Marching to the Fault Line

by David Hencke

  For the diehards on either side, these two great steelworks acquired a totemic importance. As we shall see in the next chapter, Neil Kinnock was involved in efforts to find a compromise over Llanwern which would not break the strike, but would not destroy the steelworks either. In Scotland, Mick McGahey was quietly involved in a similar exercise over Ravenscraig. He got an agreement to allow 18,000 tonnes of coal into Ravenscraig each week. The Socialist Worker historians of the strike regard this as proof that the pure faith of revolutionary fervour did not really burn in McGahey. Scratch him, and he turns out to be a traitor to the working class too, just like Kinnock. John Monks says that McGahey had to be very careful to avoid being branded as the man who sold out the miners. ‘The Communist Party could not afford to be seen as class collaborators,’ he said.

  Whether or not McGahey knew it, the steel bosses were genuinely alarmed at the prospect of the closure of Ravenscraig. They feared it would destroy their business. His deal was one that allowed British coal in and kept the steelworks open – but it was not enough: the steel bosses wanted foreign coal too. When a giant ore carrier, the Ostia, docked at Hunterson with fresh supplies of coal, the dockers, members of the TGWU and sympathetic to the miners, refused to unload her.

  A British Steel delegation went to see Norman Tebbit to urge him to intervene personally and raise it in the Cabinet. He saw them and kept them waiting all afternoon while a Cabinet committee deliberated. Then he came back to the delegation, and, according to his account, just said to them: ‘Carry on your business.’ They said: ‘Is that all?’ He replied: ‘Yes.’

  So they made their arrangements and ensured that other dockers would unload them, under the eye of a non-TGWU supervisor. This was absolutely forbidden by the Dock Labour Scheme, which had been devised to give the union sufficient power to defend its members in the docks; breaking those rules was one of the many body-blows to union power suffered during the strike. At any other time, the contravention of the Dock Labour Scheme would have been a major story, but in the middle of the miners’ strike it passed practically unnoticed.

  Tebbit regards this moment as a key turning point in the strike. ‘If the dockers had come out and called a national strike, we would have lost.’

  When talks began on 5 July, Labour leaders and the TUC still saw a compromise as a realistic thing to hope for. By 9 July there was talk of movement on both sides; then talks were adjourned for a few days. Unfortunately, just at that moment the NUM executive was preoccupied with internal revenge. It proposed to change the rules in order to discipline members for offences including actions ‘detrimental to the interests of the union’. This was directly aimed at miners who continued to work, as in Nottinghamshire. And it was Nottinghamshire that took the first of many actions in the High Court, to obtain an injunction on 10 July to stop the union doing this. The next day a special conference of the NUM ignored the injunction and went ahead with creating a disciplinary ‘star chamber’.

  This decision enabled MacGregor to issue a statement on 12 July saying that rebel miners would not lose their jobs if they were thrown out of the NUM. At a stroke he rescinded the miners’ closed shop, which for generations had ensured that their union was strong. This, like the breaking of the Dock Labour Scheme, would at normal times have been an earthquake in the industry. In the fever of the times it too went almost unnoticed; but without this decision, the breakaway union that eventually hammered the last nail into the coffin of NUM power would have been impossible.

  As he battled through the long, hot summer of 1984, Scargill, like many other generals in history, waited patiently for General Winter to thrust victory into his hands. The passing of the longest day in the year, 21 June, was greeted as though it was the turning point, and on 30 June Scargill wrote a signed front-page lead in The Miner headlined TIME IS ON OUR SIDE NOW.

  ‘The strike pendulum has now securely swung to our territory,’ he wrote. ‘The most crucial date in the calendar – June 21, the longest day – is passed. From here on in, the days get shorter and the nights longer. We shall be entering autumn in an immensely powerful position with coal stocks at approximately 15m tonnes – well below the 17m tonnes level at which the three day week was introduced 10 years ago.’ But that was ten years ago. There was a lot less oil about then.

