Looking back to the 1984-5 strike, Durham miners' leader Davey Hopper believes that the dispute was not primarily about the coal industry.

He explains his comment, which is at face value surprising, by asserting that the main concern of Margaret Thatcher's Tory government was to neuter the trade union movement.

"I believe the strike wasn't about the coal industry. It was about trade unionism and the miners were seen as in the vanguard of that movement," Hopper says.

"They would have spent anything, made limitless funds available to destroy the National Union of Mineworkers because Thatcher's philosophy was a free-market economy."

He reflects ruefully that Thatcher's goal has been all but accomplished by her successors - not all of them Tories.

"Look at zero-hours jobs and the number of people on short-term contracts and very low wages. We've still got firms that don't even pay the minimum wage, which is a pittance really.

"The whole of Britain's working class has suffered for the dispute and that's because a lot of people on our side didn't support us."

Hopper recalls the optimism at the beginning of the dispute, which followed the overwhelming election in 1982 of socialist Arthur Scargill, with 70 per cent of votes cast, to succeed right-wing NUM president Joe Gormley.

Gormley had agreed a plan for coal with the government after sporadic strikes against pit closures in 1981, which included a commitment to consultation procedures with the union prior to any further closures.

Despite this, the dispute was sparked by the National Coal Board naming five pits - Cortonwood and Bulcliffe Wood in Yorkshire, Herrington in Durham, Polmaise in Scotland and Snowdown in Kent - to be mothballed.

Cortonwood immediately downed tools due to an existing Yorkshire area council decision that authorised strike action if any pit was closed without procedures being followed.

NUM members at the other threatened pits walked out and Durham area council met to endorse strike action.

"On the first Monday in March, we joined our colleagues in Yorkshire, Kent, Scotland and Wales who'd also come out," says Hopper.

"The strike was under way very quickly and was well organised in the coalfield. We had to picket a couple of pits out in Durham, but it was rock solid in two days. We then went up to Northumberland and picketed them out, so the strike was solid from Yorkshire up to and including Scotland."

That was the case for months, although there were sporadic attempts to bus would-be scabs through the picket lines.

An official in the union's clerical section Cosa organised a return to work at Wearmouth colliery by 16 of his members even though they had no work to do.

Easington colliery was effectively under military occupation when thousands of police tried to bring in one scab. Many strikers were arrested and sacked, with some facing charges of riot.

While not crucial in themselves, such attempts, together with mass scabbing in Nottinghamshire and other Midlands areas, had a debilitating effect on strikers' morale.

David Hart, a wealthy political adviser to Thatcher, was authorised to visit coalfields, seeking out potential scabs, organising spasmodic efforts to break picket lines and prepare the ground for police to beat up strikers and arrest them.

"We saw one or two breaks just before Christmas and so our men were dragged back from the picketing we'd been doing in Notts, South Derbyshire, Lancashire and Scotland, where there had been some breaches, onto our own gates," says Hopper.

"That really weakened our resolve in other coalfields and allowed more people to return to work."

The government applied psychological pressure on the miners, aside from encouraging police to wave pay packets and wads of cash on picket lines, designed to antagonise those on the bones of their backsides.

NCB chairman Ian MacGregor, who had been imported from the US with a brief to tame the union, would call meetings with NUM, raising picket-line hopes of an honourable settlement, only to pull the plug by proposing nothing new.

"This was very demoralising," says Hopper.

"It was a battle of endurance as well of minds. The vast majority wanted to support the dispute, but there was so much violence and there was also the propaganda pushed out day by day by TV and press. It was a co-ordinated exercise.

"The fact that the pit deputies' union Nacods had a 95 per cent vote to strike and didn't use it demoralised many men."

In the face of growing numbers of strikers forced back to work through hardship and desperation, the national union called off the dispute after a razor-thin 98-91 vote by delegates and those still out who hadn't been sacked returned to their pits on March 5 1985 - almost exactly a year after they had walked out.

