Handful of miners holds out

Press, 12 March 1985, Page 10

Handful of miners holds out

NZPA-AP London Most of the 6100 British coal miners who have remained on strike since union leaders called off a national walk-out were returning to work yesterday after one year off the job. In Kent, Britain’s only coal county to ignore the mass return to work, all but a handful of hardliners among 1700 miners still on strike were expected to clock on for the first time since March last year. Only about 30 of the south-east England county’s 2100-strong work-force voted at the week-end to continue the stoppage in a bid to get amnesty for some 700 miners sacked for violence or other strike-related criminal acts.

At week-end meetings in Scotland, 2150 striking miners at three out of four collieries in the militant Fife coalfield voted for an organised March back to

work. The 250 miners at Polmaise Colliery, which the National Coal Board has threatened to shut down, voted to stay out. They scheduled a meeting for today in the nearby pit village of Fallin to reconsider their stand. Most strikers returned to work last week after the National Union of Mineworkers’ national delegate conference voted to call off the strike without an agreement. The Coal Board, which runs the 174 Stateowned mines, said that 179,900 of Britain’s 186,000 miners, 96 per cent of the work-force, were at work on Friday. The walk-out was precipitated by a Coal Board plan to shut 20 money-losing mines and eliminate 20,000 jobs through attrition. The union insisted that mines be closed only when exhausted or unsafe.