No Such Thing As Society

by Andy McSmith

  Scargill was defying the law by being outside Orgreave at all, as he well knew. So was every other miner on the picket line, because the miners’ dispute was with the coal board, not British Steel, and this was ‘secondary picketing’, which had been outlawed in 1981 by Jim Prior, the then employment secretary. This point was not lost on David Owen, the SDP leader, who asked repeatedly during Prime Minister’s Questions in the Commons why British Steel did not injunct the NUM. Each time, Thatcher replied grumpily that the steel industry management was at liberty to go to law if they thought that it was in their interests. This was deliberately disingenuous. British Steel would have taken the miners to court if that was what the government had wanted. When Thatcher addressed a private meeting of backbench Conservative MPs on 19 July 1984, she did not pretend that the government was any kind of passive spectator in a dispute between management and a union. This was the occasion when she described the miners’ leaders as the ‘enemy within’. There is no verbatim record of what she said, but her speech notes have been preserved, on which is written: ‘Enemy without – beaten him. Enemy within. Miners’ leaders, Liverpool and some local authorities – just as dangerous, in a way more difficult to fight.’21 But Mrs Thatcher and her ministers were aware of the unpopularity of the law on secondary picketing, which was opposed by every trade union and by the Labour Party. Using it to have Scargill arrested would have played into his hands.

  The government was feeling its way towards a much more subtle and destructive way to deploy the law against the NUM. Central to it was a mysterious individual named David Hart, a property dealer, right-wing libertarian and amateur political fixer, who had inherited a fortune from his banker father. Touring the Midlands in a chauffeur-driven Mercedes, using the alias David Lawrence, he built up a network of disaffected miners, while keeping in contact with Thatcher. He introduced himself to Ian MacGregor and opened up to him the possibility that individual miners could be the shock troops who went into legal battle against the NUM. He was, the NCB chairman gratefully recalled, ‘the man I had been looking for’.22 Hart raised money from a number of businessmen, including Sir Hector Laing and Lord Hanson, both major donors to the Conservative Party, and John Paul Getty, who was persuaded to make amends for his generosity to striking miners’ families.

  With this financial backing, two miners, Ken Foulstone and Bob Taylor, took the NUM to court over the failure to hold a national ballot. In September, a high court obligingly ruled that the strike was unofficial and illegal. Scargill’s reaction was predictably defiant. ‘There is no High Court judge going to take away the democratic right of our union to deal with its internal affairs,’ he pronounced. The next move was to serve a writ on Arthur Scargill for contempt of court. This was not a simple matter because the writ had to be served to Scargill in person, which meant that they had to know where to find him, when he was forever rushing about from picket line to mass meeting. Besides, it would have been a brave or foolish solicitor who handed Scargill a writ when he was surrounded by striking miners. But they knew where to find him on Monday, 1 October, because that was the day the Labour Party annual conference, in Blackpool, would be debating the strike. Hart hired a helicopter to transfer the writ and the man serving it from London to Blackpool. Next, the server had to get into the hall, which he did by producing a photographer’s pass issued to the Daily Express, to serve the writ in full view of hundreds of party delegates. The moment was captured in a photograph published exclusively in the Daily Express. The photographer who took the image later went to the press desk claiming to have lost his pass and asked for another, which he was not given.23 On 10 October, a court found Scargill and the NUM in contempt of court, and fined them £1,000 and £200,000 respectively.

  Scargill’s policy on fines such as these was to refuse to pay on the grounds that the Conservatives had no right to pass the legislation under which they were imposed. On this occasion, somewhat to his annoyance, his £1,000 fine was paid by an anonymous well-wisher. However, the union’s fine remained unpaid and, on 25 October, a judge ordered the entire assets of the NUM to be seized. Scargill and his colleagues had foreseen this possibility and had squirreled the union’s money into a labyrinth of bank accounts where the sequesters could not find it.

