Marching to the Fault Line

by David Hencke

  The headlines from the conference were mostly Scargill’s. It passed a motion calling for full support for the strike, which mattered not a jot in the real world because there was nothing of value that the conference could deliver, but was a symbolic victory for the strikers. Scargill had the drama of a writ being served on him in the conference hall, which ensured that he was the centre of attention, whatever worthy motion might be being discussed by the platform. The Friday before the conference, Mr Justice Nicholls delivered his judgement that the strike was unlawful in Derbyshire, and Scargill and other officials must stop calling it official. Scargill went on Channel 4 News to say that it was official, whatever the courts said, and on Monday morning David Hart obtained a writ demanding that Scargill appear before the court within forty-eight hours to explain himself. Once he had the writ, Hart immediately chartered a helicopter to fly a writ server to Blackpool and present it to Scargill as he sat in the conference hall.

  ‘I want to make it clear’, Scargill told a fringe meeting, ‘that if the offence I have committed is contempt, I plead guilty. Because the only crime I have committed is to fight for my class and my members.’ Cue wild cheering, then more when he declared that he was prepared to go to prison, but the truth was that no one expected Scargill to go to prison. It was the union, not its President, that was going to suffer for Scargill’s moment of glory.

  Scargill again told the meeting that he had not seen anyone throwing stones. Kevin Barron MP knew perfectly well that striking miners had thrown stones, and told Scargill, when they met in a Blackpool corridor outside the conference hall: ‘I’m not going to go round denying it.’ Scargill was flanked by his faithful acolytes Nell Myers, Jim Parker and Roger Windsor, and, says Barron, there was a deathly silence from all of them. The next day the equally faithful editor of The Miner, Maurice Jones, told Barron: ‘Arthur’s not very pleased with what you said.’ Arthur being not pleased was serious for an NUM-sponsored MP who wished to keep his union sponsorship.

  But Barron knew what he was talking about. When he met Scargill, he still had his badly bruised arm in a sling after his own experience on the picket line. At the end of September he had been to a mass picket in Maltby, stood behind the police lines and saw stones being thrown. Then he and a local vicar went to speak to the pickets, wearing a helmet as the police advised him to do.

  He described for us what happened next. ‘Suddenly the police charged and they just started lashing about. The vicar ran, I tried to get my ID card out and saw a truncheon coming down on my head, so I lifted my arm to protect it, and I got two cracks on my arm from the truncheon. Then I ran, watching hand-to-hand fighting all the way and a man lying on the ground who I thought was dead.’1

  So he knew Scargill was talking rubbish. But it did not matter a lot what Scargill said any more. His loyal members were listening, but the television reporters, who, for the first six months of the strike, had made what looks like an honest effort to be impartial, had become ‘in effect the cheerleaders for the return to work’, as the BBC’s industrial correspondent Nicholas Jones puts it. ‘Lining up in support’, Jones adds, ‘were the newspaper proprietors who realized that defeat for the NUM would pave the way for their own subsequent confrontation with the print unions.’

  ‘Each weekend as the strike wore on’, writes Jones, ‘the newspapers were full of stories warning the miners they were fighting a lost cause; this was backed up by new offers of increased redundancy money for those willing to return. The aim was to put pressure on the men’s wives to persuade their husbands to give up the struggle.’2

  Not that the government got everything its own way. The police action against the miners and the intransigence on the government side had angered the church hierarchy, and even, if reports were to be believed, the Queen. The most dramatic intervention came from David Jenkins, newly appointed Bishop of Durham. A controversial figure, he had already caused a row in the Church of England by questioning the resurrection, the virgin birth and Christ’s ability to perform miracles.

  In a sermon at his enthronement he denounced MacGregor as an ‘elderly imported American’ and called for his dismissal. Later, in his autobiography,3 he retracted the phrase as ‘a hostage to fortune’ and because he had learned that MacGregor was born in Scotland. But he never retracted his view that neither side should have total victory. He describes the strike in his book as a battle between MacGregor’s belief in Darwinism and Scargill’s Marxist analysis. His comments caused a furore among traditional churchgoers and the Tories.