One of the myths built up by politicians, media and lukewarm trade unionists looking for an excuse not to back the NUM was that the strike had no democratic mandate and should have been legitimised by a national ballot.

Hopper tackles this "red herring" head on, pointing out that two national ballots in 1978 had rejected the introduction of an incentive scheme, but Mr Justice Watkins ruled that a national ballot had "no great force or significance," meaning that it was not binding on individual areas.

"If we'd had a national ballot during the strike and won it but Notts hadn't voted for it, I'm sure that Notts would have invoked that ruling and still worked. I don't think they would ever have adhered to a national ballot," he says.

In addition, Hopper doesn't think it fair that a miner in Notts could have put a cross on a ballot paper and condemned a miner in Durham to a life of unemployment.

"Coalfields in the Midlands would have voted to close down the Durham coalfield or any coalfield bar their own," he says bluntly.

Hopper takes a grim satisfaction in noting that the miners in Nottinghamshire were "used and abused" by the coal board and government because all but one of their pits has been closed.

"They took the Judas shilling and got no reward."

Striking miners from many coalfields tried to reach Nottinghamshire to spread the strike, but the entire county was effectively under martial law, with free movement for miners banned by police despite having no legal basis for their embargo.

"We couldn't get people in and when we did get people into Mansfield we were battered down with baton charges and 46 men were charged with riot," he recalls.

Hopper also recalls the battle of Orgreave alongside Durham miners and their Yorkshire comrades.

He remembers his surprise as, in contrast to their experience in Nottinghamshire, the Durham men's buses approaching South Yorkshire were given a police escort.

"When we saw the number of police waiting there for us, we knew why we'd been escorted in. We were taken in like lambs to the slaughter," he says bitterly.

BBC TV coverage showed young miners throwing rocks at police lines before a cavalry charge, backed up by police on foot, drove into the massed ranks of strikers.

It was a travesty. The BBC had transposed its film, reversing cause and effect. It was the police that attacked the miners not vice versa.

"It's a miracle that none of us was killed at Orgreave that day. The BBC apologised five years later, but it was too late then. The state violence there was almost unbelievable."

Not a single police officer was prosecuted for Orgreave or indeed elsewhere during the strike. Hopper believes that, had South Yorkshire Police been brought to book, the Hillsborough disaster would not have happened.

"It was the same police force getting away with almost murder, perpetrating their evils once again at Hillsborough against football fans, calling them drunkards and troublemakers when all the trouble had been caused by the police, as they did at Orgreave, charging the miners before the miners retaliated."

In contrast to the 1926 General Strike when miners were out for six months but never organised commemorations of their struggle, Hopper regards it as positive that, 30 years on, the NUM and Women Against Pit Closures are holding numerous events to mark their courageous battle.

"Look at the Durham Miners Gala now. The last pit in Durham closed 20 years ago, but we still have 100,000 people turning up on the second Saturday in July to support the miners' gala," says Hopper.

"There were 70 miners' banners there last year, so we were defeated, but we're not beaten. We're still hoping. We're always involved when there's workers in struggle, supporting them, raising funds for them, so we're still here.

"That's one thing that has given our communities the confidence to carry on because some of the unemployment in our villages is criminal - 60 per cent male unemployment. We've got thousands of men on benefits through injuries and industrial diseases and the benefits are under relentless attack from this government."

What worries him is that Labour is not saying anything about reversing these cuts.

"In my lifetime I've seen miners leaders go into politics to try to change society for the better. Today the vast majority seem to be in politics to make their lives better and enrich themselves. They have to be made more accountable.

"Don't ask me how to do it, because I don't know, but we don't want representation like we had from the last Labour government," he says.

He has advice for the new intake of Labour MPs that he hopes will be elected next year to return a Labour government and that advice is simple.

"When you get down there to Westminster, stop looking after yourselves and start looking after those who put you there," he says.