  Such stuff did not impress the print union leader Bill Keys, who was acting as the unofficial emissary of the left wing of the TUC General Council to the NUM. Keys was desperately worried about where the strike was going. Scargill, he confided to his diary on 29 June, the day before Scargill’s article appeared in The Miner, ‘wants a total victory, industrially and politically, and refuses to see that he is dealing with a different situation [from the one] that existed in the two previous miners’ disputes.’ It worried Keys that ‘in talks I have had with him, there has never been any suggestion at any time of him modifying his attitude’.

  Keys had never been in a dispute where he achieved total victory. Scargill ‘will fight to the last miner, and in doing so destroy the NUM . . . I just wish the man would discuss a resolution with the friends of the miners.’ Keys predicted the emergence of a breakaway union in Nottinghamshire, though he did not have access to the private evidence possessed by Thatcher, Gregson and MacGregor.

  Bill Keys was a larger-than-life figure. In the powerful print and newspaper trade unions he had an almost mythical status, and the first reaction among them to any proposal, however unimportant,was generally: ‘Have you asked Bill?’ He knew it and encouraged it. He was once heard shouting to the President of the NUJ at a TUC Congress in Blackpool, in his uncompromising South London accent: ‘I wish you’d bloody arst me before you put down bloody motions on bloody agendas.’ His legendary correspondence was typed exactly as he dictated it, so his letters carried the stamp of his personality. One, to the NUJ General Secretary Ken Morgan when the two unions disagreed about something, began: ‘Now, look here, Ken.’ The classically educated Morgan reported it to his executive with the comment: ‘Bill Keys moves directly into the vocative case.’

  He was one of the many union officials – you can find examples even today – who seem to model themselves on that greatest of union barons, Ernest Bevin, the creator of the TGWU in the 1920s: at once blunt and devious, lovable and a bit of a bully. Keys was a left-winger, but he used his union’s considerable power carefully: a realist and a pragmatist, he knew just how tenuous that power was. He understood that print union power could one day evaporate like the morning dew – as it did, not so long after the miners’ strike, though he had retired by then.

  An erect, stiff figure with a face that looked ever so slightly like a seal’s, Keys was a chain-smoker and a deal-maker, sometimes accused of being too elaborate in spinning out negotiations, but always trusted to deliver what he said he would deliver – which was the real key to his power. He was an old-style union leader in the Bevin mould, tough and noisy, full of bravado and a kind of simple cunning, conspiratorial, egotistical, but consumed with a passion for justice. He remained true to his working-class roots while unashamedly enjoying the fine wines of the ruling class.

  In his own print union, Keys launched a campaign to get branches to adopt local pits and open up their homes to miners’ families. He decided on the slogan: ‘They shall not starve.’ Keys, then aged sixty-one and with health problems, had just told his own union’s conference that he intended to retire the following March. Engaged in a round of emotional retiring parties – he was finding how much loved he was – he did not yet know that he was destined to become a key player in the miners’ strike. But he did know as early as July that there were considerable potential problems. ‘How the movement can help is the problem,’ he wrote in his diary on 24 July. ‘Arthur does not want direct TUC involvement, but a third party has to come into the arena sometime.’ Two days later he found himself deep in discussion of the problem with Labour leader Neil Kinnock.4

  As July opened, Scargill had, for a very short period, a ray of hope tha
t the strike might spread to the docks. On 9 July a row over the use of ‘scab’ labour to unload coal at Immingham Docks threatened a national dock strike. The National Dock Labour Board moved swiftly to resolve the dispute in favour of the TGWU, and ministers insisted that the National Dock Labour Scheme was safe. But just for a day or two, the second front – one of Scargill’s most desired outcomes – looked as though it might happen.

  In government circles there was immediate concern. A memo5 written by David Normington, then principal private secretary at the Department for Employment, to Andrew Turnbull, Margaret Thatcher’s private secretary, included a special briefing for ministers of ‘points to make’ to the media that weekend. The top line was: ‘Cannot see why the unions and employers should not settle this quickly through their normal negotiating machinery.’ It emphasized that ministers should say the unions had already won their point.

