by David Hencke
She drew a distinction between NACODS and the NUM, saying the former would fight closures but eventually agree that the Board had the right to make them, while the NUM might block plans for a new independent review body so that the present procedures would still apply. She described this as the NUM in effect having‘a veto on closures’.
Peter Walker then pressed Norman Willis on what he thought the NCB document meant. Was it a basis for negotiation or part of the final agreement? The answer was that it was to be part of the final agreement.19
Margaret Thatcher asked what authority they had. ‘An interesting question,’ noted Keys afterwards. ‘To which we could only honestly say that our authority came from the NUM executive.’ As a negotiator he was distinctly uncomfortable: ‘The role we are undertaking could leave us to be attacked if there is no movement. In effect we are going into Downing Street as messenger boys on behalf of the NUM with no real powers of negotiation ... It is a no-win situation for the TUC.’20 Although they were now negotiating with the authority of the NUM, they could only undertake to recommend a settlement to the NUM executive: they were not empowered to agree one.
The meeting broke up with both sides emphasizing their final views. Mrs Thatcher said she thought a settlement was long overdue but ‘that any agreement must deal clearly and unambiguously with essential issues of the dispute’. The TUC remained ready to help.
Geoffrey Goodman notes that Thatcher ‘greatly impressed the TUC seven by her sympathetic understanding, her grasp of detail and her insistence that there should be no fudged agreement which might later lead to “accusations of bad faith”’.21 The main reason, we now know, is that she had followed the advice of her private secretary and Peter Gregson to the letter, which suggests that she placed great trust both in the young rising star who would, like his boss Robin Butler, go on to be Cabinet Secretary and in the experienced Cabinet Office official who went on to become Permanent Secretary at the DTI.
The TUC team felt some hope. Keys noted that the Prime Minister listened, a rare occurrence in itself, and they went away feeling that ‘we had done all we could in expressing the miners’ executive’s point of view.’22 Thatcher’s promise that Peter Walker would convey the TUC’s position to the NCB gave them some hope. Talks were held between Walker and the TUC later that night and went on into the early hours of the morning.
The next day, 20 February, the TUC met MacGregor and Jim Cowan. And it was MacGregor and Cowan who gave them a letter, the final result of all the shuttle diplomacy that had begun when Bill Keys secretly met Willie Whitelaw in the House of Lords and then went to Edinburgh to talk it over with Mick McGahey.
It had been approved, down to the last detail, by Peter Walker, despite repeated government claims that it was not interfering in the dispute in any way. This time Walker was leaving no space in which MacGregor could botch the negotiations. ‘I presume you will have this delivered to Norman Willis between two and two thirty in order that he can present it to the National Executive of the NUM whose meeting is due to start at 2:30,’ Walker wrote to MacGregor, rather as though he was giving very precise instructions to a rather dim subordinate.
His hand-delivered letter continued: ‘I have communicated these drafts to the Prime Minister who agrees that this is the correct response to the TUC following the meeting that took place at Downing Street yesterday, and further confirms that it is correct that the Government and the Coal Board make it clear that this clarification of your original document constitutes the final wording that will be offered.’23
The deal offered a minor revision of the words in their original document. It assured the negotiators that pits were not to be closed without the unions having time and opportunity to refer the closure to the independent review body which NACODS had been promised. It said this agreement would be implemented as soon as possible. It said existing procedures would apply until the new procedure could be created.
It also made crystal clear that this was the last word and it hoped the TUC would keep its side of the bargain. ‘We note also that the TUC confirms that the Executive of the NUM had accepted the Board’s duty to manage the industry efficiently; had confirmed its acceptance of a modified Colliery Review Procedure; and had accepted that the board would take the final decision on closures after completion of all the review procedures.’
It ended on a tough note: ‘I wish to make it clear that this must now constitute our final wording. We hope that the NUM Executive will accept this as a means of ending the present damaging dispute and allowing all sides of the industry to concentrate their attention on the future success of the industry.’
And with that the TUC team trudged back to Congress House, where the NUM executive was waiting for them, and asked to see the three national officers, Scargill, Heathfield and McGahey.
CHAPTER 9
THE BITTER END
20 FEBRUARY TO 5 MARCH 1985
I shall remember to my last day what then happened,’ wrote Bill Keys Ibitterly in his diary on 20 February 1985. He and the rest of the TUC team had returned to Congress House, after long and difficult talks with the NCB, to present to Scargill, McGahey and Heathfield the revised document, with its minor amendments, including a small face-saving clause saying that they did not intend closing pits without the NUM having the opportunity to refer the closure to the independent review body
‘Arthur picks up the papers for the first time,’ continued Keys. ‘He flicks two pages in what could only be called a cursory glance and then tells us that the revised proposals are worse than the original. How the damn hell he could come to such a conclusion without detailed study I do not know. It was difficult to contain oneself. We tell the three (the other two had said not a word) that we intend to go up to the boardroom and present the document to the executive and then leave them to make a decision.’1
With that, they all trooped into the executive meeting. Norman Willis introduced the document, pointed up the minor differences from previous documents and answered questions. He said: ‘It is the clear judgement of the liaison group that no further changes are achievable. That is the judgement of us all.’2 This was designed to make it clear that left-wingers like Keys took the same view as right-wingers like Basnett.