  Publicly the Prime Minister and Energy Secretary Peter Walker refused to be drawn into the controversy surrounding the speech, Thatcher merely saying: ‘I don’t think I should be too fussed about getting involved in that.’4 Privately it was a different matter. The government was livid. Walker opened a correspondence with David Jenkins and took great pains in a seven-page letter on 5 October to try to persuade the controversial bishop to change his mind.5 The letter was copied to Gregson at the Cabinet Office and to Brigadier Budd, head of the Civil Contingencies Unit.

  Walker chastised Jenkins for arguing that the government ‘did not seem to care for the unemployed’. The Tory Cabinet minister wrote: ‘I know of no problem which so dominates the thinking and the anxieties of myself and the government. As somebody whose father was an unemployed factory worker in the 1930s, there is nothing that I hate more passionately than the despair of unemployment.’ He listed government measures to tackle training, housing, enterprise and community programmes.

  He responded to the bishop’s criticism of the government’s record in failing to care for the elderly, embarking on the Falklands war and spending more on the police by saying: ‘I hope I don’t have to presume that, as an Anglican bishop, you would have allowed the military adventures of the Fascist junta in the Argentine to succeed, and the freedom of citizens for whom we have responsibility to be destroyed.’ As for the police, ‘There are 70,000 people working in the coal industry who are very relieved we have done that.’

  But it was the bishop’s attack on MacGregor and his support for striking miners that really angered Walker. He devoted nearly three pages to condemning the bishop for suggesting that MacGregor should go, and for not taking Scargill to task. The bishop’s description of Scargill as having a ‘personal intransigence’ seemed to drive Walker to paroxysms of fury. Did the bishop not see that Scargill was on a political crusade, that this was contrary to what most Britons wanted, that he was putting demands which the government and the NCB could not possibly agree to? ‘I must ask you as a Christian and as a Bishop – why do you think Mr Scargill keeps up mass picketing?’

  And what did His Grace mean by saying that Scargill had strong support? It was ‘seemingly never strong enough to ballot his members, seemingly never strong enough to rely on the peaceful picket as opposed to the mass mob.’ As for the bishop’s argument that redundancy payments are all very well but redundancy means no further jobs for the redundant and no jobs for their children, Walker had no time at all for it: And even if they [uneconomic pits] could last, you would be condemning tomorrow’s teenagers to a working life deep in the ground in the most dangerous and uncomfortable four pits. I cannot believe that it is Christian charity to preserve these sort of jobs when, economically, there is no need.’

  He lectured Jenkins on his Christian duty: ‘As a Christian bishop in a mining diocese your objectives must be identical to the policies that the government are willing to finance ... What as a Christian bishop you must not do is encourage the belief that if miners are deprived of the right to ballot and mob rule and violence are imposed, then demands devoid of logic and sanity will have to be fulfilled.’ Why did he not tell miners’ leaders that their cause could not be just if force and intimidation had to be used in its support? And why not tell Mr Scargill –‘if he listens to preachers of your faith’. This last phrase gives a sense of the harrumphing establishment anger many Tories felt at this apparently over-mighty union leader.


  Walker helpfully provided a shopping list of issues which he thought it was the bishop’s Christian duty to talk about: the absence of a ballot, the NCB’s investment programme, the fine work of Ian MacGregor. And he told Jenkins ‘as a Christian in your moments of meditation and prayer to ask why the 70,000 miners who were given a democratic vote, decided overwhelmingly not to strike ...’

  The government still had problems over coal supplies. A secret letter written on 11 October to Peter Walker by John Stradling Thomas, the minister of state at the Welsh Office, showed that school closures were a real possibility in Glamorgan because the coal they were getting was not a suitable grade. The NCB did not have sufficient alternatives to use in some 150 schools because of low stock levels, and Thomas warned of widespread disruption to education in the county.

