No Such Thing As Society

by Andy McSmith

  None of this detracted from the admiration he inspired in young miners. On the picket, they chanted ‘Arthur Scargill walks on water’, and in the miners’ clubs they told jokes that were a tribute to his stature. One was that when his predecessor Joe Gormley died, he was offered a place in heaven, but accepted it only after he had been promised that Scargill was to be consigned to hell. Later, Gormley was knocked off his cloud by a fast-driven limousine with the number plate AS 1, and complained to St Peter that he had been deceived. ‘Oh don’t worry,’ said St Peter, ‘that’s just God. He thinks he’s Arthur Scargill.’

  The reason that Scargill refused to hold a strike ballot was that he had held three already, and had been thrice bitten. There was a strike ballot in January 1982, during the interregnum after he had been elected NUM president, but before Joe Gormley had left office. The NUM was demanding a 23.7 per cent pay rise, but on the eve of the ballot, Gormley wrote an article in the Daily Express urging the men to accept the Coal Board’s off er of 9.5 per cent, which they did by a margin of 55 to 45 per cent. It was, as the newspapers reported at the time, a clear ‘snub’ for Scargill.7 In October, six months after Scargill had assumed office, another round of pay talks broke down. Scargill toured the coalfields urging the men to vote for a strike, but they voted by 61 per cent to 39 per cent against. In March 1983, the South Wales, Yorkshire and Scottish miners all voted to strike in opposition to pit closures, but the areas with less militant traditions did not react. Scargill summoned the NUM executive to an emergency meeting and told them that he wanted to call a national strike without a ballot, which they had the power to do under a rule change he had recently introduced, but other members of the executive warned that he risked tearing apart the union. Scargill reluctantly agreed to a ballot, and once again, the men voted 61 to 39 per cent against a strike.

  By March 1984, as the strike that started in Cortonwood spread across the whole Yorkshire region, and another strike – also over pit closures – began in Scotland, Scargill’s mind was made up: no more ballots. He argued that there was a legitimate case for not balloting over pit closures. Unlike a pay off er, which affected every union member equally, redundancies affected some members but not others, and those whose jobs were safe would be in a position not to support those who were under threat. Peter Heathfield, the recently elected general secretary of the NUM, who was expected to be a moderating influence on Scargill, backed him without reservation throughout the momentous events that lay ahead. ‘Can you reasonably say to miners working in relatively successful coalfields “you have the right to determine whether people working in less successful coalfields can defend their jobs”?’8 he asked, rhetorically.

  On Tuesday, 6 March, Ian MacGregor called in the leaders of all three mining unions to inform them that he intended to bring the industry to break-even point by 1988 and, to that end, he proposed to shut twenty pits in the coming year alone and make 20,000 miners redundant. As the miners’ leaders emerged, the older and rather wiser Mick McGahey, NUM vice-president, and a lifelong Communist, was heard to say: ‘I want to make it clear that we are not dealing with niceties here. We shall not be constitutionalised out of a defence of our jobs.’9 On the same day, the Scottish NUM called its members out on strike over the threat to close the Polmaise Colliery. Two days later, on 8 March, the Yorkshire and Scottish areas went to the NUM National Executive asking for its approval for a strike that had already begun, and the executive decided to make it a nationwide strike. Only three members of the executive, from the East Midlands, voted for a ballot.

  Pickets rapidly formed outside the pits where miners were still working. The Yorkshire miners, in particular, were formidably well-organized. Each evening, at about 7.00 p.m., an NUM branch official arrived at the miners’ welfare office at Maltby Colliery with a brown envelope containing instructions for the next day’s pickets. The miners would then pore over maps looking for back roads where they could avoid police blocks. And off they went. From Monday 12 March onwards, thousands poured out of Yorkshire into Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire or Lancashire, to appear at the gates as their colleagues arrived to begin their shift s. The executive had hoped that even those miners who had not voted to strike would balk at crossing a picket line, but there was a tradition of bad feeling between the Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire miners dating back to the General Strike of 1926, when the men from Nottinghamshire formed a breakaway union and went back to work. Though almost no one involved in that dispute was still alive in 1984, the pit villages knew their history. Pay was better in Nottinghamshire and the long-term future more secure, and the miners objected to being told by men with Yorkshire accents that they should strike without a vote. At the end of the first day, eighty-one pits were on strike, eighty-three were working. Within a couple of days, picketing had reduced the number of working pits to twenty-nine, but that was as far it got. From the very start of the strike, the miners’ union was catastrophically split.

