ACCORDING to Rolling Stone magazine, 1984 was pop music’s best ever year. The charts were on fire with innovative new sounds from the likes of Prince, Madonna, Boy George and Frankie Goes to Hollywood. A Glasgow indie rock band called The Bluebells were also high in the charts in July that year with their singalong song Young At Heart.

But even as a teenager, I was more engrossed with the evening TV news bulletins and the front pages of the press. Maybe that’s because I was already involved in the trade union movement as a shop steward with the local government union Nalgo, a forerunner of Unison. But mostly I think it’s because a whole generation were fixated on what would prove to be one of the most momentous class battles of the 20th century.

At the time, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) was Britain’s most powerful trade union. Ten years earlier, I had spent many a happy hour playing tiddlywinks, snakes and ladders and blow football with my family by candlelight. Industrial action by the union produced power cuts, a three-day week and ultimately the toppling of a Tory government.

Many people in high places never forgot and never forgave. And in 1984 they came back for revenge, this time with the ruthless Margaret Thatcher at the helm rather than the hapless Edward Heath.

My workplace – an office in Glasgow Chambers – was a world away from the collieries of Fife, Ayrshire and Midlothian. I’d never even seen the outside of a coal mine but I took solidarity strike action and went out on street collections for the families of striking miners.

I wasn’t a huge fan of Arthur Scargill – but I remember being transfixed by the oratory of Mick McGahey, President of the Scottish NUM. But far more important than the personalities involved were the principles at stake. From early on it was clear the outcome of the miners’ strike would decide the power balance between employers and workers for decades to come. It was a simple question: which side are you on?

On one side were 100,000 miners and their families standing up for their communities. On the other side were Thatcher and her henchmen, determined to smash the trade union movement, the main obstacle that stood in the path of unrestrained corporate greed.

There is plenty of evidence now that Thatcher and her government planned and provoked a confrontation with the NUM. Thatcher’s biographer Charles Moore described how in 1979 she took aside her Home Secretary, Willie Whitelaw, and said: “The last Conservative government was destroyed by the miners’ strike. We’ll have another and we’ll win.”

She threw everything at the NUM. The total bill for defeating the miners came to £6 billion – the equivalent of £36bn in today’s money. It would be like Theresa May spending the entire defence budget to defeat the RMT.

Today, Muslim refugees are demonised by sections of the Tory party as the enemy within. In 1984-85 that epithet was bestowed on the NUM. Rank-and-file miners were vilified as violent, criminal scum while Arthur Scargill was the 1980s equivalent of Osama bin Laden. All the institutions of the British state were mobilised in Thatcher’s crusade. Anyone who believes the BBC is incapable of bias clearly wasn’t around during the miners’ strike. Infamously, it stitched news footage of Orgreave together to make it appear that miners had launched a mass charge against the South Yorkshire police rather than the other way around.

Britain’s police forces were offered overtime at treble time and turned into Mrs Thatcher’s private army for 12 months. Some officers openly revelled in their nickname, “Thatcher’s boot boys” and would taunt impoverished pickets by throwing coins at them.

For a year, we had, in the words of Guardian journalist Seamus Milne, “the militarised police occupation of the coalfields”.

The laws of the land were bent and twisted in pursuit of Thatcher’s goal. Laws against solidarity picketing were rushed through the statute books, where they remain to this day. So too were laws allowing trade unions assets to be sequestrated. And in an act of cold-blooded cruelty, the families of strikers were denied social security payments. It was a vicious, and ultimately successful, strategy to starve the miners into submission.

All this happened over a generation ago. But Thatcher’s poisonous legacy lives on. The UK has the most draconian anti-trade-union laws in western Europe, most of which were never repealed even through 13 years of Labour power at Westminster.

And thousands of miners still alive, including 500 in Scotland, have been left with criminal convictions, despite compelling allegations that have since come to light of police perjury, illegal surveillance and the planting of evidence. These men lost their jobs, were refused redundancy money and many never worked again.

A month or so back, Home Secretary Amber Rudd outraged families when she announced that there would be no public inquiry into Orgreave because “nobody died”. Actually people did die. Countless lives were cut short as result of stress-related illnesses and suicide.

Neil Findlay MSP may not yet be on the side of independence but his tireless campaign for a public inquiry into the policing of the miners’ strike in Scotland should be supported by the entire independence movement.

I was pleased that the Justice Secretary, Michael Matheson, this weekend called for “national recognition” of the injustices suffered by miners. I hope he now goes the whole hog and announces a full public inquiry into one of the most disgraceful episodes in modern British history.

When the UK state refuses to examine its dirty laundry, we should shame those at the top by digging ours out from the bottom of the basket and putting it through a boil wash to remove every last stain.

Let’s show the whole of the UK that even if Westminster remains stuck in the dark ages of Thatcherism, Scotland is prepared to stand up for truth, justice and humanity.