  Walker was resolute. In a tough reply on 17 October he said: ‘There is plenty of coal in Wales which the miners could produce if they are anxious to avoid this particular form of suffering. I am sure we must convey very carefully to the public that it is the NUM’s refusal to supply that coal which will create any problems.’ The government and the NCB were largely managing to convey this message, with the help of a broadly compliant press and a sophisticated media operation.

  But there was a ray of hope for the striking miners. If NACODS, the small but crucial trade union for pit overseers, could pull all its 16,000 members out in support, the industry might still be closed down, for without overseers to ensure proper safety procedures it was illegal to operate mines, and the NCB would have to close them. Both Scargill and Thatcher believed that NACODS held the key to victory in the strike, and the NCB was scurrying round making sure it did not unnecessarily antagonize the overmen and deputies: for example, by seeing to it that where possible they would be paid when they were unable to work because of picketing, so long as they could show they had tried to get in to work.6

  So while the NUM and the Board were dancing minuets around each other at ACAS (where more talks started on 6 October), the talks that really mattered were happening in the Board’s own headquarters. For NACODS members, surprisingly, had already voted by a substantial majority (82.51 per cent) to come out in support of the miners. Peter Walker privately blamed MacGregor for this debacle because of his bungling of the negotiations.7

  This was a worry for Walker. He and Thatcher were sure that it was vital to buy NACODS off, and he knew that MacGregor was reluctant to offer NACODS anything. According to MacGregor’s adviser Tim Bell, MacGregor ‘didn’t really see why such a union existed. He was quite prepared to bring in private staff, say health and safety staff and doctors, to take over their work. And he was not impressed with Peter McNestry and Ken Sampey, the two negotiators, referring to them as “Scampi and chips”. He thought that with private staff he could keep the Nottinghamshire pits working.’ MacGregor’s autobiography dwells on a plan he had to let the NACODS strike go ahead, confident that Nottinghamshire could not come out – something neither Walker nor Thatcher believed for a moment.

  This attitude was typical of MacGregor. He never seemed really to want a settlement. Tim Bell, who was called in to advise MacGregor about the same time as Hunt was appointed by Thatcher, recalls the extraordinary way he handled his board meetings. Not only was MacGregor occasionally out of step with the government, he had almost no rapport with his own board, whom he saw as part of a big consensual, subsidized state apparatus that ought to be swept away. Bell recalled: ‘I used to come with him to board meetings, which always shocked the other board members. He would never have an agenda. He would start the meeting with “What shall we discuss today?”

  ‘He often clashed with people, notably Ned Smith [the labour relations director]. Ned would say, “We ought to settle this dispute,” and MacGregor would reply, “Why?” and he would say, “Strikes are a bad thing for the industry,” and MacGregor would come back and say, “I disagree, sometimes strikes can be a good thing.” So often any initiative from Ned would get nowhere.’

  So MacGregor was a permanent worry to Walker. But Scargill was worrying him, too. Like many people, he probably overestimated Scargill’s cleverness and subtlety, and he was preoccupied with the idea that the NUM President might be able to capitalize on the NACODS problem. These worries led to Walker’s last-minute decision not to go to Brighton in the second week of October for the Conservative Party conference, but to stay in London to be on hand for the dispute. So he gave his room in Brighton’s Grand Hotel, room 659, to Sir Anthony Berry MP, a junior minister. In the early hours of Friday, 12 October, the last day of the conference, an IRA bomb went off just underneath room 659, and Anthony Berry was killed instantly. Patrick Magee, the bomber, had planted the device a fortnight before, hoping to kill Thatcher.

  Telling us this story, Walker said, perfectly seriously: ‘Arthur Scargill saved my life.’ If he had been in that room, much might have changed. Walker was a far more central figure in the dispute than most earlier accounts have given him credit for, and he was much more hardline than people have realized; he was not the Cabinet wet that his public image suggested, or as MacGregor liked to paint him. Also, his death would have linked the IRA to the miners’ dispute in the public mind –wrongly, because the IRA did not particularly want to kill Walker, but inevitably all the same.

