Robbie Dinwoodie: When the miners fought austerity

Anti-austerity campaigners today? That would be the miners in the early eighties. From the white line painted on the road outside Bilston Glen Colliery, to a pit-head bothy in Fallin, to a doo'cot in Whitburn I reported the experience of the strikers who knew they had been goaded into a trap but felt the cause was just even when defeat seemed inevitable.

I was always reminded of the question to James Connolly, the Edinburgh-born socialist who ended up commanding the Easter uprising at the Dublin GPO. "What are our chances of success?" he was asked. "None whatever," he replied.

There was something of that about the thinking of the miners in the 1980s as it became obvious that the Thatcher Government was determined to smash the unions through the destruction of their perceived Praetorian guard. The Ridley plan was already in place, with huge coal stockpiles and police primed to act in a political manner unknown in modern times.

I covered the 1983 dispute at Monktonhall Colliery where an aggressive new boss of the Scottish coalfield, Bert Wheeler, was probing at the NUM defences. This was all about provoking a national dispute, miners told me, and this had a ring of truth about it as other flashpoints arose in places like Polmaise in Stirlingshire.

After my reporting of the Monktonhall "ca'cannie" dispute miners began getting in touch to say industrial relations were breaking down in a way which indicated a plan for schism. There were claims of provocation at Bilston Glen in Midlothian. Polmaise, the pit at Fallin on the south of the Forth in Stirlingshire was already out on strike before the national strike started in March 1984.

As the national strike unfolded one of the first people I met was Davie Hamilton, now MP, the delegate at Bilston where the National Coal Board famously painted a white line at the road end and said they would sack pickets caught on the wrong side of it. This was deemed unlawful, but Hamilton was swept up in claims of assault and intimidation of strike-breakers. He was acquitted after two months on remand.

When I was asked to report on Polmaise the bitterness between miners and the media was getting out of hand, so I carried with me a phone number from Midlothian attesting to my fairness.

Even so, entering those pit gates in Fallin and approaching the NUM bothy was unnerving, as was the sight of the formidable strike committee, but they made a phone call and decided to trust me with their story. These men were ultra-aggressive but not for themselves. It was all channelled at defending their communities and their class.

The next time I had to check out the ground I carried their endorsement, so James Neilson met me in Whitburn to discuss fears that Polkemmet Colliery had been deliberately flooded to ensure its demise while the miners were on strike.

By that time a new concern was arising, the rate of convictions of miners, some on the most spurious of pretexts, making a mockery of industrial relations law and the right to strike. The miners saw it as state intimidation.

Afterwards I got an interview with Mick McGahey. He was understandably paranoid about being eavesdropped by the security services and spoke to me in Sir Walter Scott code as I sought an interview. Luckily I did not turn up at city centre pubs such as the Abbotsford and instead saw him in the suburbs at the Rob Roy in Liberton, where the Special Branch would have known to find him all along.

Would he have led the miners to a different outcome from Mr Scargill? I asked. He refused to turn on his comrade, urging me to read Soviet historian G.V.Plekanov . I tracked down "The Role of the Individual in History" and found the conclusion, which was that Mr Scargill or Mr McGahey might have marginally speeded up or slowed down the great structuralist tide of events, but neither would have changed the outcome.

The anti-austerity movement would benefit greatly from the likes of McGahey and his lost union today.