Marching to the Fault Line

by David Hencke

  But they did not jeer Scargill. He had not voted for a return to work, and now he stood on the steps of Congress House and told the demonstrators, as well as the army of reporters and television crews gathered there to hear him: ‘I feel terrific. The union has responded magnificently to save jobs and pits. The trade union movement in Britain, with a few notable exceptions, have left this union isolated. They have not carried out TUC conference decisions, to their eternal shame.’

  Then he went quietly upstairs to Norman Willis’s office. Willis wasn’t there, but John Monks, head of industrial relations, was, and he made them both tea and said with his habitual quiet courtesy: ‘How are you feeling, Arthur?’ And Arthur Scargill replied: ‘Pure. I feel pure.’ He told Monks that he was satisfied he had done everything that he could possibly have done, and that if he had the chance to live the previous twelve months over again, he would do just what he had done.7 And that, incredible as it sounds, is the view he has continued to take, with absolute consistency and apparent certainty, throughout the last twenty-five years.

  Two days later, strikers marched back to work behind their branch banners, sometimes with bands playing. ‘One could not but be proud of them,’ wrote Bill Keys in his diary, ‘as one watched them on television marching with dignity with banners flying back to work. They certainly did not deserve such leadership as AS gave them.’

  Yes, there was dignity, but it was brittle and hard-won dignity, because there was also the bitter taste of absolute defeat, and defeat at the hands of a government and a Coal Board who were going to humiliate them and rub their noses in it at every opportunity. Lord Bell, the chief media adviser to Thatcher and MacGregor, said years afterwards: ‘We wanted the strikers to drag themselves back to work, their tails between their legs. That was what it was about at the end.’8

  In that spirit, a triumphalist MacGregor promised the miners would be punished for their ‘insurrectionary insubordination’. There was no question of reinstating the miners the NCB had fired during the dispute. A few were taken back in South Wales, thanks to Neil Kinnock’s old chum, the area director Philip Weekes, but none at all elsewhere.9 No one was going to try to make their return to work easier. Here’s what happened in one colliery, Lea Hall in Staffordshire, as told by a man who was there:

  We all met at the colliery gates on Tuesday morning as planned ... The Women’s Support Group was there with their banner, and many other supporters had got up before the crack of dawn to make the trip to Lea Hall. But the most important people of all standing beside the gate were the two sacked miners, Eric Lippitt and Peter Mayers.

  It was so important that Eric and Peter were there because we knew full well that they couldn’t come through the gates with us. Nevertheless they were there to make sure that we carried out our union instructions ...

  With the cheers of our wives and supporters ringing in our ears we moved off as one down the pit drive. We’d timed the moment exactly so as to hold up the coaches that were transporting the scabs. For the first time in twelve months it was them who were forced to wait outside the gates.

  Tiny victories like that were seized all over the country.

  After we’d checked ourselves in we decided to wait in the canteen for management to come and discuss the situation. Whilst we were waiting the scabs began to arrive, but amongst them there was not one who could look any of us in the face.

  We decided that the colliery manager should come and address us so that we could all get assurances about our position, rates of pay and job security. But in his typical fashion, he refused.

  A delegation went in search of him, but all he did was waste ten minutes on saying he couldn’t spend five minutes talking to the men.10

  There was a reason why the management at Lea Hall would not meet the returning, defeated strikers. The idea that the union had a role in ensuring the men got fair treatment was to be a casualty of the strike. To the victor the spoils; and part of the spoils, for this employer, was that it was going to treat the men however it chose. Managers were encouraged to refuse to talk to the men.

  The union found that its role at each pit, looking after its members and ensuring each individual was decently treated, had gone for ever. Branch officials no longer had what was called facility time: they had to get down the pit and work. Management changed shift times how and when they chose, instead of taking the men’s view into account.

  At other pits, men were sent home that first day back for being five minutes late because they had waited for the procession to assemble. At Ackton Hall in Yorkshire, the men were told to stop parading around with their banners or they would not be paid.

