I was born and raised in West Yorkshire, and during the strike I was doing my A levels at Wakefield College; and Wakefield is surrounded by pits and mining villages. But it was a pretty exciting time for music, and it was still that time when everybody, myself included, was in a band or had a fanzine; and you were forever going out to clubs like the Hellfire Club in Wakefield. The Fall played there. [And] one of the first times Brix played with them. And they’d have the Virgin Prunes, Test Department, people like that.

But then in the spring of ’84, the strike began, and everybody knew some- body who was involved. I mean going back, two of my great uncles had been killed in a mining disaster, and everybody had family who had been a miner or was a miner or was connected to the mining industry in some way. I had friends who were the children of miners, and everybody was out on strike, and everybody was behind the strike. I didn’t know a single person who was against the strike.

And at first, you know, our band got more gigs, in support of the strike, and we would get to go down to London on demos, and if I’m entirely honest, it was an exciting time. I was only 16 [or] 17, in the band, doing history and politics at A level, reading Soviet Weekly, swept up in it all.

But the turning point was really Orgreave, and what that represented, because you just realised that the government would stop at nothing, and that the police, particularly the Met, would do anything; and also that the TV and the media would help them, that the news would reverse footage, and it just made you despair.

I mean, most of my friends were the children of people on strike who were coming from profitable pits, and they were on strike for other people. And this is one of the things that I don’t think people fully realise. People lost their savings and their houses to save the jobs of people they’d never met, just because they did the same profession, and that to me was staggering. That level of sacrifice and struggle for others. And it’s just not mentioned enough.

But as the strike went on into the winter, and the drift back to work increased, you’d see pitched battles in Wakefield pubs between people who were striking and people who had gone back to work. And then came the end, the return. And, looking back on it now, I’m ashamed to say it really led me to a period of political apathy, the defeat, seeing what had happened, and a kind of despair of the country. And just a feeling of impotence and helplessness.

It took me a while. It took me really writing the books to get it back. After John Major won the ’92 election, I thought, well, that really is that, isn’t it? So I applied for a teaching job in Istanbul, and went and lived in Istanbul, and then came to Tokyo. And when I came to Tokyo I started to write the Red Riding Quartet, and initially the fourth of the Red Riding books was going to be about the miners’ strike. But I quickly realised that the strike was too important to be tagged on to the end of this quartet, which was ostensibly to do with the Yorkshire Ripper.

Then in 2001, I came back from Tokyo on a holiday with the kids, and I went to meet my new editor, Jon Riley, at Faber. Initially, after the quartet, I was going to do another book on the Yorkshire Ripper, and then a ‘book about the strike’. But Jon and I went out for lunch, and we just started to talk about the miners’ strike, and three hours later, both of us were almost in tears of rage. And Jon just said, ‘I think you know you need to do this book.’ And I remember walking back towards King’s Cross, thinking, fuck, I’ve only got five days of my holiday left, so the minute I got back to Ossett I started to ring up a bunch of people who had contacts and tried to do some of the interviews before I left. Then when I was back in Tokyo, I tracked down all the books I could, books like State of Siege by Jim Coulter, Susan Miller, and Martin Walker, which is one of the very best books on the strike, with horrific accounts of the police brutality.

But the more I spoke to people, the more I read, the more angry I became at myself for not appreciating the sacrifice[s] that people had [made] during the strike. You know, I’d been there. I’d been on the demos —[I] thought I had supported the strike. But I don’t think the penny had dropped for me.

I was angry at myself about that, and felt guilty and angry at society at that time, too, for [its] apathy. But I was really angry as well at the present because it was the time of New Labour, and they’d done absolutely nothing to reverse a single piece of any of the anti–trade union legislation that had come in since the strike. And so GB84 was written in a kind of rage, you know. All I wanted to do was try to show the mag- nitude of the strike, from left to right, from top to bottom, and try to somehow tell it all in one novel.

I wrote the Red Riding Quartet and GB84, and to a lesser extent The Damned Utd, because I was really trying to understand the time and the place I’d grown up in. I was a bookish, nerdy kind of child in the seventies, easily frightened, afraid that my mum would get attacked by the Yorkshire Ripper. I mean Leeds at that time was like Gotham City, it was a really dark and violent place.

But I remember Andy Beckett and I did an event at Waterstones in Leeds many years ago. Andy had written this book, When the Lights Went Out, about Britain in the seventies, and in the book he talks about all the positive things that happened in the seventies, about how 1974, which to me is this year I always come back to for some reason, was the year when the wealth gap was at its very narrowest in Britain. That this dark time I was writing about, in terms of misogyny and police corruption, for example, was also actually a time of great creativity and [of] moves towards equality and social justice and stopping wars; [a time of] great reckonings with imperialism and colonialism.

