The Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain, and it was fueled by coal. By the 1850s there were over 3,000 British coal mines in operation, employing hundreds of thousands of workers, and Britain was the world’s leading producer of coal, accounting for about 2/3 of global production. In 1913 British coal production peaked, generating over 292 million tons of coal per year. In 1947 the British government nationalized the coal industry.

Coal continued to be the Britain’s primary energy source until the 1960’s. But in that decade, as other more desirable types of fuel became available and as Britain transitioned to a predominantly services-based economy, coal production began to fall precipitously, and the government began to close hundreds of inefficient and unprofitable mines. By the 1980s the British coal industry was being heavily subsidized, operating at a significant loss, and charging substantially more for coal than the international market price.

In 1984, after the National Coal Board (NCB) announced plans to close 20 more mines and thereby eliminate about 20,000 jobs, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) went out on strike, led by their fiery and controversial president, Arthur Scargill. Demanding that there be no more mine closures, Scargill and the strikers were encouraged by the results of successful miners’ strikes in 1972 and 1974, which had caused severe energy shortages in Great Britain, resulting in the emergency implementation of a three-day workweek, and forcing the government to agree to significant wage increases. Scargill’s strategy was to force the NCB to stop the closures by again crippling the British economy with the strike.

But in 1984 the British Prime Minister was Margaret Thatcher, and she was determined to defeat the union. Anticipating the possibility of a strike, Thatcher and her ministers had secretly prepared a strategy that would keep the economy fed with enough coal to prevent any power outages or shutdowns during a strike, while employing police more aggressively than in the previous strikes.

Although Scargill’s strikers strenuously enforced their picket lines (the strike would be Britain’s most violent industrial dispute of the 20th century), and although they were able to mobilize significant public support, eventually the strike began to lose steam. Within the union, Scargill’s strike had been a controversial and disputed action from the beginning, as he had announced it without first taking a vote of all union members, many of whom strongly opposed it. Consequently, many miners kept working and denied they were obligated to strike—a position supported by the courts. The strikers were never able to stop the transportation of coal, and so were never able to cause power shortages and shutdowns. And as the strike dragged on, and as the union’s strike funds were depleted, the strikers began to experience severe economic hardship, in part because a law enacted in 1980 significantly reduced the availability of welfare benefits to the families of strikers, removing a source of support that had been critical during the strikes in the 70s.

Finally, on March 3, 1985, three hundred and fifty-eight days after it began (and 38 years ago today), the strike officially ended. The mine closures that Scargill and his strikers had fought to prevent proceeded.

The coal industry was privatized in 1994 and the last remaining British deep coal mine was closed in December 2015. Today coal mining employs fewer than 200 people in Great Britain.