  As this was going on, coincidentally, the miners were suddenly closer to victory than at any time, because on 28 September the small, half-forgotten National Association of Colliery Overmen Deputies and Shotfirers (NACODS) announced the result of a ballot in which 83 per cent of its members had voted to strike. Its members included all the overseers responsible for safety below ground, without whom it was illegal to operate the pits. The point seemed lost on Ian MacGregor, but Walker and Thatcher understood that a NACODS strike would close the Nottinghamshire pits and possibly force the government to surrender; and since NACODS’ leaders had conducted a proper ballot, the legality of their action could not be challenged. ‘Apart from the initial few days of the strike in March, this was the time when we felt most concern,’24 Thatcher admitted. The government’s problems were worsened by MacGregor’s refusal to treat the threat seriously. Thatcher had to ring him from her room at the Grand Hotel in Brighton, during the Conservative Party conference, just before an IRA bomb almost killed her, to order him to negotiate.25 Later that same month, when invited by Neil Kinnock to say that she still had confidence in MacGregor, she changed the subject.26 Arthur Scargill would say later that he believed that at this point Thatcher knew she was beaten and would have to settle on the NUM’s terms. But on 24 October, the NACODS executive decided to accept a ‘modified’ colliery review offered by the government and to call off their strike, a decision that Scargill thought ‘inexplicable’.27 The miners’ last chance of victory had slipped away.

  No sooner had that opportunity been lost than Scargill suff ered his worst publicity so far when the Sunday Times revealed that Roger Windsor, chief executive of the NUM, had been in Libya, apparently soliciting money from Colonel Gaddafi. It was not the only tale of money from dubious foreign sources going to the NUM. In December 1984, Mikhail Gorbachev, who was soon to become head of the Soviet Communist Party, visited Britain and was chided by Thatcher over intelligence reports that the USSR was secretly funding the strike. In fact, some Soviet money was sent to the International Miners’ Organisation run from France by Alain Simon, a Communist ally of Scargill. It would be a source of endless recrimination within the NUM in the early 1990s, precisely because the money never reached the British miners. It arrived after the strike was over. But the story of money from Libya was more damaging even than rumours of Moscow gold, because of the shocking incident the previous April when, as discussed in Chapter 5, someone opened fire from inside the Libyan embassy in St James’s Square and a stray bullet killed the young police constable Yvonne Fletcher. The Sunday Times had also discovered that Scargill had been to Paris earlier in the month, travelling under the alias of ‘Mr Smith’ to meet foreign trade union leaders, one of whom was Libyan. The inference was that Scargill was accepting money from a regime held responsible for the murder on a London street of a young policewoman. The news finally killed the fragile relationship between Scargill and Neil Kinnock. Without waiting to hear Scargill’s explanation, Kinnock pronounced that any off er of Libyan aid would be ‘an insult to everything the British Labour movement stands for’. Scargill defiantly insisted that talking to a Libyan trade union leader was not the same as talking to the Libyan government. He also claimed to have ‘no idea what happened between Mr Windsor and the leader of Libya’.28

  This would not be the last occasion that Roger Windsor made front-page news. He was a recent arrival at NUM headquarters, appointed by Scargill, but resigned suddenly in July 1989. It then emerged that he was responsible for an incident several years earlier that had nearly landed the NUM in court, when a letter purportedly written by one of the Nottinghamshire miners’ leaders was exposed as a forgery. Windsor had forged it. He had also forged a letter supposedly sent by Peter H
eathfield to Sheffield Council, in which the NUM agreed to pay £90,000 for landscaping in return for planning permission to erect steps to the front door of its headquarters. The NUM denied sending the letter, and for five years its head office’s main entrance was suspended eight feet above ground.29 Months after his resignation, Windsor made an explosive reappearance on the front pages after he told the Daily Mirror – for a fee of £130,000 – a sensational tale about how he, Scargill and Heathfield had used money donated by Libya during the strike to pay their mortgages. The story came with a picturesque detail of a mountan of cash being brought to Scargill’s office, where the NUM president divided it into piles and divvied it out. Until then, whatever else their enemies thought of Scargill and Heathfield, it was assumed that they were incorruptible; now it appeared that they had been exposed as embezzlers. Over time, it was established that there was only one detail in Windsor’s story that was demonstrably true: he had indeed used nearly £30,000 of money intended for the miners to pay his own mortgage, for which he was successfully sued in the French courts. Scargill and Heathfield had not. Roy Greenslade, who was editor of the Daily Mirror when the story appeared, wrote a 2,000-word apology thirteen years later, saying that he wished he had never published the story.30 Whether or not any money ever came to the NUM from Libya has not been established.

