the orders of the union. The images of police charges with batons and horses, such as that of Orgreave in June 1984 (with a balance of 123 injured and 90 arrested), went around the world.
Politically, it became a pole between Thatcher, who had the support of the majority of voters, and the president of the National Union of Mineworkers, Arthur Scargill, who used the conflict to try to bring down the government in an ideological war and of class, the workers against the capitalist State (he never wanted to put the strike to a vote among the miners themselves, because he feared not getting the 55% support he required for it to be carried out). Names like Cottonwood, Thoresby, Easington, Ollerton, Orgreave, Annesley or Shirebrook, today nothing more than tiny dots on the map, villages left in the hands of God, were constantly in the news as scenes of work stoppages, confrontations and bloody battles fields
For many the strike of 1984 is a vague memory, or a story told by their parents and grandparents, but it is very present in cinema (Ken Loach films), as is the condition of the English working classes it had previously been the thread of George Orwell’s novel The Walk to Wigan Pier. Elton John composed for the musical Billy Elliot a theme whose lyrics say: “Merry Christmas, Maggie Thatcher, we all celebrate today because it means your death is one day closer .. .”. On the day he died, many ex-miners and ex-miners organized parties, and in the room where the play was being performed, the producers asked the audience if they wanted the song to be sung or deleted out of respect. Only three voted for the latter, and they left.
Former Labor leader four decades ago, Neil Kinnock (who represented the party’s moderate wing against the radical Militant group, with Liverpool as its stronghold), tried to mediate between Scargill and the miners who were demanding a vote on the strike , or directly they didn’t want her, but tempers were too tense, and the toughest accused the others of being cowards and effeminate. There was no room for compromise.
Today the mining towns of Wales, Lancashire or Yorkshire are mere shadows of what they once were, depressed places with huge unemployment and dependency on social benefits, without that spirit of community and solidarity that allowed them to survive in the strikes (aid came from France, Germany, Italy and even the Soviet Union, and now a delegation of Welsh miners has traveled to Kyiv to return the favor, in a convoy full of medicine and food for to their colleagues at war). A bleak landscape of closed pubs and shops, men passing the hours doing nothing, one hundred and one shops, supermarkets with Polish products and malnourished children. One of the great paradoxes of history is that many of those who challenged Thatcher, and her children, do not want immigrants, voted in 2016 for Brexit and in 2019 for Boris Johnson, and now support the far right and leave seduce even Reform, the xenophobic party of Nigel Farage. Like Trump voters in Ohio or Michigan, they feel betrayed by the system.
Thatcher and capitalism won the Stargill war, left the unions a shadow of what they had been and hundreds of thousands of miners (25,000 in Wales) lost their jobs. Some wells closed immediately, others in the following months, years and decades, in a process of deindustrialization that changed the political landscape and the social and industrial fabric of the country and opened wounds that have not yet healed.
The last English deep coal mine, Kellingley, closed in 2015. In Wales, Aberpergwm, near Glynneath, remains a skeleton of what was and a journey not only into the past, but also to the future, a mirror of what the United Kingdom was forty years ago, and what it will be in another forty if it does not modernize and make the transition to other industries and a more effective economic model.
