John Westmoreland interviews Howard Wilson about a little-known but vital rank-and-file miners’ action that shows what can and must be done to revive the power of workers’ resistance

A number of people at this year’s Durham Miners’ Gala were sporting T-shirts with the legend ‘I still hate Thatcher’, and there is every reason to do so. Thatcher was a class warrior on the side of the rich. Despite the fact that many of Thatcher’s policies were rooted in the previous Labour government, Thatcher is celebrated on the right for being the person who launched naked neoliberal governance in Britain and smashed the post-war welfare consensus.

Thatcher’s government set in train the devotion to privatisation, financialisation and monetarism that has devastated public services and helped to transfer wealth from the working class to the very rich. Thatcher would acknowledge and approve of the current government’s devotion to fiscal responsibility, cosying up to bankers and businessmen, and giving the working class the sharp end of ‘tough decisions’.

Thatcher’s major achievement, and that for which we should continue to hate her, was that she hugely reshaped the Labour Party and the wider Labour movement. Thatcher was a right-wing populist who was successful because of the failures of Labour and trade-union leaders, with the exception of miners’ leader Arthur Scargill, to put up any meaningful opposition.

When Labour leader Neil Kinnock announced that the party was embracing a ‘new realism’, everyone knew it was doublespeak for trying to out-Tory the Tories. The trade-union leaders seemed hypnotised by Thatcher, who went after them with a series of anti-union measures and the creation of mass unemployment that weakened their base. Job losses and wage cuts became normalised and the working class moved away from taking on the government through collective action.

On the revolutionary left, we often say that it didn’t have to be this way. Workers could have and would have fought back, but they were constrained by the powers on our side – a compromised trade-union bureaucracy and the Labour Party. We get told we’re dreamers, but there were lots of examples of workers at rank-and-file level taking the initiative, prepared to take action, only to run up against the dead hand of the trade-union bureaucracy.

What follows is an example of one such initiative that came from the rank and file of the Yorkshire coalfield. It is the kind of action we need to remember as Starmer and Reeves, along with the trade-union leaders who crave their favour, carry on with policies that Thatcher herself would admire and applaud.

The Armthorpe ‘budget strike’

‘The meanest budget ever’. These were the words the former Labour leader Jim Callaghan used to describe Thatcher’s first budget in June 1979. It was a budget that widened the cracks that Labour had inflicted on welfare spending into a clear break. It proved to be a foundational moment for the neoliberal nightmare that was to follow.

The BBC coverage of the budget was being listened to by some workers on the pit top at Armthorpe in Doncaster. Former miner Howard Wilson takes up the story.

‘We were working on the screens. That’s where the coal comes out of the pit and goes through screens before moving on to the washery. There was no coal coming out and so we were listening to the radio. I can still remember it. We just got angrier and angrier.

‘They were going to double VAT and that would hit working-class families hard who had limited disposable income. But on top of that they were going to cut income tax for the rich (down from 83% to 60%).

‘Then came all this bullshit about how they were going to take tough decisions and cut public-sector spending, and so on. It all got too much to bear.

‘What you have to understand is that there had always been a strong rank-and-file tradition at Armthorpe. In fact, there was a rank-and-file paper for miners called The Collier. It was widely read in the coalfield. We knew, even in a strong union like the NUM, that the strength and independence of the rank and file was the key to winning disputes, and taking on the government.

‘My mate was a good militant. He was called Bob Conn. Bob and me, we started talking about what the unions should be doing about the Tories and their budget. We had been part of bringing down the Heath government in 1974, and, I can’t remember who said it first, but one of us said we should walk out.

‘It was no sooner said than the whole team agreed. A walk out was known as a “rag up”. So we told the manager we were ragging up. When the screens stopped the pit had to stop. The pit manager asked us why we were walking out and we told him straight: we don’t like the budget.

‘It caused an overreaction on his part. He told us he was going to sack us. This is probably what someone up the line on the National Coal Board had suggested. The union couldn’t let that happen. Our official at the pit was Alan Bell. He told the manager he would not allow us to get sacked and that we would picket out the Doncaster pits if we had to and that was that. We were never going to be sacked because the rank-and-file miners understood that old saying “an injury to one is an injury to all”.

‘I wasn’t sure how the face workers would react to us stopping the pit and losing them money, but after talking to a few of them I realised that we had made a mistake just walking out. Those who were in agreement with our action were annoyed that we hadn’t rung down the pit to those at the face. If we had done that, we could have brought out the pit as a whole and the political implications would have been so much greater.

‘As it was, the management and the union were keen to bury the affair. It was relegated to a moment of anger and now we could return to business as usual. But, and take note, business as usual was going to lead to Thatcher’s pit closure programme and the decimation of our mining communities. I am proud that we did it, but I wish we had done it better.

‘From where we are now, that strike, long forgotten and probably regarded as irrelevant by historians and commentators, was exactly what was needed, but on a much bigger scale. There was a rank-and-file leadership. We would play the decisive role during the 1984 miners’ strike too, but we needed to be better organised and clear about our political job – leading where Labour dare not tread.

‘When I look at where we are heading with the current shower, I can say with absolute confidence we need that rank-and-file attitude again. That is the only way to keep the best traditions of the workers’ movement alive and relevant.’

Have you got a story about rank-and-file initiatives in your locker? Let’s share our ideas and experiences. Only the organised working class can bring the changes we need.