Marching to the Fault Line

by David Hencke

  The arrival of a Labour government under Harold Wilson in 1964, after thirteen Conservative years, did little to slow down the programme. This was a major disappointment to the NUM, which thought it had a deal with the Labour Party, entered into when the Party was in opposition, to expand the industry as part of its fuel policy. Three hundred more pits were closed by Harold Wilson’s Labour government, and the workforce slumped from more than 750,000 in the late 1950s to 320,000 by 1968. Just before the general strike, the MFGB had had 900,000 members.

  That, according to the militants in the NUM, was when miners should have gone on strike to stop pit closures. But they did not. Pit closures forced miners to move from coalfield to coalfield in search of secure jobs. The NUM opposed the policy with lobbies and campaigns. It said repeatedly that depending on imported energy from the Middle East was economic madness; but there was no strike action until the late 1960s.

  The move back to militancy mirrored what was going on in the rest of the unions, for, where the sixties were not swinging, they were insurrectionary instead. On 5 August 1967, in Sheffield, left-wing militants in the NUM met together for the first time, calling themselves the left caucus, to co-ordinate tactics throughout the country in order to ensure that another left-winger was elected General Secretary when Will Paynter retired at the end of 1968. They were concerned that the job, occupied for so long by one of their own – for Paynter had succeeded the left-winger Arthur Horner – might be captured by the right: the trade unionists who believed the road to improvement was the tortuous one of talking to government, not the direct one of fighting for justice industrially. One of the Yorkshire representatives on the left caucus was the youthful Arthur Scargill, whose career was already being carefully nurtured by the Communist Party, determined to wrest control of the Yorkshire coalfield from the right and the compromisers.

  The caucus chose as its candidate Lawrence Daly, one of the most attractive and colourful characters the trade unions ever produced. He was a former miner from Fife and, like many mining union leaders, a self-taught intellectual who knew reams of poetry by heart – not just Rabbie Burns, though that was his favourite – and could recite it with passion and feeling, especially when he was drunk. (One of the authors treasures the memory of standing with Daly on Euston station at midnight, some time in the early seventies, after a long session in the pub, and reciting the whole of Act 1, Scene 2, of Julius Caesar. First Daly played Brutus, then they changed parts and he played Cassius.) Short, thick-set, naturally intelligent, entertaining, Daly was also an inspiring orator, and a militant trade unionist who used to say: ‘We only get what we are strong enough to take.’

  By that time the NUM had achieved a common wage agreement, so that all miners everywhere were paid the same for doing the same job. Now, instead of a series of local disputes about local wage rates, came the threat of national strike action over the hours that surface workers had to put in. At the union’s national conference in October 1969, Arthur Scargill had proposed a strike – and, against the opposition of the National Executive, the proposal was carried overwhelmingly. The strike was unofficial, but thousands of miners came out. The strike saw the first use of flying pickets, and in some areas, notably Yorkshire, no mining took place at all for the whole of the two weeks that it lasted.

  Judged by its avowed aims, it was not a success. The eight-hour day for surface workers, its ostensible objective, was not achieved. But the union’s left wing had a deeper purpose. What they were interested in was who was to run the union in the future, and the strike immeasurably strengthened their position inside the NUM. So the face-saving return-to-work deal put together by TUC General Secretary Vic Feather as the strike began to collapse is still presented, in the official NUM history, as a victory for militancy and Arthur Scargill. ‘It was clear that the union was never, ever, going to be the same again,’ he said afterwards. 14 The right wing in the union, Paul Routledge writes, ‘were being outflanked and outmanoeuvred by younger, smarter, more politically committed miners’.15 The same thing was happening in other trade unions, but the miners were leading the way.

