NEXT month will mark 40 years since the beginning of the 1984-5 miners’ strike. It was not only a formative struggle for an entire generation of socialists and trade unionists, but one whose outcome continues to shape British society today.

But when we meet this weekend for our Morning Star conference — Fightback: 40 Years On From the Miners’ Strike — we will be looking forward, not back.

The miners’ strike was the largest and most consequential industrial dispute of the Thatcher years. Their defeat put rocket boosters under Thatcher’s programme of privatisation and deregulation, from which we can trace a direct line to today’s failed state of collapsing services, enfeebled workplace rights and threadbare social security.

It was a victory of organised capital — the Conservatives had been preparing war on the working class for a decade following the miners’ victory over Edward Heath — over organised labour, and it dealt a blow to trade unionism from which it is yet to recover. Union membership is half what it was then.

But are we recovering? Last year saw the greatest number of strike days since the 1980s. Union conferences may no longer routinely make headline news (except in the Morning Star) but the media and political focus on unions has risen sharply.

The government’s retreat on public-sector pay last year, raising its offer to workers across the board, represented a significant victory for unions. Wage increases catching up with CPI inflation (yes, a flawed measurement) in the summer also reflected the achievements of the strike wave and a new mood of militancy among workers.

“The past we inherit, the future we build” is an oft-quoted maxim of the labour movement. This weekend’s is a then-and-now conference, a debating ground for the left on how we fight and win today informed by the experiences of that titanic struggle.

Its hosting by the Morning Star is appropriate, the labour movement’s “paper of record.” The Star not only gave full-throated support to the strike throughout, as an agitating and organising paper it was right at the heart of the action.

As then-news editor Roger Bagley told me in 2020, “That was the busiest time of my life. The phones were red hot on the news desk, you had Scargill on the line, Dennis Skinner, Mick McGahey. You had miners coming to the office, saying they were down in London for solidarity events and could we find them accommodation. We did a huge amount of work to collect money and food…”

Veterans from that struggle, including National Union of Mineworkers general secretary Chris Kitchen, Heather Wood of Save Easington Area Mines and miner-turned-MP Ian Lavery, will be among those leading the discussion — as will our northern reporter Peter Lazenby, who reported on the strike for the Yorkshire Evening Post.

But the purposen is to build working-class consciousness and militancy today, and it is the dilemmas facing today’s left which will dominate most of the day.

Thatcher’s war on workers took place in the context of a hardening cold war internationally, with Ronald Reagan’s “evil empire” rhetoric directed at the Soviet Union and 1983-4 seeing West and East on the point of nuclear war.

Today, too, attacks on unions and civil liberties accompany an accelerating arms race and ministers talk of looming conflict with major world powers: the impact of this on unions and the challenges it poses to the peace movement will inform session two, Imperialism and the Workers’ Movement.

For Thatcher the miners were the “enemy within,” and the state pulled out all the stops to smash them, most notoriously with the police riot at the Battle of Orgreave.

Her government also launched a ferocious assault on trade union rights, which have been eroded further ever since, recently with the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act seeking to effectively ban strikes across whole sectors.

Understanding the role of the state — not a neutral arbiter, but a weapon in the hands of the ruling class — is essential to a fighting left, a theme we’ll take up after lunch with Our Freedoms Under Attack: State Repression Then & Now, looking not just at attacks on union rights but the persecution of journalists like Julian Assange and attempts to outlaw Palestine solidarity.

Our final session will look at the huge resurgence of trade unions in the last two years and how to build it into a movement capable of changing this country’s direction.

While we have a stellar cast of labour movement leaders, socialist MPs and peace campaigners to lead sessions, each will also make time for audience participation and debate. Just as our paper provides a platform for people to put forward various political and industrial strategies for fighting capitalism, it’s our hope the Morning Star conference will become an annual debating ground for the left.

We’ll be talking too about the importance of the Morning Star itself, and how to get involved in supporting it through readers’ groups, becoming a shareholder and more. Many in attendance will be from regional readers’ and supporters’ groups, and the conference will feed back into this national network of activism.

Forty years after the miners’ strike, we need strategies to end the “golden age for the super-rich” (as the Sunday Times Rich List describes it) and confront wealth and power with the demands of the working class once more.

Facing a vicious anti-worker government and a world in flames, Britain urgently needs a bigger and more revolutionary left.

So let’s talk about how we get there. Join us on Saturday, tickets are available online but you can also buy them on the door. It’s a fiver to get in, and you can always pop by for just one or two sessions if you have other stuff on. We at the Morning Star are looking forward to seeing you.

Ben Chacko is editor of the Morning Star.

Ticket’s for this weekend’s conference are available here.