Thirty years after the miners' strike trade unions are annoying, but not scary

Thirty years ago today, Margaret Thatcher won what many see as her greatest (or most notorious, depending on your politics) victory. The National Union of Mineworkers ended its campaign of industrial action. The miners’ strike was over.

Since then, industrial relations in the UK have been transformed, though looking at our political debate sometimes, you’d be hard-pressed to tell.

A part of the Conservative attack on Ed Miliband is based on his closeness to the trade unions. Those unions do indeed provide most of the funding for Labour, and they provided the votes that made Mr Miliband party leader.

But how much does that matter to voters? Some people don’t like unions. That’s probably because they associate them with disruption, disruption to the wider economy and to their own everyday lives. Memories, accurate or not, of the 1970s, the winter of discontent and the dead going unburied are an important part of our political debate to this day.

That, incidentally, says a lot about the dominance of the old in British politics. To have experienced 1979’s winter of discontent as an adult, you had to have been born before 1961, meaning you’re at least 54 today.

Even the miner’s strike of 1984-85 is ancient history to today’s 30 year-olds. They were busy being born when the rest of us were fixated on Arthur Scargill, Ian MacGregor, the NUM, the NCB, flying pickets and scabs.

Memory aside, what do people experience of trade unions today? A quick glance at the figures suggests that quite simply, unions just don’t matter as much as they used to.

In 1985, there were 10.8 million union members. Today it’s barely 6 million. And of course, the workforce is bigger. When the miners’ strike ended, around 40 per cent of all British workers were unionised. Today, it’s barely 20 per cent.

Perhaps the biggest change for the unions has been in the balance between the public and private sectors.

Today, scarcely 14 per cent of people who work for private companies and organisations are members of unions. In the public sector the figure is still around 55 per cent. Possibly as a result, union members tend to be older and more female than the workforce as a whole.

And what do the unions do? Do to our economy and our services? Not much, at least by historic standards.

In 1984 the UK lost 27 million days of work to industrial action. That’s a lot, but still lower than 1979’s figure of 29 million days.

And now? The most recent figures, for 2013, show that 443,600 working days were lost due to strikes and other union action. That’s less than a fiftieth of the 1984 figure.

Yes, union power over bits of the public sector can matter a lot to everyday life. Disrupting public transport and closing schools makes a real difference to voters' lives. But it doesn't pose the systemic threats to the market economy and even democracy itself that some saw in the industrial disputes of the 1970s and 80s. Unions today can irritate, not cripple.

In their pomp, Mr Scargill and other union leaders were figures of true national power, able to cause great and far-reaching disruption to the country. Their successors, men like Len McCluskey of Unite, may aspire to such clout but they are weaklings in comparison.

The bottom line is that 30 years on from the miners’ strike, the trade unions are a shadow of their former selves. To many people, especially the young, they’re not scary, just irrelevant.

This is all a measure of both the completeness of Lady Thatcher's victory and the transformation of the UK economy she helped deliver. Perhaps the Conservatives should spend more time celebrating those victories and less trying to pretend they didn't happen.