  Daly’s victory ensured that the left had the general secretaryship, and in 1971 came the chance to capture the presidency as well – the job that included being the union’s chief negotiator. The left candidate was probably the most liked and respected Communist in Britain, Mick McGahey. McGahey had a voice that sounded as though it was filtered through thick, dense layers of coal dust, tobacco and scotch whisky, which it was, for to a hard youth in the pit he added a lifetime of chainsmoking and whisky drinking. He was clever, sociable and emotional, and never looked entirely happy in the union official’s uniform of dark suit, white shirt and tie, though he always wore it – the tie never quite done up, the glasses perched just above their rightful place on his ears.

  Joe Gormley, the candidate proposed by the right wing in the union, shared McGahey’s sociability but little else. He was a clever negotiator from Lancashire, chubby, cheerful, likeable and cunning. The right, still smarting from their defeat at the hands of Daly and aware that they were less well organized than the left, put everything they had into Gormley’s campaign. Helped by a fear that the union would be run by two left-wing Scots, Gormley won a massive victory.

  Harold Wilson’s Labour government was unexpectedly beaten in the 1970 election, and a Conservative government under Edward Heath faced the growing unrest and militancy in the coalfields. The 1971 NUM conference demanded substantial pay rises and called for strike action if they were not conceded. It also took a decision that was to have momentous consequences: it lowered the percentage in the ballot required for calling an official national strike from two thirds to 55 per cent.

  Its demands were not conceded, and for the first time since 1926 a national coal strike was called. It went to a ballot, and the vote only just made the new ballot margin – the percentage was just 58.8: before the 1971 conference they could not have called the strike. But this time the NUM faced a government far less well prepared than in 1926, and far more vulnerable, and it started its strike in the depth of winter, on 9 January 1972, so that the lack of coal bit quickly. The strike looked like a winner from the start. There was enough coal to last eight weeks, but solidarity action from other unions stopped it being moved, encouraged by NUM flying pickets who went to power stations, docks, ports and wharves all over Britain. The mines themselves did not require pickets, for, despite the narrowness of the strike ballot, not a single miner broke the strike. No one ever shouted ‘scab’, for there was no one to shout it at.

  Joe Gormley, having opposed the strike, was determined once it was called to win it. Lawrence Daly’s Scottish charm was set to work on the middle classes. Lord Lambton had just resigned from the government in disgrace after revelations about his association with prostitutes, and Daly told his audiences that the miners’ pay claim was rather less than ‘government ministers are willing to pay to ladies of easy virtue, for what I understand is considerably less than an eight-hour shift.’

  Exactly a month after the start of the strike, Heath was forced to declare a state of emergency, as voltage had to be reduced across the national grid; a few days later he agreed to set up a public inquiry into miners’ wages. He tried to persuade the miners to go back to work while it was sitting, but memories are long in the mining community, and just saying the words ‘Samuel Commission, 1926’ was enough to persuade the miners that they were not going to go back without a satisfactory settlement.

  So Lord Wilberforce, the enquiry chairman, was told to work at breakneck speed, and he did: his report was completed in just two days. He was also under pressure to find a way to pay the miners enough to get them back to work, and he managed that too. The day after the settlement, miners carried Lawrence Daly shoulder-high through Mansfield in Nottinghamshire.

  The strike had another effect, of even longer-term significance than the NUM victory. Before it, no one outside Yorkshire and delegates to NUM conferences had heard
of Arthur Scargill. By the end of it he was on the way to being a household name. He was credited (wrongly) with having invented flying pickets. Journalists loved him: he was dashing, fluent and quotable, and happy to talk up his own role.

  ‘We took the view that we were in a class war,’ he told New Left Review. ‘We were not playing cricket on the village green, like they did in ’26.’ He told the Observer Colour Supplement that in Barnsley he ran a ‘strike operations room’ like a military headquarters, with a map showing ports, power stations, steelworks and mines, and from there he despatched pickets ‘like shock troops’.16

  But what really made his name was what became known as the Battle of Saltley Gates. On 7 February Scargill heard that police were allowing lorries to take coke from a depot in Saltley, Birmingham. He led 400 Yorkshire miners to the gates of the depot. The battle between police and miners raged for three days, while television cameras recorded every twist and turn and Scargill directed his men through a megaphone. After three days, the lorries were still moving coke, 100 pickets were in jail and fifty were in hospital. So with the help of his old friend and mentor Frank Watters, now the Communist Party’s man in Birmingham, he persuaded local unions in the city to call a one-day strike. Thousands more miners came, from all over the country. The Chief Constable took an instant decision: he closed the gates, as Scargill wanted.

