Blackleg Miner was particularly offensive.   I can remember similar scenes in Mansfield, and sutton in ashfield folk clubs. It was the song - not Roy Bailey. some idiots thought they they were being 'relevant' by singing it - yeh like singing 'Old black Joe' at a black panther meeting.

still we have these arguments everyday on mudcat - middle class people can't see that many of the 'working class anthems' are of their time and as such utterly offensive to a modern audience.

I can remember a year into the strike, a guy went back to work in Pontefract and was beaten to a pulp outside the WMC where my mate was gigging. Not really the subject for rejoicing and community pride.

As for the villification of the police. a big topic of conversation at the time was, is it the police we are facing? there were lots of stories of soldiers put in police uniform. secret service men hanging round the fringes of the miners - collecting evidence. unauthorised phone taps.

I'm sorry - it wasn't a situation that reduced to simplistic formulae of marxist ideology.

the trouble was that nobody was telling the truth, and no one was in a rush to believe the truth that many had arrived at, but couldn't bring themselves to face.

Tebbit was on telly saying that if the miners packed in the strike - not a single job would be lost in the mining industry. The Notts/Derby miners had been through this twelve years earlier - when Alf Robens had given similar assurances - and afterwards the men who had given Robens their trust never struck another blow.

the notts/Derby lot saw it as a comeuppance for the Yorkshire blokes who had refused to back them with strike action in the 1960's. they could see that their own turn was coming - so they might as well grab some money whilst they could. they didn't believe tebbit.

scargill was on telly saying that the country would be lost without his deep mine coal. how lost has the country been?

The labour party upper echelons kept a frigid silence - they knew damn well they would be pusuing similar policies themselves.

Would the miners have been better getting the money and that the government spent on police action and putting it into their communities - bribing other industries in? would Thatcher have given them THAT much money, to a load of people who never have voted for her in a thousand years anyway.

i don't know if it was worth fighting for, I'm damn sure it wasn't worth dying for.