"the strike was as much about smashing the unions and robbing us of our voice as much as it was about redundancies"

Indeed. The unions have never recovered, and probably never will. Most people don't even understand unions anymore, particularly in the younger generation. When you consider how the working classes have been slowly disempowered and disenfranchised over the past 30 years or so, the breaking of the unions represents, IMHO, a seminal moment in what has amounted to a concerted and strategic campaign. The Tory press may demonise the unemployed underclass, but who the hell created them in the first place?

Stringsinger: Billy Bragg did a very fine update of Florence Reese's Which Side Are You On? based on the British NUM strike of the 1980s.

"It's hard to explain to a crying child
Why her daddy won't go back
The families suffer but it hurts me more
To hear a scab say 'sod you, Jack'..."