  The miners’ other weakness was that, this time, they had not caught the government unprepared. For eight years the Conservatives had been thinking about a possible miners’ strike and making preparations. In 1978, when they were in opposition, a group headed by Nicholas Ridley had produced a strategic report on how a Conservative government might defeat union militancy. They concluded that ‘the most likely battleground will be the coal industry’, and laid out a series of precautions that needed to be taken against this possibility, including building up coal stocks at the power stations, making plans to import coal and switching to dual coal/oil-firing as fast as possible.10 At the time, this was all too radical for Margaret Thatcher, who was single-mindedly interested in winning an election. Even afterwards, she recoiled at the thought of taking on the mighty NUM. Three years before the miners’ strike, in January 1981, NCB chairman, Sir Derek Ezra, warned that the price of coal was falling and that the twenty-three least productive pits were losing around £85m per year, or nearly £20 per ton of coal. Someone on the management side is thought to have quietly tipped off the union that a pit closure programme that would affect thousands of jobs was on the way. As unofficial strikes broke out in Kent and South Wales, Energy Secretary David Howell and his deputy, John Moore, were prepared to take them on. Unions and the press were briefed that there would no government climb-down, until Margaret Thatcher studied the battlefield. ‘I was appalled to find that we had entered into a battle we could not win,’11 she wrote. No pits were closed, and when a new energy secretary, Nigel Lawson, was appointed later in the year, the first thing Thatcher told him was ‘Nigel, we mustn’t have a coal strike.’12

  There was no strike on Lawson’s watch, but he was assiduous in following the advice in that old 1978 discussion paper. He sacked Glyn England, the chairman of the Central Electricity Generating Board, because ‘he had little stomach for a fight with the NUM’ and replaced him with Walter Marshall, an enthusiast for nuclear power who, for that reason, had been sacked by Tony Benn when he was energy secretary and therefore ‘had no affection for Benn’s friend and ally, Scargill’.13 Next, he sacked Derek Ezra, who had worked in the coal industry since being demobbed in 1947, and replaced him with the seventy-year-old Ian MacGregor, who had completed his three-year stint running British Steel, where he cut its workforce from 166,000 to 71,000, making it almost profitable and ready for privatization. After much haggling, MacGregor settled for a salary of £58,325, plus a £1.5m fee to Lazard Frères of New York, on top of the £1.8m they had already been paid for their generosity in lending MacGregor to British Steel. ‘Ian was widely seen as an overpaid, over-aged, ruthless American whose main achievement at British Steel had been to slash jobs,’ Lawson recorded, without a hint of disapproval.14

  The other task was to move coal from where it was stored at pit heads to the power stations. Glyn England had been reluctant to undertake this, fearing that it might provoke a strike, but once Walter Marshall was in place, part of the railway system was separated off and dedicated twenty-four hours a day, seve
n days a week, to shifting millions of tonnes of coal for the sole purpose of defeating a strike that had not yet broken out. By 1983, the power stations had more than 58m tonnes in reserve, which allowed them to keep on generating electricity for the entire strike. Four months into the strike, Margaret Thatcher and Norman Tebbit began to fret that time was not on the government’s side, and neither of them trusted the wily Peter Walker, who had succeeded Lawson as energy secretary. He was an old ally of Edward Heath, and Thatcher frankly admitted in her memoirs that she kept him in the cabinet only because he would have been more trouble outside. However, Walker brought Thatcher together with Marshall, who produced charts to demonstrate that they could keep the power stations running until November 1985, or longer, if more miners could be induced to break the strike. To win, the miners would have had to stay on strike for a minimum of eighteen months, or possibly two years.