  Kent miners, and a few others, refused to accept the return-to-work decision, and fanned out across the country to set up picket lines. They stopped the return-to-work march in Cortonwood, where the strike had started. And they stopped Arthur Scargill himself. Scargill, with a Scots piper, started to lead 1,000 men into Barrow colliery near his home town of Barnsley, but was stopped by a group of pickets from Doncaster and Kent. ‘I never cross a picket line,’ said Scargill piously, and turned round and led the men back again. They went in quietly the next day.11

  But there was also a reminder of what dreadful work coal mining was. At Mardy colliery, the last remaining pit in the Rhondda, the 753-strong workforce, not one of whom had gone to work for even a single day, followed their colliery band and massed lodge banners back to work. At the end of the day, when her husband came home with his brother, one woman wept. ‘The difference in those men in one day down that pit. You forget. You aren’t used to seeing them that sickly grey. You have them off twelve months, and one shift, that’s all it took.’12 Others, particularly in Yorkshire, noticed that there were no longer any mice down the pits. They had all died because no one was bringing their ‘snap’ (packed lunch) down the mine, so there were no longer any crumbs to live on.

  On the day of the return to work, Leon Brittan, the Home Secretary, wrote to Charles McLachlan, President of the ACPO and Chief Constable of Nottinghamshire, expressing his appreciation for all their work during the NUM dispute. On 27 March McLachlan and fellow Chief Constables were invited to a reception at the Home Office and addressed by Mrs Thatcher, who thanked them personally for all their efforts. But the police themselves seemed to be relieved it was all over. In his reply to Brittan, the ACPO President wrote: ‘I know you, as we, are happy that the main effort of dealing with the dispute is over and we can once again return to a rather more normal form of policing.’ He must have known that there were mining towns where the police’s community relationships were dreadfully and perhaps irreparably fractured.

  That was only a small part of the cost.

  The price the miners paid in the strike was shown in an article in the Police Review on 7 June that year. It provided a chilling statistical list. Miners filed 551 complaints against the police, 257 alleging assault. Some 1,392 police officers had suffered injuries, eighty-five seriously. A total of 9,808 people were arrested and 7,917 were charged. Altogether 10,372 charges had been brought against striking pickets, including 4,107 for conduct conducive to breach of the peace, 1,682 for obstructing a police constable and 1,019 for criminal damage. At the other end of the scale there were three murder charges, four charges of criminal damage with intent to endanger life, three explosives offences and five threats to kill. One person was charged with possessing drugs. Some 682 miners were sacked for‘violence and sabotage’.

  The cost of the police operation was estimated at £200m. Some 14m hours were worked by police officers controlling the picket, with thirty police forces providing aid to twelve areas of the country. Twenty thousand people were injured or hospitalized. Two hundred served time in prison or custody, and two were killed on the picket line, while three died digging for coal during the winter. Nine hundred and sixty-six people were sacked for striking.

  At the end of the strike the government estimated that at 1980 prices it had cost £2.5 billion. Later this figure ha
d to be revised to nearer £2.75 billion. But that was only for 1984-5. In the following four months the figures had to be revised drastically upwards as it became clear that the overhang from the strike had produced dramatic extra costs for the NCB and electricity industries.

  Confidential estimates produced by the Treasury showed an escalating series of costs and the need to increase dramatically the borrowing requirements of nationalized industries to cope. By the end of August the net figure meant an extra £1.1–£1.3 billion.

  If the losses were to include the effect on the country’s GDP, including calculating the loss of production by miners, then, in the words of one treasury minute, they would ‘push the cost well over £5 billion’.

  This was an even higher figure than press speculation suggested. David Lipsey, then economics editor of the Sunday Times, using an analysis of publicly available figures by the London Business School, estimated it would be as high as £4.8 billion.13

  The Treasury were embarrassed by the press speculation but also reluctant to release the extra costs - which by now included a further £26m for the police and £103m for the prison service coping with jailed miners. It also had to include extending the external financing limit by £800m to cover restocking the power stations.