  That was the day the government appointed a Court of Enquiry, which is the basis of the myth that Scargill and Saltley won the strike for the NUM. In fact, though Saltley’s symbolic importance was enormous, its practical importance was not that great, and the course of the strike was probably not much affected. The coke heap in Saltley, which was a fraction of the size Scargill claimed, would have been used up in a fortnight.17 It was not, as Scargill seems to believe, the turning point of the strike, but it was the turning point of his career. It may also have been the moment in which he began to believe in his own invincibility. ‘All I ever hoped for, in unionism and solidarity, all I’ve dreamed of, came true on February 10 at Saltley in Birmingham. I cried that day.’18

  After it he was elected to his first full-time union job, as Yorkshire’s compensation agent: the person who assembles a case to show that a miner’s illness is due to an industrial disease like pneumoconiosis, and he is therefore entitled to compensation. He was very good at it. Whatever else he did or didn’t do with his life, a lot of miners in Yorkshire owe their relative comfort in illness to Scargill’s skill, fluent advocacy, determination and hard work.

  Soon afterwards he was elected to the National Executive, and in 1973 became President of the Yorkshire miners, just as another strike was in the offing. The value of what they had won looked like being eroded by the government’s incomes policy. This time there was an added pressure on the government: the Yom Kippur war in the Middle East, which drove up oil prices. Gormley and Edward Heath met secretly to try to work out a formula for a settlement, and Gormley used all his considerable negotiating skills to extract enough to avoid conflict.

  Of all the executive members, Scargill was the most ferociously determined to take the dispute to a strike, and to scupper the efforts of his President to avert one. The TUC tried to broker a deal, but a strike ballot was set for 1 February, returning the largest majority for a strike in the union’s history: 81 per cent. The strike was called for 9 February, and before it began Heath called a general election for 28 February.

  Heath stood on the platform ‘Who governs Britain?’ A victory in the election would be interpreted by the government as a mandate to stand firm against the miners, and the voters knew it. He wrote to Joe Gormley, asking that the strike be suspended during the election campaign. If it had been just up to Gormley, this would have been agreed, for apart from sympathizing with the Prime Minister’s point of view, Gormley was wise in the ways of public relations, and knew that refusing the Prime Minister’s request would count against Labour in the election. But he was overturned by his National Executive.

  This time Heath declared a state of emergency straightaway, and limited industry to a three-day week. Shops and offices could not use electricity into the evening, and television channels had to close down no later than 10.30 p.m.

  Labour’s election victory was desperately narrow. The miners came close to disaster in 1974. But Labour’s victory made possible a swift conclusion to negotiations with Wilson’s new Secretary of State for Employment, Michael Foot. The new government, the NCB and the unions set about agreeing a long-term strategy for the industry: the Plan for Coal, which set both short-term (150m tonnes per year) and long-term (200m tonnes per year) production targets for the industry. The NUM was delighted. It was a plan for a booming, optimistic industry of the future, not the grimy old smokestack industry ready only for slow dismantlement, which was how they felt governments had seen it until then. During the 1970s new coalfields were opened such as Selby in Yorkshire, along with drift mines in various parts of Britain. For the first time in two decades, investment poured into the industry. And the miners’ disease – the black dust, pneumoconiosis – was tackled on a large scale for the first time, with over £200m going into a scheme for its victims.

  It was, however, the unions that at last brought Labour down in 1979. By then Wilson had resigned. His successor, James Callaghan, tried hard to make the deal with the unions over wage rises stick, but the huge public sector strikes of the winter of 1978–9 were fatal to his electoral prospects. Margaret Thatcher was elected at the head of a far more radical Conservative government than Britain had ever known.

