Perhaps incomprehensibly for the people and communities who lived through it, next year it will be 40 years since the violence and fury of the miners’ strike. Incomprehensible, because the dark shadow that year-long civil war cast – politically and economically, culturally and emotionally – still reaches far into people’s lives today.
Long before leave versus remain split families, friends and generations, this defining industrial action caused rifts between people as deep and wide as the seams that invisibly connect villages from Swansea to Fife. I know from my own community of Annesley in north Nottinghamshire that those rifts, those “sides of the pub”, that act of crossing the street to avoid a neighbour who took the opposite decision to either strike or work, can still exist to this day.
