As a rule, the most effective trade unionists have to die before the mainstream media and politicians will say anything decent about them. That's certainly what has happened to the rail and seafarers' leader Bob Crow.

Instead of the industrial dinosaur, political throwback and strike-happy hypocrite demonised for more than a decade, it now turns out that Crow was in fact a modern and effective workplace champion. The scourge of the London commuter didn't just drive up rail workers' living standards, we are told, but fought successfully for low-paid contract cleaners into the bargain.

Part of that is about not speaking ill of someone cut off in their prime, of course. But it also reflects establishment awareness of the chord that an authentic workers' leader strikes with a public living the reality of the race to the bottom in pay and conditions – and a public life purged of working-class figures and populated by plastic political and corporate professionals.

As it happened, Crow died on the eve of the 30th anniversary of the start of the miners' strike. It is doubtful that even death will win Arthur Scargill the national treasure treatment currently being given to Crow, given the scale of his vilification and the extent of the challenge he represented to political and economic power from the 1970s to the 1990s.

But the 1984-5 strike, the decisive social and economic confrontation of Britain's postwar era, is how we got where we are today. A generation on, it is now even clearer than it was at the time why the year-long struggle over the country's energy supply took place, and what interests were really at stake.

The Thatcher government's war on the miners – her chancellor Nigel Lawson described preparations for the strike as "like re-arming to face the threat of Hitler" – wasn't just about class revenge for the Tories' humiliating defeats at the hands of the miners in the early 1970s. It was about using the battering ram of state power to break the single greatest obstacle to the transformation of the economy in the interests of corporate privilege and wealth that Margaret Thatcher was determined to carry out. The offensive ushered in the full-blown neoliberal model that has failed to deliver for the majority, generated inequality and insecurity on a huge scale, and imploded with such disastrous consequences five-and-a-half years ago.

For the miners, the strike was a defensive battle for jobs and communities. But it also raised the alternative of a different kind of Britain, rooted in solidarity and collective action. The crippling of the country's most powerful union opened the way for the systematic deregulation of the labour market – and the zero-hours contracts, falling real wages, payday loans and food banks we are living with today.

Every couple of years, evidence emerges to underline the unparalleled nature of the state onslaught and ruthless rule-breaking to overcome resistance in the mining communities, bought at a cost of £37bn in today's prices.

In January, newly released cabinet papers confirmed that, just as Scargill had warned at the time, there was indeed a secret hit list to close 75 collieries with the loss of 75,000 jobs when the strike began. Thatcher lied about it and planned to send thousands of troops into the coalfields, as her government faced imminent defeat.

In media and establishment mythology, of course, it was the insurrectionary incompetence of the miners' leadership that led to the breakneck destruction of the mining communities, rather than the government that ordered it. That is abject nonsense.

There was simply no option of a gentle rundown of the industry in 1984, with or without a national ballot, as the treatment of pits that worked during the strike demonstrated. The only choice was between the certainty of mass closures and the chance of halting the assault.

To achieve its goal, the government unleashed the full force of the state: a militarised police occupation of the coalfields, a commandeered and manipulated criminal justice system, mass sackings and jailings – and the use of MI5, GCHQ, the NSA and special branch to bug, infiltrate, smear, manipulate the media, and stage dirty tricks against the union and its leaders.

Since the Guardian first reported leaks about security service operations against the miners in the 1990s, much more has emerged and been confirmed by former officials. MI5's "counter-subversion" role has been largely transferred to a string of notorious undercover police units, now the subject of an official inquiry; global blanket surveillance by GCHQ and the NSA is on another scale entirely from their then unprecedented operations against the miners' strike; while state collusion with mass corporate blacklisting of trade unionists has continued, despite the enfeebled state of the labour movement.

Thirty years on, the argument about coal is now focused on the threat of global warming and carbon emissions, rather than the tiny workforce that still mines it or the social wreckage in the coalfields left behind by Thatcher's social vandalism.

But the battle over coal in the 1980s was in any case really about power and class, not fuel – just as the argument about its legacy is more about the future than the past. Success for the miners could not, of course, have turned the neoliberal tide, which was a global phenomenon. But it would certainly have at least weakened Thatcher, reined in her worst excesses, and put a brake on Labour's rush for the "third way", which eventually turned into New Labour's embrace of the Thatcherite settlement.

As the strike fades into history, the miners' stand has been vindicated by the experience of that failed model. Profound economic change means such an industrial conflict will never be repeated in that form; but its experience can speak to our times.

Among its lessons are that you can't always fight on terrain and at times of your choosing; division can be fatal; and the higher the stakes, the dirtier that employers and governments will play. And as Crow demonstrated, militancy may not guarantee success – but passivity will asphyxiate unions when the workforce needs them to be stronger than ever.

• An updated edition of Seumas Milne's book, The Enemy Within – The Secret War Against the Miners, is published this week and is available from Guardian Books

Twitter: @SeumasMilne