British Miners Built Their Own Power and Culture. Deindustrialization Wiped It Away.
Miners’ labor militancy transformed British politics and culture in the twentieth century. Then neoliberalism destroyed coal miners’ institutions and communities, upending British politics at the entire working class’s expense.
Abandoned miners’ cottages in a state of ruin after the closure of a local colliery, Easington, Durham, UK, in the late 1990s. (Corbis / Getty Images)
In the twentieth century, British coal miners built mighty cultural and political institutions that challenged and were challenged by conservative and neoliberal rule alike. But since the 1980s, the coal industry and its workers have been pushed to the periphery — with disastrous results for the economic and cultural survival of British mining communities.
In their book The Shadow of the Mine: Coal and the End of Industrial Britain, Ray Hudson and Huw Beynon explore the political, cultural, and economic history of mining communities from the early days of industrialization. They also explore the devastating aftershocks of deindustrialization, not only for coal miners but for the entire British working class.
Jacobin’s Piper Winkler spoke to Hudson and Beynon about how miners organized their isolated coalfields into a formidable political force, how this force contended with the austerity of Thatcherism and Blairism, and how it left a lasting impact on modern working-class culture and labor organizing.
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