WBilly Elliot is a 2000 British dance drama film directed by Stephen Daldry and written by Lee Hall. Set in County Durham, England during the 1984–85 miners' strike, the film is about a working-class boy who discovers his passion for ballet, despite his father's objection and the negative stereotype associated with being a male ballet dancer. The film stars Jamie Bell as 11-year-old Billy, Gary Lewis as his father, Jamie Draven as Billy's older brother, and Julie Walters as his ballet teacher.
WThe Enemy Within: The Secret War Against the Miners is a book by British journalist and writer Seumas Milne, first published in 1994. Updated editions were released in 1995, 2004, and 2014.
WR v Hancock [1985] UKHL 9 is an English legal decision of the highest court setting out the relationship between foresight of consequences and intention in cases of murder. It refers to the case of the killing of David Wilkie. The defendants' stated intention had been to frighten a person, but another was killed. The law, as the judgement of the whole court was held to hinge on the relationship between foresight of the range of results of taking a particular action and the result of that action which must include a specific direction or legal mention of considering the probability of death or serious injury resulting, and other directions which explain the difference between the offence of manslaughter and that of murder.
WThe Last Nightingale is an album by various artists recorded and released in 1984 to raise money for striking coal miners in the 1984–85 UK miners' strike. It features Chris Cutler, Tim Hodgkinson and Lindsay Cooper from the English avant-rock group Henry Cow, singer and musician Robert Wyatt, and poet Adrian Mitchell. The cover artwork was done by British cartoonist and caricaturist Ralph Steadman.
WLesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM) was an alliance of lesbians and gay men who supported National Union of Mineworkers during the year-long strike of 1984–1985. By the end of the strike, eleven different LGSM groups had emerged throughout the UK, with the London group alone raising £22,500 by 1985 in support.
WThe Battle of Orgreave was a violent confrontation on 18 June 1984 between pickets and officers of the South Yorkshire Police (SYP) and other police forces at a British Steel Corporation (BSC) coking plant at Orgreave, in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, England. It was a pivotal event in the 1984–85 UK miners' strike, and one of the most violent clashes in British industrial history. Journalist Alastair Stewart has characterised it as "a defining and ghastly moment" that "changed, forever, the conduct of industrial relations and how this country functions as an economy and as a democracy". Historian Tristram Hunt has described the confrontation as "almost medieval in its choreography ... at various stages a siege, a battle, a chase, a rout and, finally, a brutal example of legalised state violence". Most media reports at the time depicted it as "an act of self-defence by police who had come under attack", and there still exists a body of opinion that the police at Orgreave "were upholding the law in the face of intimidation from thousands of strikers".
WPride is a 2014 British historical comedy-drama film written by Stephen Beresford and directed by Matthew Warchus. Based on a true story, the film depicts a group of lesbian and gay activists who raised money to help families affected by the British miners' strike in 1984, at the outset of what would become the Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners campaign.
W"Red Hill Mining Town" is a song by the rock band U2. It is the sixth track from their 1987 album, The Joshua Tree. A rough version of this song was worked on during the early Joshua Tree album writing sessions in 1985. The focus of the song is on the National Union of Mineworkers' 1984 strike in Great Britain that occurred in response to the National Coal Board's campaign to close uneconomic mines. A music video was produced in February 1987 for the song and was directed by Neil Jordan. The song was planned for release as the album's second single, but it was ultimately shelved in favour of "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For".
WArthur Scargill is a British trade unionist. He was President of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) from 1982 to 2002. Joining the NUM at the age of nineteen in 1957, he became one of its leading activists in the late 1960s. He led an unofficial strike in 1969, and played a key organising role during the strikes of 1972 and 1974, the latter of which helped in the downfall of Edward Heath's Conservative government. His views are described as Marxist.