During the twentieth century, Britain's coal miners acquired something of a symbolic status among the Left and the Right alike but for markedly different reasons. The miners’ role at the center of the 1926 general strike, and the extent to which their industrial action precipitated the downfall of Edward Heath's Conservative government in 1974, ensured that they were widely viewed on the Left as a putative vanguard of the British working class and the ultimate source of proletarian solidarity. For these very reasons, though, the political Right viewed the miners and their apparent inclination toward syndicalism as a serious threat to Britain's parliamentary democracy. However, until the 1970s, Britain's Conservatives generally subscribed to the view that the miners in general and their trade union, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), in particular ought to be accommodated as far as possible, so that direct confrontation was avoided. After the clash between the Heath government and the NUM, however, this accommodationist strategy was abandoned by the Conservative Party, to the extent that in opposition until 1979, senior Conservatives quietly prepared for a future clash with the NUM, this culminating in the 1984–85 miners’ strike, when the Conservatives finally defeated their bête noire and thereby accelerated the closure of most of Britain's coal mines, in preparation for the privatization of the few remaining profitable pits.

Although this much is already widely known, Taylor's remarkably detailed and well-researched study provides a number of additional insights into the decline of the NUM and Britain's coal industry since the end of the 1960s. One of his most notable findings concerns the underlying fragility of the coal miners, whose apparent solidarity and comradeship belied underlying weaknesses and internal divisions, many of which derived from “differing regional industrial traditions and political cultures” (3). As such, while individual mining communities and pit villages might be characterized by considerable solidarity, such comradeship did not necessarily extend to miners in other parts of the country; indeed, the solidarity of particular mining communities often fostered a sense of insularity and indifference to what was happening to miners elsewhere.

While the 1972 and 1974 miners’ strikes did foster a notable degree of national unity—thereby promoting an image of proletarian solidarity among Britain's coal miners—these were disputes about pay increases and a relative decline in miners’ wages, issues that affected virtually all miners. However, this apparent unity and solidarity were conspicuous by their absence during the 1984–85 miners’ strike, when any semblance of class solidarity and national unity among miners was largely replaced by interregional differences of interest and intraunion conflict, for, as Taylor notes, “no national coalition had ever been built around pit closures. … Their effect was to fragment not unite” (186). Such differences and conflicts were most apparent in the varying levels of support—or opposition—to the strike, with miners in areas such as Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire generally continuing to work in defiance of the strike (frequently justifying their stance on the grounds that the strike had not been endorsed by a ballot of NUM members, which thus meant it lacked democratic legitimacy) and thereby attracting the opprobrium of many striking miners in more militant areas such as Yorkshire.

Such variations in support both reflected and reinforced ideological and organizational divisions within the NUM, initially between Left/militant and Right-wing/moderate factions, but during the course of the strike, differences began to manifest themselves within Britain's Left more generally. Certainly, the wider labor movement was often unable or unwilling to offer material support; other trade unions were hampered or deterred by the Thatcher government's (anti)trade union legislation, which had narrowed the legal definition of a trade dispute, outlawed secondary industrial action, and strictly limited picketing, while the Labour Party itself was hesitant about publicly endorsing a strike called without a ballot and also widely perceived to be characterized by picket violence against “working miners” and police alike. Having been so heavily defeated in the 1983 election, the Labour Party, now led by Neil Kinnock, was reluctant to be seen giving its support to such industrial action or being associated with the NUM's Marxist leader, Arthur Scargill. Yet even to the Left of the Labour Party, support for the miners’ strike was tempered by criticism of Scargill's syndicalism and his belief that industrial action could precipitate fundamental political and governmental change: “This infantile leftism isolated and fragmented the NUM and produced a crushing defeat” (246).

Of course, such tensions and fragmentation were ruthlessly, but skillfully, exploited by the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher, which pursued a classic divide-and-rule strategy to preempt a national miners’ strike and keep the miners divided geographically, ideologically, and organizationally. Having learned valuable lessons from the 1972 and 1974 miners’ strikes, both of which had inflicted humiliating defeats on the Conservative government, and implementing the strategy and tactics enshrined in the subsequent 1978 “Ridley Report,” the Thatcher government prepared for the 1984–85 miners’ strike meticulously and with almost military precision and was determined that there would be no negotiated settlement or compromise. They were aided throughout the miners’ strike by a sycophantically supportive media, in which striking miners and pickets were portrayed as “bully boys” and thugs while working miners and the police were characterized as heroes valiantly defying intimidation and “mob rule.”

Once the strike had been defeated and the Conservative's pit closure program fully implemented—resulting in large-scale redundancies—little more was heard from ministers about the coal miners’ “right to work.” Moreover, even areas such as Nottinghamshire, which had refused to support the strike and even broken away from the NUM by forming the Union of Democratic Mineworkers, discovered that their stance had not earned them any long-lasting respect or loyalty from Conservative ministers, for they too were subject to extensive pit closures and redundancies during the early 1990s, in preparation for imminent privatization (a policy objective that senior Conservatives had vehemently denied throughout the miners’ strike itself).

In carefully delineating these events, Taylor's volume provides a very thorough account of one of the most pivotal events in British political history, while also skillfully placing the 1984–85 miners’ strike and its aftermath in a wider historical and ideological context. His stance is clearly sympathetic to the NUM, but he is not uncritical, and he avoids the political ax grinding or polemical approach that has often characterized other texts on the 1984–85 miners’ strike. Moreover, Taylor's coverage is both broader and deeper and, as such, is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand just how a group of industrial workers who seemed to symbolize Britain's proletariat were so ruthlessly defeated and destroyed by ministers determined to promote the free market, management's right to manage, and strong government while also committed to emasculating Britain's organized-labor movement and destroying the vestiges of collectivism.