  Nothing was left to chance. A memo from Robin Butler, Thatcher’s principal private secretary, on 17 July showed she had already ordered the immediate setting up of a special group chaired by Employment Secretary Tom King to co-ordinate action against any strike, alongside two other special groups that met daily under Peter Walker and the Transport Secretary. In the event the strike fizzled out by 21 July, but Thatcher’s reaction showed how jumpy ministers were.

  In the meantime there had been a secret review of the five collieries identified by the NUM as intended for closure by the NCB. The report on Polmaise, Herrington, Bullcliffe Wood, Cortonwood and Snowdon prepared by engineers and sent to Ned Smith and Kevan Hunt is the one that contained the extraordinary fact that Cortonwood, whose closure started the strike, should never have been included in the closure list in the first place.6

  The talks brokered by Stan Orme resumed on 18 July at the Rubens Hotel in London, and centred on the terms of future pit closures. The two sides had prepared draft agreements. Both sides accepted that pit closures should be negotiated if a pit was exhausted, unsafe or for ‘other reasons’. It was the definition of ‘other reasons’ that became the sticking point: the NUM had previously accepted poor geological conditions and poor quality coal as reasons for some closures but was not prepared to go further, and certainly would not give a blanket agreement to closures of ‘uneconomic’ pits. As a compromise, it was suggested that pits could close if they could not be ‘beneficially developed’. That phrase formed part of the thirteen hours of talks before they collapsed. According to Stan Orme’s diary it was not Scargill who stopped talking; it was MacGregor, ‘convincing Scargill and Heathfield that he had been stopped in his tracks by the government’. Geoffrey Goodman observes: ‘There was strong evidence then . . . that the Cabinet feared MacGregor was making too many concessions to the NUM and stood in danger of handing Scargill a political victory.’7

  But in TUC circles it was being claimed that the fault for the breakdown lay with Scargill. There was briefly, they said, a form of words available which he could have proclaimed as a victory. The idea that a pit might not be closed while it could be ‘beneficially’ worked was a long way from the idea that it could be closed if it was not economically viable. Had Scargill been a proper negotiator, they said, he could have grabbed the chance before Thatcher had time to whip it away from him. This view was expressed most forcibly by the EMA leader John Lyons, who always maintained that Scargill had been offered the nearest thing to a victory that any trade union leader can ever expect. ‘It was 95 per cent of what they were after.’

  In public MacGregor and Peter Walker were adamant that talks could not continue. MacGregor said to journalists a little after midnight: ‘The trouble with Arthur is that his rhetoric has put him out on a limb, and the problem for me is that all I have got to help him is a saw.’ Walker was more prosaic and predictable. ‘It can only be the desire to impose on Britain the type of socialist state that the British electorate constantly rejects, that motivates Mr Scargill to continue to do so much damage to his industry.’8

  Walker launched a very personal attack on Scargill in The Times that same day, making it clear that the immediate cause of the strike was no longer the government’s main concern. Ministers had launched a crusade to destroy Scargill and all that he stood for. ‘Readers of the magazine Marxism Today in 1981 were left in no doubt of Mr Arthur Scargill’s contempt for democracy,’ Walker began. There was much more: ‘This contempt for parliamentary democracy and desire to seize power through the militancy of the mob . . . The British people need be in no doubt that we are facing a challenge to our whole way of life . . . If the NUM was led by a union leader who was not concerned with playing the political fanatic . . . It is time for the Labour Party, if it is going to survive as a party believing in parliamentary democracy, to denounce both the political objectives and the violence . . . This is not a mining dispute. It is a challenge to British democracy and hence to the British people.’9

  But this was nothing compared to what the Prime Minister said soon afterwards. Choosing her words carefully when she was addressing the 1922 Committee, the powerful Tory backbench committee, at its last meeting of the Parliamentary session, Mrs Thatcher said the miners’ leader posed as great a threat to democracy as General Galtieri, the deposed Argentinian leader, whom Britain had defeated in the Falklands War. In words which would be remembered as one of the key phrases of the strike, she said her government had fought the enemy without in the Falklands and ‘now had to face the enemy within’. She described the pit strikers as a scar on the community.

