Miners' Strike 1984: Easington MP reflects on the epic struggle

Recalling the bitterly divisive industrial dispute, he said: "The Miners' Strike personally touched me very deeply.

"My father was a coal miner and was on strike for the duration of the 84/85 Miners’ Strike. I had deep family connections, in fact my mother worked in the pit canteen and was a member of the NUM.

"My grandfather, grandfathers, uncles, cousins all worked in the industry, so it wasn't an incidental moment in my life - it was really very important.

"At the time I was working in the NHS, at the Sunderland hospitals and got married during the Miners’ Strike.

"But I was living at home and I was a member of the Labour Party and my trade union very much supported the miners in what wasn't a struggle about wages, it was a struggle for survival.

"It was about trying to protect jobs and communities and a way of life. And it was a real epic struggle for survival and arising out that and there are many deep scars.

"The warnings given by the miners' leaders of the time, that the consequences of losing the struggle would be not just the decimation, that means losing 10%, but the destruction of the industry – that is precisely what happened.

"Conservative commentators talk about how you can trace the decline back from the Miners’ Strike.

"Well you can trace the decline in industrialisation and loss of well-paid jobs, not from the strike but from the pit closure programme that followed.

"Because it wasn't just the thousands of miners in my part of the world who lost their jobs.

"It was all of the supply chain, the companies on the industrial states that made pit props that made mining machinery, coal cutting machines,cranes all of the paraphernalia and all of the infrastructure that supported that industry.

"And course for companies on the Team Valley who are global names, whose core market was British Coal and when they lost the orders for the British, the export business was not enough to sustain it so all of those jobs went.

"It had a multiplier effect and we are still seeing the consequences of that today."

He added: "In terms of social costs, we had a very vibrant social welfare side. We had brass bands - Seaham had three and Murton, the village I am from had a championship brass band which had been going for 150 years.

"All the villages had bands, of which they were very proud and gave young people the opportunity to learn music and participate. They went.

"The leisure facilities too – because the miners contributed to the social welfare schemes - tennis courts, football, rugby, cricket. In Murton we even had a 50 metre swimming pool and Horden had Olympic-sized diving pool – all provided for by the miners and paid for at the pit point by deductions from their wages.

"And of course when the pits closed all of those facilities were lost. The fabric of the communities was torn asunder. Even the miners' welfare halls gradually closed - those social hubs have now gone."

Dawdon's was the most recent one to be sold off. 

Mr Morris said: “When Margaret Thatcher effectively went to war against the mining communities there is no doubt about it in my mind get the role that she played in politicising the police and the state institutions - and it was a struggle for existence.

“When commentators at the time said the miners’ leaders were scaremongering about the plans to close down the industry and the impact that it would have - well unfortunately their predictions were completely true."

Mr Morris said he was still dealing with injustices of the many man arrested or sacked during the strike. 

He said: " There were so many injustices some of the injustices. More than 9,000 miners were sacked during the dispute.

"About 200 of them were imprisoned - many of them unjustly. One of them, Ray Patterson, was amongst a group of Dawdon miners who came to see me last year to raise their case to have their names cleared.

"They were charged with the breach of an 800-year-old law of unlawful assembly, last used in the days of Peterloo. 

"There was no assault against a person. They were arrested in their homes and were charged and convicted of doing criminal damage to a security compound at Dawdon Colliery.

"They lost their jobs and their pensions and were imprisoned."

Mr Patterson has since passed away. 

He added: "This follows you - it scars you. He wanted to take his grandkids kids to Disneyland, but because he'd been in prison and had a criminal conviction he couldn't do that. And these were for trivial matters.

"There was no individual assault against the person. These are the sort of things, if it was done by posh students on a freshers' week, they would be let off with a caution."

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"These men were sacked, charged, imprisoned, blacklisted, lost their pensions and often these convictions were on the basis of evidence that was. to be charitable, dubious."

*Thousands of individuals were charged, cautioned sacked feel aggrieved."

Mr Morris is going to pursue getting them a pardon. 

He has memories of huge police presence, particularly after Christmas when an enormous effort was made by British Coal to encourage some of the striking miners to break the strike and return to work.

Mr Morris said: "There were literally thousands of police drafted in from South Wales and the Met to9 clear a path, not just in Murton, where I believe the strike was pretty much 100% solid t0 the end.

"I can certainly remember Easington - I some of Keith Pattison on the wall of my office of police arresting and old man and his wife remonstrating with them. 

"The scars are still there. The consequences of the mining communities - the high streets the businesses that have closed.

"These were once vibrant, proud communities with people who had a belief in their own abilities. These were people who were not workshy. These were people who grafted, worked really hard all their lives - often suffering injuries or ill health as a consequence of their work.

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"They provided the coal that fueled hte fires of the engines of industry - not for 50 years but 150 years and made Britain great.

"And their reward from Margaret Thatcher was to be labelled the enemy within and had the forces of the state turned against them."  

He said: "I haven't forgotten and am bitter about it. And bitter about some of the injustices people lhave sufferd that still haven't been corrected."