A rich seam Mark Fisher looks at influence of political cartoons during the miners’ strike P


oor Neil Kinnock. He had only recently been elected as Labour leader when the miners’ strike kicked off. He was torn. Should he back the striking workers, not least those in his own constituency, or should he take issue with the


NUM for side-stepping a pit-head ballot? He would not be the last party leader whose allegiances pulled in two directions. Newspaper cartoonists had a field day. There he was, depicted by Nicholas Garland in The Daily Telegraph as a skinny bather, shivering in his trunks, the waves of the coal dispute crashing towards him. As Mac saw it in The Daily Mail, Kinnock was a floppy-tongued poodle shuffling behind a domineering Arthur Scargill, the miners’ leader, on the way to the Labour Party conference. Gerald Scarfe in The Sunday Times turned him into an


elongated doll, stretched between the tugging hands of left and right with a look of eye-popping panic. Repeatedly, he appeared as a diminutive puppet, peeping


out of a miner’s lamp, sitting on the lap of Margaret Thatcher or trying to free himself from Scargill’s controlling strings. “He immediately becomes the butt of the cartoons because


he’s got this dilemma,” says Nicholas Jones, who covered the 1984–85 strike as an industrial correspondent for BBC radio. “He’s torn apart for month after month. The cartoonists begin that demolition job that continued all his political life. In his first political test, he loses credibility and the cartoonists make sure the public see this in Technicolor in a very graphic way.” It is an arresting thought. Could it be that the journalists


who inflicted the most political damage during this divisive strike were not the columnists but the cartoonists? They were the ones whose work had the most immediacy, bite and polemical force. Could even the sprightliest leader writer match the impact of, for example, Michael Cummings in The Daily Express imagining Scargill on a bridge about to drop a slab of concrete onto a defeated-looking Kinnock? That is one of the many uncomfortable images in The Art of Class War: Newspaper Cartoonists and the 1984–85 Miners’ Strike, in which Jones digs through his archive of press clippings to show how the bitter conflict was represented visually – most commonly to forward the opinions of pro-government proprietors. Published by the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom (North), the book draws with Reithian even- handedness on publications from the left and right to explore the meeting point between satire and propaganda. For every crumbling statue of Thatcher, there is a deranged-looking Scargill demanding unconditional surrender like a stuck record. The book started after Jones went up to his loft to retrieve his 24 boxes of cuttings, subsequently donated to the University of Sheffield, covering the mining industry from the


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mid-1970s to 1990. “As I was turning over the pages, it was the cartoons that came out,” says Jones, an NUJ member since 1960. “The ones from the right-wing newspapers are really in your face. They are as violent and as vitriolic as the social media of today. Then I looked again at all of the left-wing papers – News Line, Militant, Socialist Worker, The Miner, a host of trades union journals – and I thought I could use these cartoons as a way of talking about the year of the strike.” Casting a keen professional eye on all this is cartoonist


Steve Bell, a regular contributor to The Journalist. In the foreword to the book, he recalls his attempts to “redress the massive weight of opinion” against the strike with his ‘If…’ strip cartoon in The Guardian. “I was beavering away right through the Thatcher period


and was biased against her from the word go,” says Bell. “Everything she did, especially at the time of the miners’ strike, was getting my goat and I was on the offensive. The editor, Peter Preston, very creditably, let me get on with my propagandising. I was working against the mass of opinion, which is the stuff in the book from The Sun, The Express and even The Observer, sadly.” He continues: “They were very fine cartoonists, all well paid,


but the case you were getting from them was entirely biased. I look at Trog, who I have always admired incredibly, and his take on it was completely imbalanced. He is a wonderful, powerful cartoonist but he concentrates on all the negatives and the sense that this was a tragedy unfolding.” Jones can only agree: “I believe that the cartoonists were


furthering the propaganda of the Thatcher government.” It was a theme he first explored in 1986 in Strikes and the Media, which looked at the way the Thatcher government, as he saw it, had manipulated the media agenda against the unions. He came to accept that, working for the BBC, he was one of those being manipulated. “Especially towards the end of the strike, we found ourselves


swept along by the government agenda, which was to break the strike and get the miners back to work,” he says. “Did I become a cheerleader because all of my focus in those final months was on the return to work? We all thought that was the most important storyline, but that was exactly what the government machine wanted us to do. The more we could sustain the return-to-work stories, the greater the despondency.” Beginning in Yorkshire in reaction to proposed pit closures,


the strike started in March 1984 with the walk-out of 6,000 workers and escalated into a year-long conflict. The stakes were high. Thatcher saw victory as central to her union- busting agenda. For the left, it was a crucial last stand against the ravages of the free market. “It was an awful year and it brought back terrible memories,” says Bell, who put up two Kent pickets at his


Immediacy, bite and polemical force: below: Gerald Scarfe; right from top: Nicholas Garland; Michael Cummings; Trog; Steve Bell


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