  One explanation for Windsor’s behaviour is that he was a fantasist who developed a grudge against Scargill and Heathfield, and needed money. Tam Dalyell, the same Labour MP who relentlessly pursued Thatcher over the sinking of the Belgrano, heard another explanation from his contacts in the world of intelligence and alleged, in the House of Commons, that Windsor was an MI5 plant. Windsor denied it, and when he was named as an MI5 agent in the Sunday Express by the former Conservative MP Rupert Allason, he sued; the newspaper settled out of court.31 It is certainly possible that MI5 had an informant at NUM headquarters. Cathy Massiter confirmed that MI5 discussed trying to get Harry Newton employed there, but had to drop the idea because he was too ill. David Shayler, an MI5 officer who went public in 1997, described having seen the organization’s forty-volume file on Scargill, which he said confirmed that the MI5 had at least one well-placed source in the NUM. As discussed, Stella Rimington’s published memoirs confirm that MI5 was spying on Scargill, McGahey and Heathfield, but she claimed that all the information they forwarded to Margaret Thatcher was ‘carefully scrutinized’ to make sure that it was ‘properly within our remit’.32 Whether or not that remit included retaining an informant in NUM headquarters, she did not say, though when asked about Windsor, she replied: ‘It would be correct to say that he, Roger Windsor, was never an agent in any sense of the word that you can possibly imagine and that MI5 did not run agents in the NUM.’33

  While the pictures of Roger Windsor consorting with Gaddafi were bad for the miners, something worse – far worse – followed two weeks later. In Wales, a small number of miners had filtered back to work, creating huge resentment among those still on strike. There, as in England, the resources of the state were liberally expended in protecting and encouraging strikebreakers and, allegedly, in acts of provocation. One miner’s wife was walking home in the dark in the little town of Abertillery, when a van pulled up ahead of her. ‘I could hear the voices of the men shouting “Slut, prostitute!” . . . When I got alongside the van, it was full of policemen,’34 she claimed. One strike-breaker was David Williams, from Rhymney, who worked at the Merthyr Tydfil coalfield six miles from his home. Each morning, a taxi called at his door and he was driven to work along the A465, accompanied by two police cars and a motorcycle outrider. The procession followed the same route ten days in succession. On the tenth day, 30 November, a 46 lb concrete block was dropped from a bridge over the road. It hit the car, only slightly injuring Williams, but instantly killing David Wilkie, the taxi driver. Wilkie had two children under thirteen by a previous relationship, and a fiancée, by whom he had a two-year-old daughter and who was pregnant with a baby, born six weeks after Wilkie’s death. His mother had a heart condition and was taken to hospital after she heard of his death. His funeral was led by the Bishop of Llandaff, and his death created an outcry that the death of the miner, David Jones, never had. The police soon found the culprits, two young miners named Dean Hancock and Russell Shankland, who were convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment in May 1985. The verdict set off a strike by 700 miners in Merthyr Tydfil who had only just gone back to work. When the case went to appeal in October, a high court ruled that the judge had been wrong, and reduced the conviction from murder to manslaughter. The two men spent five years in prison.

  By the time of Wilkie’s death the mood had changed on the picket lines. Confrontations with the police became rarer; arrests and injuries were fewer. The sense of defeat was pervasive. It was winter, but the power stations were easily coping with demand. The NUM’s attempts to hide its money in foreign bank accounts were coming apart. Everything, even the union headquarters, had been seized by the sequestrator. In December, leaders of the TUC approached the government, using Robert Maxwell as an emissary, in the hope of mediating a settlement. They believed that Scargill and the NUM were in the mood to settle, though they were not saying so. This was not really what Thatcher wanted, but on 19 February 1985, she met seven TUC leaders, impressed them with her grasp of detail, and left them with some hope that they might be making headway. A proposal was drawn up by Peter Walker and the next day the TUC leaders presented it to the NUM executive, who unanimously rejected it.

