Richard Cross, "The British Communist Party and the 1984-85 miners' strike: visible splits and hidden fractures."

By the early 1980s, little could disguise the degree of political disagreement and organisational decline afflicting the British Communist Party. As the Great Miners' Strike began in April 1984, evidence of the malaise encroaching the CPGB was evident everywhere. Yet despite all the very public manifestations of the party's ills, many analysts - inside the party and beyond - continued to suggest that the Communist Party and its members remained significant agents throughout the course of the Strike. Whether those commentators portrayed the influence of the CPGB as benign or baleful, many accounts depicted the party as an industrial force still to be reckoned with.

Yet those who wish to celebrate, exonerate, rehabilitate, or denounce the agency of the CPGB in the course of the Great Strike, need to provide a realistic appraisal of the party's industrial and political standing at the time.

Much of the evidence now accessible suggests that the erosion of the party's industrial base and its increasing political fragmentation seriously undermined the CPGB's ability to act in any coherent and focused way during the Strike. The tendencies towards independence, long apparent in the work of the party's industrial 'cadre', had been exacerbated by the slide in the party's fortunes; and by the response of the CPGB's leadership toward its compound crises. The party insisted that it was building pit head branches, recruiting miners and playing an 'unsurpassed' role in support work. The reality was more complicated, and - for the CPGB - much less reassuring. The reluctance of those party leaders to acknowledge how perilous the CPGB's position had become encouraged the party's critics to seriously over-estimate the Communist Party's remaining industrial leverage.

Beneath the visible splits within the CPGB, there was also a layer of hidden fractures - some of which only reached the surface after the demise of the party in 1991; and others of which have yet to be fully uncovered. Although the survey of the party's 'intervention' remains incomplete, there can now be little question that the Miners' Strike impacted on the CPGB far more forcefully than the party was able to impact on the course of the Strike.