  CHAPTER 2

  ENTER THATCHER, STAGE RIGHT, AND SCARGILL, STAGE LEFT

  Margaret Thatcher, and the philosophy she stood for, did not spring on the world new-minted in the 1970s. Hers was a strand of thinking in the Conservative Party which can be traced back at least as far as 1957, the first year of Harold Macmillan’s premiership, when Peter Thorneycroft resigned as Chancellor of the Exchequer along with his Financial Secretary Enoch Powell and his Economic Secretary Nigel Birch. These three men stood for a new brand of Conservatism, distinguished at first by their convictions that money supply had to be controlled and inflation kept down with low wage settlements, and the free market was the key to both prosperity and freedom itself. They had no patience with the patrician way in which Macmillan humoured and, in their eyes, appeased the unions and regarded them as having a legitimate voice in the state. In future years the battle lines lengthened to embrace the Atlantic alliance and the European Union.

  Macmillan won that first battle, riding with seemingly effortless ease the storm that Thorneycroft, Powell and Birch hoped to whip up. But his protégé Edward Heath lost the last battle, ejected from the leadership of his Party by Margaret Thatcher in 1975, a year after losing the general election.

  Like all politicians who actually change the world – such as that other great change-maker of the twentieth century, Clement Attlee – the grocer’s daughter from Grantham had very clear and precise ideas about how a country should be run. ‘It is not government, but free enterprise, which is capable of creating wealth, providing jobs and raising living standards’ – so away with the strong public sector of the Attlee settlement, and in particular away with nationalization. Talking of herself and Ronald Reagan, she said: ‘Our belief in the virtues of hard work and enterprise led us to cut taxes. Our belief in private property led to the sale of state industries . . . Our belief in sound money led to the monetarist policies that attacked inflation . . .’1 It could all hardly be clearer.

  That is why Margaret Thatcher’s victory in the 1979 election was a watershed. It marked the end of the Attlee settlement of Britain’s affairs, which had endured for more than thirty years, and the start of a new and very different settlement that is still with us. No one under forty knows what it is like to live in a country where trade unions are a force in the land; where the public sector is a recognized and respected player in the economy; where the idea of a job for life is not meant as an insult; where h
eavy industry and those who work in it are considered vital to the British economy. That was Britain before the 1984–5 miners’ strike, the moment when Clement Attlee’s Britain turned into Margaret Thatcher’s Britain: a Britain in which heavy industry – the smokestack industries, as they were called – gave way to service industries like call centres and distribution centres; in which the strong public sector of the Attlee settlement was humiliated and almost all its powers handed to businesses, charities and churches.

  Thatcher’s Britain was also one in which the extraordinary limitations on people’s freedom of movement that were imposed during the strike brought Britain nearer to civil war than it has come for 400 years. The borders of one county, Nottinghamshire, were effectively closed. Before 1984, the idea of police stopping a coach-load of people for no other purpose than to prevent them attending a lawful demonstration would have seemed an appalling affront to free speech. Since then, it has become almost routine.

  In 1979 it looked as though one aspect of Thatcher policy would be an attempt to gain revenge on the miners for their defeat of Edward Heath in 1974, pour encourager les autres – as a means of ensuring that the unions knew who the boss was. The outcome of the conflict, and whether it would be a skirmish or an out-and-out war, would depend largely on the nature of the leadership teams chosen by both sides, and on the preliminary skirmishing. Those fateful decisions were made between 1979 and 1983.

  Sir Keith Joseph, who headed the right-wing Centre for Policy Studies, had been given the job of drawing up and researching fresh policies for the new government in Thatcher’s Shadow Cabinet. He embraced the monetarist theories of Milton Friedman, which were to sweep away much of British industry in the 1980s, and he helped shape the Thatcher government’s social Conservatism, attacking single parents for fecklessness in a way that would be anathema today to Tories like David Cameron.