The 6 March is the 40th anniversary of the start of the year-long miners' strike. But up until today, the lessons of this strike have not been learnt. Or if they were, they have been forgotten.
Today, sections of workers are going on strike one by one, on their own, repeating in an almost farcical way, the fatal mistake made by the miners and their National Union of Mineworkers leaders in 1984.
It's little wonder that the 2022-3 strike wave which was meant to signal (according to the RMT's Mick Lynch) that "the working class was back" ended with few or no gains. In fact for postal workers, who've faced huge job cuts since, and degradation of all their previously hard-won conditions, it has been an infuriating defeat!
Instead of co-ordinating strikes and mobilising workers together on the ground, each section of workers struck in splendid isolation with only one or two token exceptions.
Yes, we should know better! Forty years ago, the strongest battalion of the working class took on the full might of Tory PM Margaret Thatcher's "armed bodies of men", fighting heroically for over 13 months. And lost.
This wasn't just a defeat for the miners. It was a defeat for the whole of the working class. Afterwards there was a prolonged period of demoralisation. Many workers concluded that "if the miners could not win, the rest of us have no chance".
This was precisely Thatcher's intention. She saw her no-holds-barred battle against the miners as a class war, aimed at the whole of the working class, with herself as the capitalists' chief of staff. Not one worker should be allowed to think it was possible to fight the bosses' industrial closure plan, involving massive job cuts and an unprecedented turn of the exploitation screw. Not only that, but the ground was to be laid for the across-the-board privatisation of (then) state-owned utilities - telecoms, gas, electricity, water, etc., without opposition from the vast public sector workforce.
Thatcher carried out all her plans successfully. But her success was never inevitable. Had the miners seen their battle in the same way she saw hers - a class war - needing the full mobilisation all of their class brothers and sisters, there is a good chance Thatcher and the bosses could have been beaten. Of course there's no point in crying over spilt milk. But every reason not to keep repeating the same mistake.