Civil Law and the 1984-85 Coal Dispute

Abstract

'Law' in all its forms, and the problems which attended its use, pervaded the 1984/5 coal dispute and transformed it from an industrial to a civil dispute. This was, of course, most graphically illustrated by the massive deployment of police, equipment, and, it would seem, magistrates' courts,' in order to defeat the National Union of Mineworkers' attempts to picket out dissident working miners. However, if the criminal law and its machinery of enforcement represented the major battalions and artillery confronting the National Union of Mineworkers then, from the High Court, the Union, as McIlroy points out,2 experienced an increasingly concentrated and well-directed sniper-fire much of which apparently originated behind its own lines. This essay seeks to assess the significance of the use that was made of civil law, procedures and courts and the implications this may have for future policy and planning within the National Union of Mineworkers itself and, indeed, for the trade union movement as a whole. In particular, we want to examine how far it is possible, as some commentators have suggested, to see the resort to civil law as an important part of the Government's strategy to defeat the strike and, as such, as a harbinger of a new era in the relationship between unions, courts and the state as a whole. We must warn at the outset that our conclusions are tentative and, in part, this is simply because the role of civil law in the coal dispute is more elusive and difficult to analyse than that of criminal law. First, of course, while the workings and effects of the latter were dramatic and demonstrable, those of the former were insidious and, except where sequestrators and receivers could be seen chasing funds around Europe, largely covert. Second, as a number of writers have pointed out,3 the use of criminal law appears to have been carefully pre-planned and centrally directed during the dispute and there can be little doubt that it played an important part in the Government's efforts to