Keys found himself seated beside two area secretaries who leaned across to him and said: ‘This will do us, Bill.’ When the TUC team left the executive to take its decision and waited in Willis’s office, they felt a sort of desperate optimism that the nightmare might soon be over.
After an hour, Scargill, McGahey and Heathfield came to tell them that the executive had agreed unanimously to reject the document. ‘Not even a question of clarification,’ wrote Keys miserably. Questions of clarification were bread and butter to this veteran negotiator.
Had his two area secretaries not spoken up, he wondered? And what, he must surely have wondered but did not even confide to his diary, had happened to Mick McGahey? Years later McGahey said to Kevin Barron MP: ‘There was a chance to settle and it should have been taken.’ But at that last dreadful moment, he could not allow anyone to split him from his President.
‘What the hell is happening?’ wrote Keys. ‘Why had so many in the past criticized the strategy as applied by Arthur, forgetting conveniently that they were part of the decision-making?... Does he have hypnotic powers over the executive, convincing decent people that they can still win? But how, there is nowhere to go. We are not just staring defeat in the face for the miners, but for the working class as a whole ... All the group are terribly disappointed. Scargill is leading the NUM to disaster, and he will try and blame us.’
He was right. Members of the miners’ executive joined the big group of banner-waving protesters outside Congress House shouting, ‘Sellout.’ Although they had agreed to allow the TUC to talk to the NCB, they now attacked Willis and his colleagues for doing so.
It seemed inexplicable. It was not even as though executive members were not going through the hardships their members were ex
periencing. They were: long before, it had been agreed that they would not take their union salaries for the duration of the strike. Trevor Bell, who represented COSA, the white-collar section of the union, on the executive, told us: ‘My mother had just died down in Royston and we had a little house to sell there, otherwise we would have been in big trouble financially.’
NACODS accepted the document, but the next day yet another NUM delegate conference at Congress House rejected it. Speaker after speaker condemned the TUC ‘sell-out’. One delegate mocked the efforts of the TUC team: ‘It’s no good sending a boy to do a man’s job.’ The conference called on members ‘to stand firm’ adding: ‘We call upon the TUC, the wider labour and trade union movement to implement the TUC Congress decision of last September and not to leave the NUM isolated.’ It was, writes Geoffrey Goodman, ‘a despairing, anguished cry from a dark corner’.3
Scargill told a rally to support the miners in Trafalgar Square: ‘It’s time that the TUC and the rest of the labour movement came to our assistance to make sure we can win.’ Fifteen thousand supporters heard him, and 100 of them were arrested as they marched down Whitehall.
Less than a week later, on 27 February, the NCB announced that more than half the miners were back at work: 93,000 men had returned. What could the NUM say? It was true. Here is what Scargill did say, on Radio Four: ‘We have already succeeded in stopping the pit closure programme in 1984. We have stopped the closure of five pits and shown that we can oppose the government’s policies. That is also a victory. This has been the most courageous and determined stand by trade unionists anywhere in the world, arguing for the right to work.’
Events now moved fast to their inevitable tragic denouement. The TUC General Council met on 27 February and agreed that they could take up with the NCB some detailed points in the document. Privately, despite his denunciation of the TUC’s efforts last time, Scargill telephoned Willis asking him to go to the NCB with some further amendments.
But the TUC leader had had enough of being messenger and whipping boy for Arthur Scargill. The jibe about‘sending a boy to do a man’s job’ had stung. After talking to the rest of the TUC seven, he decided to make no further effort to talk to the NCB unless the NUM request came in writing, with a clear statement of what they would settle for. They never again contacted the NCB or the government.
It began to look as though Scargill, without admitting it, might be hoping the TUC would pull that rabbit out of the hat for him. Willis told Keys that he had had ‘a strange conversation’ with Scargill, in which Scargill appeared to accept that the document the TUC had negotiated, which he had previously considered utterly unacceptable, might now be acceptable. The next day, on television with the NCB’s chief spokesman, Michael Eaton, Scargill suddenly produced a copy of the agreement the NCB had made with NACODS, which he had scornfully rejected at the time. ‘If Mr Eaton wants to negotiate, is he prepared to settle on television tonight the NACODS agreement in its entirety with the NUM? If so I’ll accept it.’
But it was too late. Eaton’s employers demanded total victory. There would be no agreement with an enemy they believed they had already defeated. An agreement they were prepared to make when they were still uncertain of victory was of no interest to them now.
In the South Wales area, NUM leaders were still quietly canvassing the idea of a return to work without an agreement, and the idea was starting to take hold elsewhere. At Easington in Country Durham, one of the biggest and most militant pits in the country, it was put to a mass meeting of 1,500 strikers on 25 February and carried.
