The former Labour MP Ronnie Campbell, who has died aged 80, was one of the last miners in Britain to be elected to the House of Commons. He took his seat as the MP for Blyth Valley following the 1987 election, two years after the collapse of the miners’ strike and a year after the closure of Bates colliery, in Blyth, where Campbell had worked underground since 1958.
Before his election to Westminster, where he stayed in office until he stood down in 2019, Campbell had spent more than two decades as an elected officer of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). He was among the original flying pickets in the 1984-85 miners’ dispute and was arrested twice during the bitter confrontations of the divisive strike.
