Marching to the Fault Line

by David Hencke

  He followed up his brief word with Mick McGahey by telephoning as agreed on 2 January. They arranged a secret meeting for 11 January in the Graphic Club, SOGAT’s club for printers, in Edinburgh, where Keys arranged a private room and was able to ensure that no one else would be in the club to see who the two visitors were. It was the earliest time they could arrange without risking questions about unexplained trips. Keys could go to Edinburgh that day without arousing suspicion because he was to see off a food convoy for the miners, provided by SOGAT’s Scottish members.

  The club was freezing, and they both shivered and kept their overcoats on, for they could not go outside to a café where they would be seen together. Almost certainly they both chain-smoked, Keys holding his cigarette cupped in his hand behind his back. Had anyone seen them, they would have looked like a couple of conspiring mafia chieftains. But no one saw them.

  This meeting is almost the only recorded time when McGahey allowed anyone to hear him criticizing Scargill - a testament to the trust he placed in Keys. Keys told us that McGahey said to him: ‘There is a way out but the bastard is on a path of no return.’ McGahey also agreed that the dispute was going badly, and could easily collapse.

  He outlined for Keys the three points he considered to be the bottom line for an honourable settlement for Keys to take to the government. Exactly what they were, neither man ever subsequently revealed to anyone, but they must have included some minor buttressing of the colliery review procedure and a pledge of no victimization: striking miners as well as local strike leaders must be taken back to work. Keys wrote them down on a piece of card. ‘I think we’re in business,’ he said. ‘Can you deliver?’ McGahey said he could.

  This meeting was the basis upon which Keys went back to Whitelaw, who said he thought the three points could be delivered. It paved the way for the last desperate round of shuttle diplomacy involving the TUC negotiators, the Energy Secretary and the Prime Minister. That was how Keys had always done business, getting the deal sewn up privately before elaborately negotiating it in public.1

  McGahey was working on another front too. He made an informal approach to Ned Smith, a man he had known and negotiated with for years. These two agreed that a form of words on what sort of mines might be closed should not be beyond the wit of experienced negotiators to contrive. Ned Smith later told Paul Routledge: ‘We were in negotiations, proper negotiations. McGahey wanted a settlement.’ Whether word reached the Prime Minister, or it was a coincidence, we do not know, but while they were talking she told a television programme that a lot of loss-making pits must close ‘and there is no need to argue about the definition’. Smith must have doubted what he could deliver in view of the Prime Minister’s growing expectation of total victory.2

  It was this exchange between Smith and McGahey that led to a formal meeting between the NUM and the NCB on 21 January. By then it had of course been necessary to brief Scargill, and he must have had the crucial say in who attended for the union. His choice was a strange one. McGahey, probably the only man who could have done a deal and made it stick, was not there, nor was Scargill, without whose agreement any deal was probably doomed, nor was industrial relations officer Mick Clapham. Instead, the NUM was represented by Peter Heathfield and Roger Windsor. It was hardly the strongest team the union could field at this crucial time.

  Ned Smith and Kevan Hunt on behalf of the NCB were not able to offer much. There was no movement on amounts of coal to be mined or on pit closures. Pits could be closed on economic grounds, and there would be no movement on that. There would be no question of an amnesty: the strikers who had been fired would stay fired. If discussions were to be resumed, there would have to be a quick settlement, and it was going to feel like a surrender, with perhaps the odd sweetener to help the miners’ leaders to save face. According to the minutes, Smith and Hunt ‘pointed out that there was a strong body of opinion that the strike was largely broken and would be ended by a return to work’. Heathfield and Windsor said ‘that the main body of the strikers were still firm.’ They also said that if there were to be further discussions, the full NUM executive would attend.3

  This was an extraordinary way of negotiating, with an executive committee of well over twenty people. Scargill had done it once before, much to MacGregor’s disgust, but why, at this dreadful moment, was the NUM insisting on it? Roger Windsor thinks it was Heathfield guarding his own back. Windsor also told us that they ‘secured a framework around which discussions could take place’, though the documents suggest that this is an exaggeration.