  The only way the public figure could be held down would be by including figures disclosing how investment by the NCB had been cut back during the strike, and how, if the strike had never happened, all that stockpiled coal would have to have been unloaded onto the world markets, depressing the coal price.

  In the end the Treasury decided to keep quiet about all these extra costs until they could find a time to slip it out when public interest in the dispute had waned. A confidential Treasury minute of 23 August concluded: ‘For the time being I am sure you are right to suggest that we should avoid being drawn on the 1985-6 figures. If ever we need to render an account of that element, I suggest it might be sensible to do so in the budget next year or at some other time when it might be drowned out by other news.’14

  It is a perfect example of Whitehall finding ‘a good day to bury bad news’. The phrase did not become public property until more than ten years later, when a New Labour spin doctor’s confidential memorandum on 9/11 was leaked, but the idea was already well established in Whitehall in 1985.

  The government has never told us how much closing the coal industry cost the nation. The best estimate has been produced by Dave Feickert, who left the NUM in 1993 to work for the TUC in Brussels. His careful, detailed analysis, made in 2003, arrives at a figure of £28.5 billion in 2003 prices.

  The cost of the strike itself he puts, fairly conventionally, at £6 billion in 1985 (£10 billion in 2003 prices), made up of losses by the NCB, the Central Electricity Generating Board, British Rail and British Steel, the cost of policing and the loss of taxes and national insurance from striking miners. Capital write-off on pit closures accounts for another £3 billion. Redundancy payments and other social costs - for example, early retirement - add a further £11 billion to the total, taking account of the fact that between 1979 and 2003 the mining workforce was reduced from 294,906 to fewer than 10,000. (It’s now a fraction of that.) At least another £4.5 billion has gone on the wider economic costs of closure, based on figures from the House of Commons Trade and Industry Select Committee and an academic study at Oxford University.15

  Hence the closure of £28.5 billion - almost half the North Sea tax revenue of £60 billion collected between 1985 and 2003.

  CHAPTER 10

  THE POST-STRIKE WORLD: LOST MONEY, LOST INFLUENCE, LOST REPUTATIONS

  Almost the first thing Arthur Scargill did after the strike ended was call a secret meeting at the Holiday Inn Hotel, in London’s Bloomsbury near the TUC, for the general secretaries of those trade unions from which he had borrowed money. He asked FBU chief Ken Cameron to arrive a little earlier and meet him at another nearby hotel, the Bedford. The two men sat at a small table in the bar, and Scargill told Cameron he could not pay back the £200,000 which Cameron had taken in cash from FBU funds for him. His lawyers had told him it would be illegal to do so. Cameron was furious, and swiftly Scargill backtracked. He said he could find a way of paying back the FBU’s money, but he would not be able to pay the other general secretaries whom they were due to meet soon at the Holiday Inn. Would Cameron support him in explaining the situation to them, and getting them to see that he really had no choice?

  No, said Cameron, he would not. He was very cynical about the legal advice Scargill claimed to have received. ‘If you ask a lawyer to write something, they will write it,’ he says.

  The pair went on to the Holiday Inn, where, in a meeting room Scargill had booked, they joined other general secretaries who had done what Cameron had done: gone out on a limb to lend Scargill huge sums of their unions’ money at an hour or two’s notice, in cash, and with no paperwork.

  There was Bill Keys, chain-smoking and glancing restlessly around the room, still wretchedly thinking of the chance to end the strike with dignity which he had created and Scargill had contemptuously thrown away. The railwaymen’s leader Jimmy Knapp, tall, stooping, white-haired, who looked like a man in his sixties though he was only forty-five, and spoke gruffly in an Ayrshire accent so thick that it was often impenetrable to southerners. There was the biggest union baron of them all, Ron Todd of the TGWU, who sounded like a North London barrow boy and whose hobby was palaeontology. There were perhaps two more in the room.