Three days later the NUM executive met for eight hours, a long, anguished meeting during which they tried several times, unsuccessfully, to contact Peter Walker and top NCB officials. Their enemies, sensing imminent victory, declined to take their calls. They called yet another delegate conference for Sunday, 3 March. Everyone knew this was likely to be the end.
On the morning of 3 March, crowds of angry miners, accompanied by the usual supporters from the multitude of warring far left groups of the time, gathered outside Congress House from the early morning.
The executive met first, and divided equally on whether to continue the strike, 11 votes to 11.
Arthur Scargill, incredibly, abstained. His vote could have given a clear lead to end the strike; or, if he really believed the things he said, his vote could have kept it going. He chose not to cast it. We have asked his closest friends and supporters about this behaviour, and none of them can explain it: they say we must ask Arthur, who is not answering questions.
It is impossible to avoid the damning conclusion that he knew perfectly well the game was up, but wanted to avoid his fingermarks being anywhere near the inevitable decision. It left him able to say, four months later: ‘The proposal for a return to work without an agreement was a fundamental mistake.’
So, thanks to its President, the NUM executive had no clear guidance for the delegates, and its members were not even able to address the conference, because, procedurally, they could only speak in support of an executive recommendation, and there wasn’t one. Even when the conference told the executive to go away and try again, they came back with the same result: a dead heat, with Scargill refusing to use his casting vote.
Terry Thomas of South Wales was one of many who were furious with Scargill for what they saw as abdication of leadership. He asked the executive to ‘search your hearts, comrades, and make your minds up. The men are calling for leadership ... either give them leadership and repay the loyalty they have given us, or sit back with your blindfold on and let the strike collapse around you. That is not leadership. We have got to live in the world as it is, and not as we would like it to be.’ South Wales President Emlyn Williams, Neil Kinnock’s old chum Em Swan, was more abrupt: he told Scargill he was a coward.4
We will probably never know why Scargill acted as he did. Here is his friend Ken Capstick’s stab at an explanation, given to our researcher Dan Johnson as Scargill waited in another room at NUM headquarters for a meeting with Capstick.
‘Possibly he felt that if the National Executive was that divided he probably felt it would have been wrong to do it. I’m trying to think how I would have acted in those circumstances. Would I have used the casting vote? He probably thought, leave it to conference because we came to conference ... In a sense he did use the casting vote because the National Executive committee didn’t have a recommendation. It didn’t come to the conference with a recommendation because it was 11-11 so I don’t know. I don’t know. You’ll have to ask him that.’
‘I’d love to,’ said Johnson, reminding Capstick that Scargill had refused to talk to us. He suggested Capstick go straight into the next room and ask him. But Capstick didn’t.
Kevin Barron’s explanation, unsurprisingly, is harsh. ‘By Christmas Arthur had seen how it was going, and he wanted to be able to blame the TUC and others.’
Kent’s proposal to continue the strike was heavily defeated, 170 votes to 19. Yorkshire wanted to keep the strike going until the 728 sacked miners were reinstated, which, since everyone knew the NCB would not agree to this, was effectively a motion for continuing the strike. Their motion went down by 98 votes to 91.
That left the South Wales motion for a return to work on Tuesday without any agreement. Scargill spoke neither for nor against, but he defended his refusal to sign the NCB document negotiated by the TUC, and he blamed the TUC and the other trade unions for leaving the miners isolated. He added, and this perhaps is the key to his political philosophy: ‘The greatest achievement is the struggle itself.’5
The return-to-work motion was carried by the same majority as the one by which Yorkshire had lost, 98 to 91. The great strike was over.
Bill Keys was heartbroken and relieved, all at the same time. ‘I feel so sad, that a cause so right has been lost,’ he wrote in his diary that night. ‘History will not forget that [the miners] were let down by the wider movement, but I blame the miners’ leadership for this. As I also bl
ame the miners’ leadership for the strategy they adopted throughout.’ Keys, a seasoned professional negotiator, asked in despair:
Why could not Arthur recognize many months ago one cannot achieve 100 per cent in a dispute, particularly one provoked by this hostile government. Now we will have the recriminations, which will do the miners and the wider movement no good.
These wonderful people, the miners and their families who have stood by them for 12 months deserved a better result. All the suffering has stood for naught. When is our class going to learn that it is only total unity that can promote their interests? Above all when is it going to be recognized by our people that the movement is greater than the self advancement of the individual leader?
Just one thing gave him pride and pleasure: that his union, SOGAT, had given about £1.5m to miners’ families.6
The Kent miners’ leader Jack Collins, who had opposed the return to work – the small Kent coalfield faced extinction – said as he left Congress House: ‘The people who have decided to go back to work and leave men on the sidelines, to unload these men, are the traitors of the trade union movement.’
The recriminations started that very day. Outside, on the steps, young men and women from various ultra-left groups stood and screamed betrayal, as they had done before, whenever they sensed a deal in the air. NUM official Dave Feickert, for one, was disgusted. ‘It is a day in my life I will never forget as there were Trot demonstrators outside the TUC accusing these wonderful guys of being scabs, when they made the decision.’