  Out they came, and went round to NUM solicitor Michael Seifert’s nearby office where Scargill was waiting for their report. There they saw that day’s Evening Standard, and read in it that Kevan Hunt had put out a mildly optimistic statement. Scargill, according to Windsor, was furious, and at once dictated a statement designed to deflate Hunt’s cautious optimism. MacGregor did the same.

  Nonetheless, Heathfield reported to the miners’ executive three days later, and wrote to Smith confirming their willingness ‘to enter into negotiations without preconditions’. He added that he thought there was a chance of reaching an agreement, and that he and Smith should meet beforehand. Smith did not reply. He delegated the job to Merrick Spanton, who sent a very brief reply arranging a meeting between himself and Heathfield.

  Quite quickly it all fell apart. Spanton and Heathfield met, then squabbled about what they had discussed, and on 30 January Spanton wrote to Heathfield brutally: ‘The main purpose of our meeting was to tell you that the Board required the NUM to put forward proposals to provide a basis for the Board to determine that it was worthwhile to enter negotiations ... and that in particular you would address the question of dealing with uneconomic capacity.’

  Heathfield replied that same day, a long, careful letter. He asked for an amnesty similar to the one the NUM had had after the 1972 and 1974 strikes, and for undertakings on the five pits to be honoured.4 A few months earlier he could have got these very modest demands. Now there was little chance.

  Meanwhile Scargill was telling the press that the NUM had asked for talks, and on 4 February the Board put out a statement designed as a calculated snub. There were to be no talks, it said, because there was no indication of a change in the union’s policy over uneconomic pits. Spanton said the same in an unbending letter to Heathfield. And that was that. Could Bill Keys and Norman Willis now pull a rabbit from the hat?

  The NUM asked Norman Willis to continue to explore the reopening of negotiations without preconditions, but the NCB was insisting on a prior commitment from the NUM to the Board’s right to close uneconomic pits.

  Willis told Keys that a form of words might be found which, in Keys’ words, ‘did not refer explicitly to the economics of pit closures, but recognized the Board’s right to manage and the union’s right to protect its members’ interests’. Keys thought: ‘Given goodwill on both sides it can save face.’5 But the NCB wanted their firm agreement in writing before they would start talking.

  Meanwhile an old friend and mentor was drafted in to try to reason with Arthur Scargill: Bert Ramelson, who had recently retired as the Communist Party’s industrial organizer. He was more responsible than anyone for the rise of Scargill, and it seemed possible that Scargill would still listen to him. The Communist Party – once a power in the unions, now in its death agonies as its internal warfare crippled its effectiveness – could see the writing on the wall that was invisible to Scargill, and it calculated that if anyone could talk sense into the miners’ President, it was Ramelson.

  Ramelson was asked to draw up an appreciation of the position and present it to Scargill. The idea came from the Party General Secretary Gordon McLennan, but it seems likely that some non-Communist left-wingers in the unions such as Rodney Bickerstaffe were consulted as well. ‘Some of us thought the strike might crumble and they had to go back in a disciplined way,’ says one of Ramelson’s closest colleagues in the Communist Party. ‘Bert was brought back to have a c
hat with Arthur. He thought, one has to know when to call a halt. He wanted a strategy. Just standing firm wasn’t a strategy.’

  Ramelson took his work to Scargill. Scargill stopped reading after the first few lines, threw it on the floor and accused Ramelson of betrayal.6

  Ramelson must have known of the negotiations for financial help from the Soviet Union, which, as he wrote his paper, were at last looking like yielding some money. The hope of Soviet money with which to rescue the apparently doomed battle looks like a hopeless last throw of the dice, and that, presumably, is what Ramelson thought. No doubt this is part of the reason why Scargill fell out terminally with the CPGB, while still trusting, and being trusted by, top French communists like Alain Simon, whose role was crucial in getting Moscow to help the NUM.

