When Ralph Bernard met Arthur Scargill, Bernard was in the thick of making a documentary radio on the history of the coal industry, Down To Earth.

Scargill was the leader of the Yorkshire miners, and had yet to become president for life of the National Union of Miners (NUM).

That was in the 1970s, when industrial action could hold a government to ransom during a time when Britain’s “Winter of Discontent” was just around the corner.

Five years later, Scargill may have been in charge of the NUM at a national level, but Margaret Thatcher was in Downing Street, and during what effectively became a civil war during the 1984/85 miners’ strike, she was as stubborn as her opponent. The collapse of the strike and subsequent closure of pits throughout Britain ended a period of trade union power in Britain from which it has never fully recovered. Yet, while Mrs Thatcher has long been swept from office, even if her ideologies still linger, 73-year old Mr Scargill remains the NUM’s honorary president, even if the current union leadership has informed him he no longer qualifies for membership.

Bernard’s observations of King Arthur’s rise and fall inspired Dust, a new play designed to mark the 30th anniversary of Mr Scargill’s election as union president. Set in Mr Scargill’s flat in the Barbican, London, on the day of Mrs Thatcher’s long-awaited death, the nominal miners’ leader receives a visit from an ageing comrade from the frontline of the struggle, while in recession-blighted northern England, history repeats itself as the cuts bite deep.

“I see Arthur Scargill as a tragic figure,” says Bernard as he prepares for the play, scripted and directed by Ade Morris, whose previous work has been seen at London’s Tricycle Theatre. “He says the victory of the miners was the struggle itself, but his tragedy was that he never saw the strike for what it was.”

This may sound like sacrilege to old leftists, especially in the current political climate, when protest against the UK’s current Coalition Government is coming from forces outwith the political mainstream. It was Mr Scargill, let’s not forget, who identified Mrs Thatcher’s goal of dismantling the mining industry as a whole. His claims that the NUM had been infiltrated by Government-backed spies was eventually proved equally correct, despite being scorned at the time.

One of the strike’s flashpoints was what came to be known as the Battle of Orgreave, on June 18, 1984, during which pitched battles took place between several thousand police and a similar number of striking miners on a field close to a steel coking plant in South Yorkshire.

These events were re-enacted by artist Jeremy Deller in 1991, the same year police paid out £500,000 in an out-of-court settlement to 39 pickets who had sued for unlawful arrest after their trials collapsed in 1987.

“This is a play not unsympathetic to Scargill, because a lot of what he said has come to pass, but it does take him to task as well. If he’d gone about the strike in a different manner, there might have been a different result. The strike started in spring, when the Government had five years’ worth of coal stored up, but the biggest mistake was not having a ballot,” says Bernard.

Bernard sees this as a typical act of arrogance by Mr Scargill, whose absolutist approach, he feels, brought about his downfall.

“The first rule of persuasion is to recognise that you don’t have a monopoly on what you see as the correct points of view,” Bernard points out. “The reason why the previous NUM leader Joe Gormley was respected was that he understood that a negotiation is exactly that. You don’t get everything you want. If you go in demanding everything the way Scargill did, they’ll tell you to get stuffed. Margaret Thatcher was the same. Neither of them could accept that there was such a thing as another point of view.”

Given everything that has come to pass both since the strike and in the play, what, one wonders, would the real Arthur Scargill make of how Bernard and Morris depict him on stage in a play for which former Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock has written a programme note?

“I’m not sure what Scargill’s reaction to it would be,” Bernard admits.

“All the way through the 25th anniversary of the strike there was a view that you couldn’t make a programme about it unless it was balanced, and Scargill wouldn’t take part in one.

“I will be writing go him to let him know about the play, though, so we’ll see. What happened in 1984 and 1985 was the beginning of the end of significant trade union power. Today there’s a backlash against the public spending cuts, but we live in a completely different culture now. Arthur Scargill’s tragedy is that the miner’s strike need never have happened the way it did.”

Dust is at the New Town Theatre until August 28, www.universalartsfestival.com