Coalfield Justice

In June 2022, former miners secured through the Scottish Parliament a collective pardon for convictions acquired during the 1984-5 miners' strike. The distinct injustices facing Scottish strikers were finally recognised: twice as likely to be arrested as those in England and Wales and three times as likely to be sacked. This book delves into the injustices of the strike, and shows how the pardons were won, using thirty oral history testimonies from former strikers and family members. They remember the injustices of arrest, conviction and employment dismissal. They emphasise how the National Coal Board, police and courts operated as confederates of Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government - silencing union voice and closing pits deemed unprofitable, to maximise returns from intended privatisation. The ongoing justice campaign, utilising the author's findings from the oral histories, pushed the Scottish government to provide the broad-based collective and posthumous pardon that was won in Parliament in 2022. Jim Phillips is Professor of Economic and Social History at the University of Glasgow. His previous books include Scottish Coal Miners in the Twentieth Century (Edinburgh University Press, 2019) and Deindustrialisation and the Moral Economy in Scotland since 1955 with Valerie Wright and Jim Tomlinson (Edinburgh University Press, 2021).