Digging Deeper

Digging Deeper:Issues in the Miners' Strike

Preface by Eric Heffer

Edited by Huw Beynon

  • Paperback

    264 pages / February 1985 / 9780860918202

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A collection of articles by 17 different authors analysing the UK miners' strike in detail. It examines the issues at stake, the Tories' strategy, the role of the police and the courts, the miners and their supporters and families, and the TUC and the Labour Party. Published while the strike was still ongoing, in 1985.

Nine thousand arrests. Two miners killed on the picket lines. The leader of the Kent NUM imprisoned. Trade union leaders pilloried as fascists. Millions of pounds raised in street collections. Communities drawing together to reveal undreamt of strength. Women at the front line of the struggle. A national union's funds sequestered. And a Tory Councillor from North Derbyshire declaring 'I am the NUM'.

Month after month the miners' remarkable strike has been hitting the headlines and making history. There has never been anything like it before.

DIGGING DEEPER draws together a collection of up-to-the-minute and hard-hitting contributions which get beneath the routine 'Scargill vs MacGregor' personalization of the dispute to uncover the real issues at stake: the strategy of the Tories; the role of the police and courts; the resistance of the miners, their families and supporters; the divisions in the TUC and Labour Party; and the future of an industry which has been in the grip of the longest strike this country has ever seen.

Argued with authority and conviction, DIGGING DEEPER is the book of the strike.

Reviews

  • Congratulations to Huw Beynon and his contributors. DIGGING DEEPER is the first analysis of the miners' strike which is adequate to the issues ... It is refreshingly free from easy sloganizing ... and gives the problem back to all of us - not "the miners' crisis" but our own.

    E.P. Thompson

  • DIGGING DEEPER examines the crucial but neglected issues which have erupted with the miners' strike. It documents the government's ruthless annexation of the energy establishment, the law, social security, and sections of the media. Every home and miners' support group should have a copy.

    Sheila Rowbotham