Conservatives will notice that nowhere does Pride mention that the avowed aim of Arthur Scargill was to bring down the elected government. But it is the Left of the time who ought to feel most short-changed. The miners' strike was as much a civil war on the Left as a war between Left and Right. I find it amazing that no filmmaker has looked at  Scargill, whose life screams out for attention. He behaved as if he were a modern Christ, a man without sin.  A.J. Cook, the great leader of the miners during the 1926 general strike, said as he accepted defeat, "It is not cowardice to face the facts of a situation and say that a leader who leads men blindly is not only a traitor to himself and his conscience but he is betraying the men he is leading."

Scargill never believed that. He split his union by calling a strike without a ballot. He hated the leaders of the Labour party and the trade union movement far more than he hated Thatcher. He privately encouraged them to seek a face-saving way out, then publicly denounced them as traitors. By the end, half the miners had returned to work, and his supporters were half-starved, beaten and at the mercy of vengeful employers. All Scargill won was a large home loan from international supporters. The joke at the time was that "Arthur began the strike with a big union and a small house, and ended it with a small union and a big house." More telling is an account given by John Monks, who went on to lead the TUC. He saw Scargill just after the union had called off the strike. Monks looked at Scargill, and wondered if he felt any remorse for the hundreds of thousands he had led to defeat.

"How are you feeling, Arthur?" he asked.

Scargill gave one of the most terrifyingly revealing answers in British labour history. "I feel pure," he replied. Just so. He had the purity of the far-left fanatic who would destroy everything rather than concede on anything. I wish that just one filmmaker had the bravery to tell the truth about him.

My instincts when I stood on the streets of Altrincham 30 years ago weren't all wrong. The defeat of the miners led to the creation of a Britain where every time you go to work you leave a democracy and enter a dictatorship. Unions barely exist in the private sector now, and the current government is trying to cut back on the next best thing by curtailing workers' rights to sue abusive employers for unfair dismissal. I understand cinema's nostalgia for a lost age of working-class strength but am suspicious of its evasions, and of its motives for that matter. Let me explain it like this. Imagine that trade union power was built in Britain again. Do you think that the cinema industry, which treats its young and low-paid employees like serfs, would make celebratory films about it? I suspect producers would find the reality far less comfortable than the fantasy.To put it another way, we will know that workers' rights are on the march again when pit-closing show-stoppers leave the West End.