  Just an hour or so before the bomb blast, in Margaret Thatcher’s hotel suite in the same hotel, a key decision was being made. According to Tim Bell,8 he had been talking at a reception earlier that evening with Norman Tebbit, the Industry Secretary, about how to handle NACODS. MacGregor had told Bell that whatever other people wanted, he had no intention of settling with NACODS.

  Thatcher, more politically aware than MacGregor, briefed by Walker and advised by Tebbit, realized that, if NACODS came out, the working pits would close and any momentum in getting miners back to work would collapse. The central strategy for fighting the strike - the Whitehall code word ‘endurance’– would be derailed.

  Thatcher decided that MacGregor must be told in no uncertain terms to do everything he could to settle the NACODS dispute. She rang him from her hotel room to tell him, so there could be no doubt that was her view. MacGregor was forced reluctantly to agree, and not to proceed with recruiting private staff to replace the pit safety men.

  One hour later the IRA bomb went off. If it had gone off earlier, MacGregor might not have received such an unequivocal personal message from the PM. As it was, MacGregor offered the NACODS General Secretary, Peter McNestry, an independent review body to which all pit closure proposals would have to go.

  While negotiations were going on, ministers faced another problem that made a settlement with NACODS even more urgent. It emerged that social security benefits would be docked from working miners if they were laid off as a result of the NACODS dispute. The chief adjudication officer had ruled that working miners, like striking miners, would face savage benefit reductions of £15 a week if they were laid off.

  A secret letter from Norman Fowler, the Health and Social Security Secretary, to Peter Walker was sent on 23 October warning him of the consequences.9 ‘The 1975 Social Security Act and the 1980 Supplementary Benefits Act require that somebody who has lost employment as a result of a stoppage due to a trade dispute is disqualified from benefit... unless he can prove that he is not participating in or directly interested in [underlined by Mr Fowler] the trade dispute which caused the stoppage of work. The legislation does not distinguish between different categories of people (i.e. those on strike and those laid off) who are directly interested in the trade dispute.’

  Ministers were perfectly happy – in fact, delighted – that striking miners should be reduced (as many of them were) to scratching around on slag heaps for coal to heat their homes and stealing potatoes from the fields so they could have egg and chips, but horrified at the idea that hardship might also be caused to the working miners on whom their expectation of victory rested. If NACODS went on strike, not only would working miners in Nottinghamshire have
to stop work, a disaster that the government had striven to avoid at all costs, but they would also lose benefits. This could turn them against the government.

  Of course in theory the ruling would also apply to mines closed by NUM action, but heavy policing and bussing working miners into the pits had prevented this from becoming an issue. A NACODS dispute would make it into a very big issue indeed. This Thatcherite legislation was just about to skewer the very people who had been the bedrock of fighting the strike.

  It was another reason why Walker was being very careful to keep NACODS at work. In a statement to Parliament on 18 October he was able to tell MPs that he had reached agreement with NACODS on two of their three requests. This included the guaranteed independent review of pit closures that they had asked for, and a reassessment of the twenty-pit hit list that had helped to trigger the strike. He made great play of agreeing further talks at ACAS with the NUM as part of the NACODS package. ACAS chief Pat Lowry had devised an amended proposal for closures, and the NCB had accepted it, but the NUM had turned it down. Scargill rammed the point home by saying he had not moved since day one of the strike on 6 March.

  This was dreadfully frustrating for Neil Kinnock, who on 16 October had told Robin Day on BBC Radio’s World at One: ‘If the ACAS formula is acceptably near to the procedure which existed before March, and if the Coal Board understands the need for the withdrawal of the twenty-pit hit list, then the probability of a settlement is very strong.’ Three days after he said this, and the day after Walker’s statement to Parliament, Kinnock wrote to Thatcher. He was pleased that there would be a colliery review procedure, and had interpreted Walker’s statement to mean that plans to force through a hit list of twenty closures had been dropped. ‘If that is what Mr Walker is saying, then there is indeed a possibility of resuming negotiations.’10