The 1984 British miners' strike was the decisive confrontation with organized labour for which the Conservative Party had prepared for many years: its neoliberal agenda depended on success. This paper looks at the ways in which Billy Elliot - ostensibly sympathetic to the miners cause, and to that extent contradictory - narrates both the strike and its aftermath in terms of a reform of British masculinity, associating neoliberalism with male 'feminization' and an openness to homoerotic attraction. The film's schematic, yet influential, narrativization entails both an occlusion of groups who supported the miners (women's and lesbian and gay groups among them) and a symbolic integration of social and economic liberalism through the successful figure of Billy whose artistry is ideologically made to represent the transcendence of all social conflicts.