The only major television commemoration of the start of the miners' strike 30 years ago was an hour-long documentary that went out late at night on ITV a few weeks ago. Following the model of earlier anniversary programmes, Stuart Ramsay's The Miners' Strike and Me interviewed a dozen individuals and couples – loyal strikers and their wives, strikebreakers, a couple of policemen – who had been filmed during the strike and could be revisited now. With the exception of one of the policemen, who couldn't condone the violence of his colleagues, all of them defended their actions at the time. For the strikers and wives, they'd do it all again. For one of the strikebreakers, his only regret was that his father has refused to speak to him since he returned to work.

The year-long strike was the longest national dispute in British industrial history. It was provoked by the government in order to take revenge for the 1972 and 1974 miners' strikes, which destroyed the Heath government's incomes policy and brought it down. The lack of attention to its anniversary is odd, not least because the conventional story of the strike is now being challenged. Cabinet papers released in January confirm that, as Arthur Scargill claimed, there was indeed a plan to shut down 75 pits, a plan that went way beyond the 20 pits whose announced closure provoked the strike. The Independent Police Complaints Commission is considering an investigation into police fabrication of evidence during the trials that followed battles between police and miners at the Orgreave coke depot in June 1984 (95 cases collapsed a year later). And Guardian journalist Seumas Milne's 1994 book The Enemy Within, which exposed a post-strike media campaign to disgrace Scargill for allegedly using Libyan money donated to the strikers to repay what was in fact an already paid-off mortgage, has been republished, with further damning information. Milne's book also argues persuasively that the secret services were heavily involved both in undermining the strike and seeking to destroy its leadership afterwards. Together, these revelations support much of what was dismissed as Scargillite paranoia at the time.

The prevailing contemporary view – revolutionary fantasist leads loyal troops to unnecessary defeat – was expressed in some but not all of the impressive array of books published in the strike's immediate aftermath. Milne was not the first person to use Margaret Thatcher's most noteworthy 1984 soundbite for his title (associating the enemies without in the Falklands with the enemies within in the coalfields). Coal Board chairman Ian McGregor's The Enemies Within was the most obviously polemical study: it condemned not only "Marxist autocrat" Scargill but also the "rampaging mobs" if not "stormtroopers" of South Yorkshire. In Martin Adeney and John Lloyd's The Miners' Strike: Loss Without Limit and the Sunday Times Insight Team's Strike: Thatcher, Scargill and the Miners, a clear distinction was drawn between a flawed leadership strategy and the bravery and commitment of the rank and file miners who followed it. Even veteran Mirror journalist Geoffrey Goodman, whose book The Miners' Strike is dedicated to British miners, argued that the refusal of the leadership to hold a strike ballot eventually finished the strike off. All three books (as well as McGregor's) noted the miners' failure to build relationships with power workers or to effectively picket the power stations.

By contrast, the majority of books about and by strikers and their families focused on the effects rather than the causes, anticipating the waves of sympathy for devastated communities that lay behind the success of films such as Billy Elliot, Brassed Off, and, most recently, Bill Morrison's film elegy The Miners' Hymns. In Tony Parker's Red Hill, a prose study of a pseudonymous Northumbrian pit village, the tone was of almost unbearable bleakness: a community visited and vitiated by the inscrutable workings of an alien destiny ("I don't see what I'm ever going to do with my life"). By contrast, strikers interviewed in Peter Gibbon and David Steyne's oral history Thurcroft defended the decision not to hold a ballot ("I don't think you should vote on a man's job") and tried to think positively about the outcome ("we gave them a good run for their money").

Between the journalistic summaries and the interview books lay a number of essay compilations, from a perspective instinctively supportive of the miners, which tackled the most painful and important questions raised by the dispute. In his introduction to Digging Deeper (published during the strike), the book's editor Huw Benyon pointed out that, even in traditionally militant South Wales, most of the lodges were initially reluctant to come out, and only did so as the result of picketing by miners from other parts of the area. In one of the essays, David Howell criticised the Blackadder model of the conflict (Neil Kinnock's oft-quoted claim that Scargill was "the labour movement's nearest equivalent to a first world war general").