  The number of NUM members breaking the strike was now rising by 2,500 a week, and by 27 February, the NCB triumphantly reported that more than half the NUM’s membership had turned up to work. On Sunday, 3 March, the NUM called another delegate conference to discuss whether or not to continue. It was preceded by a meeting of the executive, which could not decide what to recommend, being split 11–11. Scargill abstained, as if he knew the game was up but was not going to be the one to call time.35 The delegates voted 98–91 for a return to work. The great strike was over.

  One question left open was how much the strike had cost the nation. Arthur Scargill put the figure at £8 billion; the Treasury’s figure, at least for public consumption, was £2.75 billion. It was only in 2008 that the Treasury released papers that gave a more accurate and detailed estimate of the cost. Their published figure did not include the costs that lingered after the miners went back to work, which were £1.1 billion in 1985–6 alone. This was disclosed in a written note to Peter Rees, the chief secretary of the Treasury, by one of his civil servants, who admonished him: ‘The aggregate figures for 1985–6 have not previously been quoted and should not be volunteered.’ Other large costs were simply excluded, such as the value of coal taken from stockpiles to keep the powers stations going, or the wages that the miners lost by being out on strike. ‘Real sophisticates may say the cost is the sum of the accounting losses and loss of miners’ pay, i.e. a rough measure of GDP foregone. This would cost well over £5 billion,’36 a Treasury note suggested.

  In addition, there was the immeasurable cost in human terms, from the destruction of village communities and from the enduring bitter enmity between those who worked and those who went on strike. The real cost was borne by the mining villages whose lives had been sustained by the industry. At the onset of the strike, the NCB employed a workforce of 208,000, of whom 184,000 were members of the NUM. Once the union was beaten, the government set about cutting their numbers with vindictive haste. Within ten years, more than 90 per cent of the jobs were gone. In July 1984, Roy Lynk, an NUM official from Nottinghamshire who had assumed leadership of the strike-breakers, formally applied to the NCB for negotiating rights free of the NUM, for which the NUM sacked him and took him to court. The NUM won the judgement, ironically, because Lynk had acted on his own authority without a ballot. The victory was only temporary. With much covert encouragement from the NCB and government, the Nottinghamshire and South Derbyshire miners voted to form a breakaway union, the Un
ion of Democratic Mineworkers (UDM), which exists to this day. At the time of writing, the British coal industry employs 5,700 people, about 1,600 of whom are members of the NUM, with just over 1,000 in the UDM.37

  Where the pits used to be there are now country parks or urban developments such as leisure and retail centres. The thriving miners’ welfare club in Brampton village, where it all began, was vandalized but reinvented to become a social club for plumbers, caretakers, shop-fitters and call-centre staff, there being no miners left in the vicinity. In Shirebrook, on the Nottinghamshire-Derbyshire border, former strikers and strike-breakers still drank in separate pubs, twenty years later.38

  CHAPTER 9

  FEED THE WORLD

  Bob Geldof had been through the roller-coaster of show-business since moving to London from his native Ireland. His band, The Boomtown Rats, turned down a £1m off er from Virgin Records, signed up with a smaller label, and had a huge hit in 1979 with I Don’t Like Mondays, but by 1983 they had been pushed into obscurity by the rise of the New Romantics. In 1984, though his wife Paula Yates was earning a good living as a presenter of The Tube, an innovative rock-music programme produced in Newcastle upon Tyne by Tyne Tees TV, Geldof was so distraught about the failure of the band’s latest single that he decided to invest £1,000 in a bit of illicit hype. He sent friends out on a chart-rigging mission, buying the single in strategically selected shops. One friend crashed his motorbike while travelling from shop to shop in the Midlands and spent months in hospital, all to no avail. Having given up hope that the band’s latest album would even be released, ‘I went home in a state of blank resignation and switched on the television. I saw something that placed my worries in a ghastly new perspective,’1 he recalled.