In March 1984, Yorkshire pickets made the short motorway journey south to the Nottinghamshire coalfield. They sought solidarity against pit closures. Most Nottinghamshire miners rejected the call and continued to work, protected when necessary by large numbers of police, both local and imported. In the months that followed, the reputed solidarity of these mining communities was often expressed not in opposition to employer or government but against their own trade union. On May Day, working and striking miners each demonstrated outside the Mansfield headquarters of the Nottinghamshire Area of the National Union of Mineworkers. Their officials were themselves divided in their vehement responses to the passions of the divided and massive demonstration. The working majority in the county gained the public approval of Margaret Thatcher. Litigation by miners opposed to the strike led eventually to the sequestration of the assets of the National Union of Mineworkers. Eventually the divisions and animosities of the year-long dispute produced a breakaway union.

The images vividly portray organised labour’s most decisive defeat of the Thatcher years − the sense of a movement in disarray and incapable of responding effectively to a concerted and distinctive political challenge. The divisions of 1984 contrasted with a decade earlier, when the second miners’ strike within two years had provoked the Heath government into calling an election. The result was a defeat that was narrow, but definitive. Heath’s eviction fed myths about the industrial and potential political strength of miners that sustained the victors and aggrieved the vanquished. The reversal a decade later was not a simple matter of Heathite irresolution succeeded by Thatcherite determination. The later victory owed much to the complexities of mining trade unionism. Understanding of the Thatcher years can be developed by analysis of a major adversary.