  In any case, after the Gorbachev-Thatcher meeting, Moscow was not prepared to risk the diplomatic consequences of giving money direct to the NUM. But it was prepared to give money to a general international solidarity fund to be controlled by the Miners Trade Union International, whose largest affiliate was the Soviet miners’ union. What MTUI did with the money was, of course, a matter for its leaders. No doubt everyone, and especially Alain Simon, was perfectly clear which miners’ union was going to be the first beneficiary of help from the fund.

  Scargill and Simon agreed to establish the fund in Dublin, and Nell Myers flew there to set up the Miners Defence and Aid Fund (MIDAF). The trustees were Alain Simon and Norman West MEP. Simon and Scargill still had to calm nerves in Moscow and reassure the Russians that Thatcher would never find out what they were doing. At last, on 12 February, $1,137,000 was transferred to the fund by the Soviet Union. The East German miners’ union had by then already put $100,000 into it. In addition to that, the NUM used the fund to put some of the money it had spirited away with other trade unions. Rodney Bickerstaffe was not the only union leader to have taken delivery of caseloads of cash and put them in his safe.7

  But it was far too late. Most of the money arrived after the strike had been called off, and was kept to help found a new international, the International Organization of Mineworkers, with Scargill as President and Simon as General Secretary. This in the end exposed Scargill to yet more suspicions of misusing money intended to relieve the hardship of his members.

  On 1 February, Norman Willis, just about to meet the NUM Executive, telephoned Ian MacGregor during the NCB board meeting.8 MacGregor returned the call at 11.55 a.m., interrupting his board meeting to talk to Willis. Willis told MacGregor that little progress could be made with the NUM on the board’s position: ‘I am pretty sure at this stage that it will be unacceptable, but, of course, if that situation changes in discussion, I will send someone to let you know.’

  He went on: ‘There may be other words that we talked about that, if coming through, might have had a better chance. I am sorry if I perhaps misled you. I’m punctilious in carrying out what I’ve said and I don’t want to close any doors.’

  MacGregor: ‘Well, I do. I would like to thank you for the consideration you have given to me in dealing with this, and you and Mr Graham [TUC official Ken Graham], as you say, have been punctilious in this.’

  Willis: ‘I’m sorry perhaps to have brought you out in order to keep doors open and be properly courteous but I take these things as being very important. I don’t think that the NUM are disposed for any of the various formulas to come out...’

  MacGregor: ‘Well, Mr Willis, I think I get the impression that the situation hasn’t reached what I might call the point where our friends are ready to face up to some of the things we have to do.’

  Willis: ‘Organizations and people are very funny and very odd. I will attempt to transmit what I can to you confidentially as soon as possible but, in case that was a long process, I just wanted to keep a door open and that’s the way that I do it, if by perhaps excessive and sometimes intrusive courtesy.’

  MacGregor: ‘Well, you are nice to call us, but our board is rapidly coming to an end and the Directors will be dispersing... In the meantime, I want to thank you and I look forward to working with you perhaps when they are a little better ready to go back to what we originally had. Our industry had a system of dealing with the problems that we are talking about. It has only been disrupted by Mr Scargill’s insistence that we don’t do that. We’d like to go back to the past procedures, set them up, and have everyone agree that’s what we want.’

  It is quite clear that the two men were exasperated at this stage, but it was Willis who was desperate to keep communications going despite the NUM being determined to offer little in the way of compromise. MacGregor sounded confident of total victory, but made it clear that he did not want to alienate the TUC either.

  A listener might have thought that the TUC leader was being rather obsequious to the coal boss, or that it was a crafty ploy to lure him into a deal that would get everybody off the hook – which he almost succeeded in doing, just two weeks later.

  While Willis was working on MacGregor, Bill Keys was still in touch with Whitelaw. An NUM Executive meeting at TUC headquarters in Congress House at the end of January gave Keys the opportunity informally to sound out some of its members, who thought a compromise was necessary to save the union. Keys wondered why this point of view could only be expressed in the hotel bar, never in the meeting itself.