  Scargill repeated what he had told Cameron. There was a moment’s shocked silence, then outrage. All these men had trusted Scargill with hundreds of thousands of pounds of their members’ money. Now the miners’ President was expecting them to go back to their executives and say that there would, after all, be no repayment.

  They agreed to keep the matter secret, but none of them was going to let Scargill get away with it. Eventually, in some cases years later, they were all repaid, often by the NUM regions, which had frequently had the benefit of the money in the first place. Cameron got his money six years later, when Scargill asked him to visit him in Sheffield. There he took Cameron to the bank to see the full £200,000 laid out in banknotes. Cameron grumbled: why did he have to come to Sheffield, surely he wasn’t expected to carry that lot back to London, couldn’t the money be wired? ‘I wanted you to see it,’ said Scargill. Still grumbling, Cameron got back on his London train.1

  Years later Scargill told the Lightman enquiry that he had kept the secret accounts he had opened during the strike active for five years after the strike because some of the unions had made five-year loans, which he wanted to repay from that account but could not until the five years were up. Peter Heathfield told Gavin Lightman QC, who conducted the enquiry, a rather different story. He said they were not five-year loans at all: it was just that after the strike Scargill asked for five years to pay and kept the accounts open. In fact, we now know that Cameron, Keys, Knapp, Todd and the rest would have been delighted with earlier repayment. Lightman wrote: ‘I think that the deliberate decision was made to delay repayment as long as possible in order to retain hold of the funds in question and the interest thereon as long as possible.’2

  In July the miners’ annual conference met and Arthur Scargill did his best to lick his union’s still gaping wounds. Bill Keys was there as fraternal delegate from the TUC, and he was appalled at what Scargill had to say. ‘He blamed everybody but himself. He talks of Labour having a responsibility for the miners when Labour achieves power. What a way to give an opponent ammunition to fire at us!’3

  About the same time as Scargill was meeting his angry creditors, Peter Heathfield was writing to the NCB to say the union would not attend the forthcoming Joint Consultative Council which, before the strike, was a regular industry forum in which the union had had a powerful voice. He said that the national officials saw no point, because the Board was going ahead with pit closures and redundancies, and MacGregor had told the press that the unions would not be consulted about it.
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br />   It is perhaps understandable that he did not want to sit down at a table with MacGregor, whose treatment of the defeated strikers was triumphant, triumphalist and brutal. Miners considered to have been key strike supporters were ruthlessly fired. The Board and the government seemed to be revelling in petty acts of meanness towards soldiers of the defeated army. One of these was to force miners who had been on strike for a year, and were near to penury and up to their necks in debt, to make good their contributions to the Mineworkers’ Pension Scheme; and, just to rub their noses in it, they forced the union to obtain the payments from them. Heathfield huffed and puffed, but back came the reply from the Board’s Kevan Hunt: ‘The Board requires from the NUM an undertaking in principle to solve the problems with the Mineworkers’ Pension Scheme.’ Hunt also told Heathfield in November 1985 that there would be no pay rise in 1986, and that the NUM had only itself to blame for damaging the industry by going on strike.

  For Margaret Thatcher, 1985 seemed like a year of unalloyed triumph. The defeat of the miners seemed to consolidate the victory of Thatcherism. She had defeated the enemy within. She signed an Anglo-Irish agreement at Hillsborough with Irish Prime Minister Garrett Fitzgerald which, for a short time, looked as though it might just pave the way for the peace in Ireland that had eluded her predecessors. Mikhail Gorbachev, with whom she had established such a satisfactory relationship that she called this Soviet leader ‘a man I can do business with’ – and who, as far as she then knew, had done as she urgently instructed him, and prevented any aid for the British miners arriving from the Soviet miners’ union – was formally established as First Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party.