And that conversation possibly put me on the road to kind of rethinking that time, that maybe it wasn’t all Joy Division and Throbbing Gristle, and made me wary that, inadvertently, in criticising and detailing the actions of the state, I was contributing to the ongoing right-wing narra- tive of pseudo-historians such as Dominic Sandbrook who constantly hold up the seventies as some hell to which we must never return.

Writing Red or Dead about Bill Shankly was my attempt to posit an anti- dote because I felt that I’d spent too long documenting the disease and not offering any kind of cure. I think that when we look at contemporary Britain, if you’re not happy — as I think neither of us would say we are with the state of Britain, to put it mildly — then that is a cultural failure as much as it is a political or a social failure. And I’m including myself in that. I would say that every writer, artist, musician — we’re all culpable.

You know, you look at the horror in Gaza, and you can scream and shout at Keir Starmer and the Labour Party as much as you want, and as much as you should, but we should never have created a culture where it would be possible for anyone to condone the genocide of another people. How have we ended up in this situation? I feel we often get the cart and the horse the wrong way round. We’re looking to politics to change society. But first the culture needs to change the politics. I think we need to be better on the Left at positing solutions, culturally. And to me what Bill Shankly achieved at Liverpool is an example of something positive.

I actually think a lot of writers and also musicians have backed the BDS [Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions] movement. But yes, I mean, I thought it was a great thing that she did.

I don’t think so. Possibly one of the most popular writers of the post-war period is John le Carré, and a lot of le Carré’s books are actually very damning critiques of the establishment and a kind of deep state. Mick Herron’s novels, like Slow Horses, are also pretty damning about the security forces, and there are probably umpteen other spy novels like this that I haven’t read. Perhaps I just make it less ambiguous, by taking a real historical event like the miners’ strike rather than an imag- inary scenario, and showing then exactly how the state worked in undermining the miners’ strike and with the coordinated violence [that] it did. Possibly that’s not very common.

But I think someone like Jimmy McGovern, for example, in television, has written very powerfully about, say, Hillsborough, or about Omagh. And going back further, Ken Loach. There’s a kind of lineage. But I’ve never thought for a minute that the establishment is invincible. I don’t believe that at all. I actually think it’s quite fragile.

No, I just don’t think there are enough people trying to change the culture. I mean, to be blunt, how can any writer with even the slightest grasp of British history belong to an organisation called the Royal Society of Literature?

I mean you’re on the ground, and I’m in Tokyo, so I don’t want to be saying ‘Here’s what to do.’ But still, I refuse to be like that. I’ve wasted too much of my life almost in love with the melancholia of left-wing defeatism — living in the Hotel Abyss.

But I remember when Keith [photographer Keith Pattison] and I went to Easington [while preparing No Redemption, a 2010 book of photographs of the miners’ strike with an introduction by Peace] to interview people about the strike, the people from his photographs, and then again when the book came out — we did these events in Easington, and people would come together and talk about it. Of course, these people have been through fucking hell, and I’m not trying to romanticise, but those were really good evenings, with good people. And around the same time, I was going over to Liverpool, and I was talking to the people there about Shankly, and I had this sense that people just wanted a return to something like a recognisable form of socialism. It was there, in the air.

Then out of nowhere, really, [came] 2015. [There were] all the things that were thrown at Jeremy Corbyn, and all the fucking bollocks the Parliamentary Labour Party did to try to get rid of him once he was elected, and so forth, but when you look at those manifestoes … I remember my dad saying these were the greatest manifestoes that he’d ever read. I know people will say, ‘But you didn’t win.’ and so forth. But it showed me that, first of all, things can change just like that. And secondly, how close we came, really, how very close. And the terrible fear in the establishment — and I’m including the media here — the fear that caused, because [it knows] how fragile [it is].

And it’s still here, that desire for socialism. It doesn’t go away. Just look at the way Mick Lynch speaks, and the way he cuts through, and the way people respond to him. You expel people from the party because you’re afraid of them, because you’re fragile, and you know you are. So I continue to think that the moment is not that far off.

You know, my kids are in their twenties now. I’m not just talking about my kids. But far from being the fucking snowflake generation, I actually think that in my experience young people are much more intelligent and articulate and clued up than I was at that age. They know what a fucking mess my generation has made of things and how awful we are. So, I think change is not as far away as we think.