  After the meeting the miners’ three national officers, Scargill, Heathfield and McGahey, met the TUC seven, and something very significant was said, according to Keys. Scargill said for the first time that it would be better to go back without an agreement than to accept what the NCB were seeking. Keys was horrified. ‘It would mean total capitulation. A defeated army with nowhere to go. Any agreement is better than none,’ he wrote in his diary. He redoubled his determination to try to get some sort of face-saving agreement.9

  What Keys did not know was that Dr Kim Howells, research officer for the South Wales NUM, had already begun quietly canvassing the idea of a return to work without an agreement - with the secret knowledge and approval of the South Wales President, Emlyn Williams. Howells says he first heard the idea in the North East around Christmas.

  When, at the start of February, Howells cautiously went public with a radio interview in which he said it might be the only way to secure an orderly end to the strike, Scargill phoned Howells in a fury, and the South Wales area council said that Howells should no longer be their official spokesman, though he remained their research officer.

  South Wales was on the moral high ground in canvassing the idea, for the strike had been more solid there than anywhere else in the country, and much more solid than in Scargill’s Yorkshire base. And this had been achieved without as much mass picketing as other coalfields had seen, for the South Wales leadership had doubts about its effectiveness and were keen to build alliances with such organizations as the churches, which would have been alienated by mass picketing.

  Howells told Paul Routledge: ‘Things had become inconceivably desperate, and many of us in the coalfields had recognized that there seemed to be a serious credibility gap between what Arthur and Peter were saying on public platforms at these huge rallies and what was happening on the ground. There seemed to be no recognition of the appalling problems which miners’ families were suffering . . . A compromise didn’t seem to be on [Scargill’s] agenda. He was going for total victory and the corollary of that is total defeat. Many of us began to think how it might be possible to save the union.’10

  Willis and Keys talked every day, churning over ways to salvage something from the wreckage. MacGregor recalled the series of meetings that led to a further attempt to solve the dispute, involving himself, Norman Willis, Ken Graham and Jim Cowan. As he recorded in his ghosted autobiography, MacGregor took great delight in holding the first meeting at the Ritz Hotel, on 30 January, just to show the unions who were the bosses.11 Perhaps he should have paid as much attention to the detail of the talks, because Willis and Graham were running rings around him.

  The ser
ious negotiation began at MacGregor’s flat in Eaton Square. There was a revised document and news of these secret talks reached Whitehall, to the growing alarm of officials and of Energy Minister Peter Walker and Coal Minister David Hunt. The rumours were that Willis had bamboozled MacGregor into agreeing to a deal which effectively gave Scargill what he wanted – a ‘get out of jail’ card that he could sell to his members, thus seizing victory from certain defeat.

  By 12 February these discussions had provoked panic among government ministers. Peter Walker told us that he had been waiting for days for the draft documents but none turned up at his ministry.12 Then at 4 p.m. they arrived. Walker and Hunt were aghast, because Willis had managed, with MacGregor’s connivance, to achieve a form of wording that meant no pit could be closed unless ‘deemed exhausted’, with no agreement on who should decide that this was the case, the management or the unions. This wording would amount to nothing less than a climbdown by the board, as it would make it very difficult to close any pit that had remaining resources.

  There was no alternative but a dramatic intervention. David Hunt was despatched by Peter Walker to MacGregor’s flat, armed with some alternative draft papers which had been drawn up by Department of Energy officials. At the same time Walker rang Thatcher to give her the bad news that not only was her trusted coal chief drawing up a deal which could lead to victory for Scargill, but he was actually on the point of signing it with the TUC that very afternoon.

  Thatcher was equally aghast. After months fighting Scargill and perhaps only days away from victory, MacGregor was about to ruin the entire carefully worked out Tory strategy of ‘endurance’ to defeat Scargill. Her government had resolved to spend whatever it took to defeat the unions, and had poured the nation’s treasure unsparingly into the war. She was not now going to allow MacGregor to snatch defeat from the very jaws of victory.