  Nor was this an isolated comment. The Guardian reported the next day: ‘Her speech was echoed in a remarkable chorus of ministerial harangues in the country outside with the Home Secretary, Mr Leon Brittan, the Chancellor, Mr Nigel Lawson, the Energy Secretary, Mr Peter Walker, and the Party Chairman, Mr John Gummer, opening a drum fire of abuse against Mr Arthur Scargill, the NUM President, and Mr Neil Kinnock, the Labour leader.’10

  The attacks left nothing to doubt. Thatcher was fighting for a long-term victory and was not interested in any face-saving settlement. Scargill was also in it for the long term, hoping that a cold winter in the months ahead would give him the upper hand.

  There’s an old joke about the 1967 Six Day War in the Middle East. An Egyptian general is being asked how the Israelis could overrun his country so fast. Did their Russian military hardware fail? No, says the general, the weapons were fine, it was the Russian military textbooks that let them down. ‘The textbooks said: draw the enemy into your own territory then wait for the winter snows.’

  Scargill seemed to have been reading the same textbooks – or that was how a worried group of left-wing TUC General Council members saw it. They met secretly on 24 July at the NUR headquarters in Euston, in Central London, joined by Scargill, Heathfield and McGahey. The meeting was called because they were frantically worried at the breakdown of talks six days earlier. Bill Keys asked: ‘Do you honestly believe you can win an unconditional victory?’ He got no answer that made sense to him. He wrote despondently in his diary afterwards: ‘We considered all the aspects, but it was obvious almost from the start that Arthur was not for moving . . . Arthur has no doubt he can win on his own. We listen about General Winter, which all runs contrary to what the coal board are saying about coal stocks being available for the whole of the winter. There was little reason in getting into an argument with him, for so far as he was concerned, we were there to listen. Meanwhile the union is in deep trouble financially as he had to admit, and the miners’ families in dire need of clothing and food.’

  After the meeting Keys went for a quiet drink with a couple of other general secretaries, and they agreed that if they had had the NCB offer, they would have used it as a foundation stone to build upon. ‘How can we help such a man, he does not want TUC involvement and yet it is obvious that if complete disaster is to be avoided a third party has to come into the arena.’

  They went despondently to the TUC General Council meeting the next day. McGahey, the only NUM member on the General Council, seeme
d very different without Scargill and Heathfield. ‘Strangely Mick said that the miners were prepared to talk, but did not define on what basis they would talk,’ recorded Keys. He wondered whether McGahey was hoping to get the NUM executive to take a less hard line than Scargill’s. The day after that, Keys went to see Neil Kinnock, and established that the Labour leader was thinking all the things he himself was thinking.

  Kinnock’s views were probably influenced by another attempt by his energy spokesman, Stan Orme, to try and get talks going. On the same day as the despondent TUC meeting, Orme wrote to MacGregor again with fresh angles. One involved leaving the NUM proposals as they stood but agreeing concessions on other issues such as the future of the NCB workshops and other plant. This would have made possible more closures, if they could be agreed under the Plan for Coal. His second idea replaced the NUM proposals with one committing the NCB to a joint investigation with the NUM into the future of threatened pits, and leaving the decision to be taken in line with the Plan for Coal. Neither was acceptable to MacGregor or his deputy Jim Cowans.

  On 3 August, Orme tried again. He proposed a third version with a more detailed plan for negotiations between the NUM and NCB. But the NCB rejected this on 24 August, with some worry that they would be seen as not wanting any negotiations with the union.

  On 28 August, Macgregor wrote personally to Orme explaining why he could not agree. He ended the letter on a conciliatory note: ‘I can assure you that I remain willing to meet with any of the leaders of the NUM who are genuinely interested in solving this dispute, but we will not place in jeopardy the future of the coal industry by abandoning our plans to build a high-volume, low-cost industry which will pay substantial wages to the people who work in it, provide them with secure jobs and enable us to become a regular, reliable source of low-cost energy to the country. From our previous discussions, I know you understand our policies, and, given your commitment to the industry, I hope you might direct your efforts to persuading the NUM leadership to this view. Finally, I want to thank you for your efforts to bring this dispute to an end, and for your understanding of the logic and fairness of our position.’