  However, Scargill was not anticipating that the NUM would fight alone. The miners had a track record of taking sympathetic action in support of other unions’ industrial disputes. This was payback time, and he was counting on the backing of unionized power-workers, lorry drivers and others to bring large parts of the economy to a halt. Other union leaders, particularly the left-wing leadership of the TGWU, were willing in principle to come to the miners’ aid, but their members were not. In July, the TGWU called a national dock strike that could have severely disrupted the steel industry, but the dockers showed little enthusiasm for action, and the lorry drivers even less. The strike was called off after ten days. There was a second dock strike in Scotland, in August, over the unloading of imported coal for the Ravenscraig plant, which lasted twenty-six days.

  The Ridley Report had also called for a large mobile squad of police to ‘uphold the law against violent picketing’ and suggested bluntly that the government should ‘cut off the money supply to the strikers, and make the union finance them’. Both pieces of advice were quickly enacted. The government announced that families of striking miners were to be deemed to be receiving strike pay from their union. They knew quite well that this was not happening, but the fiction disqualified strikers’ families from claiming benefits. In some pit villages, most of the population had no regular income for a year. Lianne Roberts, from a mining family in South Wales, told the BBC: ‘During the strike we had to endure no hot water or heating through the winter as we had no coal. We were provided with special school dinner tickets for free meals and received food parcels for the miners’ families’. As the months passed, the hardship increased, and the prospect of victory dimmed, but the social cohesion of the mining communities generally held, aided by a massive voluntary effort. There was hardly a street corner in any British city centre without a bucket where people could donate to the miners’ families. Some donated rather more than small change: the oil billionaire, John Paul Getty, gave £100,000. Billy Bragg had his first political experience doing benefit gigs for the miners. Kim Howells, the future Labour foreign minister, was then an NUM official in a part of South Wales where not one miner went back to work while the strike was on. He recalled:

  To feed up to 20,000 families each week, as well as paying the huge and myriad costs of picketing, was a problem which was resolved only by creating what amounted to an alternative welfare state. Everyone was mobilised . . . the chapels, churches and political parties both inside and outside the UK. Meetings of over ten thousand were addressed by Welsh miners in Bologna and Milan . . . [M]en and women who in normal times rarely left their villages and valleys were rapidly becoming lay-experts in matters which had never before impinged on their lives. They were travelling vast distances day after day, discovering allies and enemies in the most unlikely places: friendly Hindu communities in Birmingham, hostile steelworkers in Newport; magnificently supportive farmers in the wilds of Dyfed and hostile city councillors in the chambers of Cardiff.15

  No time was wasted bussing in police officers to protect the strike-breaking miners and make sure that they could get past the picket lines unhindered. The strike formally began on Monday, 5 March. By Wednesday, 3,000 police from seventeen forces were at the pitheads and other locations around the East Midlands. The government was not going to be taken by surprise as it had been in 1972, when 800 police officers assigned to keep the Saltley coke depot open faced the sudden appearance of 25,000 miners, organized by Scargill. MI5 was running a huge intelligence operation, sending in regular reports to the government about Scargill and his immediate colleagues. This fact was later confirmed in the memoirs of Stella Rimington, the MI5 officer who ran the operation, who believed that Scargill, McGahey, Heathfield and, by implication, other NUM officials were subversives intent on destroying democracy, and therefore thought it was the intelligence service’s duty to keep watch on them. It was also widely suspected that MI5 was bugging rooms where NUM activists met in order to find out where the pickets were going to appear next, so that the police could be there to stop them. Mrs Rimington denied it:

  The activities of the picket lines and miners’ wives support groups were not our concern, even though they were of great concern to the police. But [the NUM] was directed by a triumvirate who had declared they were using the strike to try to bring down the elected government of Mrs Thatcher . . . We in MI5 limited our investigations to the activities of those who were using the strike for subversive purposes.16

  Their activities included tapping the private and office telephone lines of the NUM leaders and bugging their meeting rooms. Consequently, on certain days there were police blocks on the motorway exits in the East Midlands, and coach or car loads of miners from Yorkshire or Kent were stopped and ordered to go back whence they came. The newly elected MP for Sedgefield, Tony Blair, tried to drive to Nottingham to see what was happening, but was turned back at a police roadblock. He protested in the Commons that ‘there was no basis in law’ for this interference in the free movement of traffic.17

  Pickets found their way through none the less, and the sense of adventure in just reaching their destination added to the excitable atmosphere as they confronted lines of officers, whose accents revealed that they had been bussed from far away. Seeing hundreds of miners form a picket line was either enervating or intimidating, depending on which side you were on. These were men accustomed to hard physical labour, fired up and ready for trouble. They liked to ridicule the police by singing or whistling the theme from old Laurel and Hardy films and, if they were sufficient in number, they would literally push the police lines back by chanting ‘easy, easy’ and heaving in unison. Inevitably, there was violence; in the first six months alone there were 5,897 arrests and 1,039 convictions.

  The first fatal casualty occurred before the strike was a fortnight old, when a twenty-four-year-old miner, David Jones, was killed by a brick that hit him in the chest as he walked away from a picket line. He was on foot because the police had made the coach that was bringing the pickets stop some distance away. No great effort seems to have been put into finding the killer; Jones’s death merited one sentence in the minutes of the directors of the North Notts Mining Board.18 However, his funeral, on 23 March, attracted a procession half a mile long. Two days later, Ian Tarren, a twenty-five-year-old miner who had not joined the strike, hanged himself at home in Peterlee, County Durham, allegedly after being taunted for being a ‘scab’.19 Another strikebreaker, James Clay, committed suicide in June, allegedly after threats to his twelve-year-old daughter. Contrary to what is oft en claimed, the only miner recorded as having died on a picket line was Joe Green, a sixty-year-old miner who was crushed by an articulated lorry outside the Ferrybridge power station on 15 June, although two South Wales miners died in an accident on their way to a picket line. Other fatalities occurred because desperation drove miners or members of their families to scrabble around on slag heaps collecting lumps of coal, which could be sold for £2 a sack. It was a dangerous way to earn money. In November, two brothers, Paul and Darren Holmes, aged fourteen and fifteen, died when a railway embankment collaps
ed on them while they coal-picking in the pit village of Goldthorpe, near Doncaster.20 Another fourteen-year-old from Yorkshire, Paul Womersley, and a Northumberland miner, Frederick Taylor, died in similar circumstances. The NUM put the overall death total at 11, along with 7,000 injured, 11,000 miners arrested and 1,000 miners sacked for their part in the strike.

  The best known confrontation between miners and police took place outside the Orgreave coke works, where about 5,000 miners gathered to picket. That they were not stopped on their way suggests that someone in government wanted this to be the battleground where the police and miners faced each other in force. On day one, 29 May, eighty-four people were arrested and sixty-nine injured. The pickets returned the next day, with Scargill at their head. He was arrested, but released on bail. On day three, the pickets surprised the police by dispersing suddenly, as if they had had enough, but the confrontation dragged on, day after day, for three weeks, reaching a climax on 18 June, when an estimated 6,500 pickets, led by Scargill in person, in his trademark baseball cap, faced more than 3,000 police with riot shields or on horseback. A series of running skirmishes followed. After one police charge, which drove the pickets across a railway bridge away from the coke works, Scargill was found sitting on the ground by a burning barricade with his head in his hands. He was taken to hospital with head, leg and arm injuries, one of at least eighty people injured that day. The police claimed that he slipped off the bank and hit his head on a railway sleeper. He said that he was struck on the head by a riot shield.