But the most considered analysis of the strike's meaning was an essay by historian Raphael Samuel in a Ruskin College compilation (The Enemy Within number three, subtitled Pit Villages and the Miners' Strike of 1984-5). Samuel's argument was that, far from being a movement to overthrow the existing order, the strike was a deeply conservative defence "of the known against the unknown, the local and the familiar against the remote and the gigantesque". In seeking to protect their communities, the miners were defending precisely those old-fashioned, "Victorian" values that Thatcher sought to promote: "the dignity of work, the sanctity of the family, 'roots'".

In an article on the strike, Jeremy Seabrook made an adjacent point by way of contrast. For him, "a world in which we are no longer burdened by debt, credit, hock, mortgage, HP, might not be a grievous loss but a deliverance … a more modest and more prudent way of living". Discussing consumerism and personal debt, Seabrook explains one crucial difference between the miners in the militant areas and those – in Nottinghamshire, for example – who refused to join. The Thurcroft strikers pointed out that the miners who didn't come out, or went back, weren't the poorest, but the ones with most ties precisely to Seabrook's hock and mortgages.

But there were in fact two other new developments in 1984-5. One was the emergence of women's support groups, celebrated in several dedicated books (including Here We Go: Women's Memories of the 1984-5) as well as in chapters of most of the others. Provoking rueful and some less rueful reservations from miners themselves (for one "Red Hill" miner, this was "no way to behave"), Women Against Pit Closures both politicised and emancipated thousands of women from the coalfields, who spread out across the country to campaign for their communities, no longer standing behind their menfolk, but beside them, and in doing so building new and unexpected alliances.

Many of these alliances were forged in support groups that emerged in the cities. For Martin Adeney and John Lloyd, the "new bonds" forged between city activists and the miners gave a spurious excuse for the left to claim the strike as a victory; for McGregor the groups consisted of "the whole ragtag mob of the militant left", jumping on the miners' bandwagon. Noting that at least a dozen books quickly appeared exclusively chronicling support group activities, Samuel observed that the groups "owed more to a humanitarian spirit of good works than, in any classical trade union sense, solidarity".

Certainly, the main activity of the support groups, fundraising for striking miners and their families, was closer to the impetus of Live Aid (July 1985) than the proletarian solidarity that won the miners their emblematic victory at Birmingham's Saltley Gate in 1972. Food and money were nonetheless vital to keep the strike going and more money was raised for South Wales miners in Oxford than in the Welsh capital. In towns and cities, supporters collected food outside supermarkets, wrapped Christmas presents and – an action by Covent Garden florists – floated hundreds of carnations down the Thames. Support was not, of course, universal: in Digging Deeper, South Wales NUM organiser Kim Howells noted "friendly Hindu communities in Birmingham" and "magnificently supportive farmers in the wilds of Dyfed", but also hostile steelworkers in Newport and city councillors in Cardiff. As Bea Campbell argued, the strike saw a considerable cultural revolution in the coalfields as well as in the towns. At a Pits and Perverts concert which raised £5,640 at the Electric Ballroom, a South Wales miner told attenders: "You have worn our badge, Coal not Dole, now we will pin your badge on us."

Plus there was some real political solidarity going on. The miners allied with the Greenham Common protesters not just because they'd come to terms with "scruffy lesbians" (or realised that not all Greenham woman were lesbians, or scruffy, or that it didn't matter if they were), but because they were opposed to nuclear power as well as nuclear arms, and so shared an interest and a cause. Before the strike, women wrote in Here We Go, "our kids would call black people niggers"; miners changed their minds when they found themselves experiencing police brutality too. Men were impressed with feminism because they saw it working, and women because they were doing it.

In the immediate aftermath of the strike, much of this melted away. Women's groups folded, and miners' wives went back to the kitchens in their thousands. Looking back 30 years, however, the new political forms that arose during the strike year leave a longer shadow. When Communist party organiser Pete Carter called for the NUM to ally with churches, he was derided; now, London Citizens is built on an alliance between left organisations and faith groups.

At the end of Ramsay's ITV documentary, Michael Heseltine says of the government's war on the NUM: "This issue had to be faced, and there was no nice way to do it." In combination with the cabinet papers, Milne's Enemy Within demonstrates how nasty the government and sections of the media were prepared to be. By contrast, miners and their supporters were standing up for what former NUM branch delegate David Douglass called "values of community, of work, solidarity, of looking after each other rather than dog eats dog". As one of the Thurcroft miners put it, "in years to come, there might be something to come out of that".