Marching to the Fault Line

by David Hencke

  Peter Walker endorsed the strategy on the same day. The collusion between the breakaway union, the NCB and the government was complete. The only worry expressed by the government was that such action could be interpreted as breaking the spirit of Attlee’s 1946 Act which nationalized the coal industry, by arbitrarily changing the terms of the negotiating machinery. Here Falconer came to the rescue with a carefully written letter on 7 October.11 The NCB had simply to state that it had no intention at this stage of changing the national negotiating and conciliation machinery, so it was not required under the Act to consult people in advance to talk to the breakaway union. So when NUM General Secretary Peter Heathfield wrote to MacGregor’s deputy Jim Cowan to protest on this very issue on 8 October, the answer was already prepared.

  Heathfield protested again on 16 October, but by then pay negotiations had begun which led to an incentive pay award for UDM members. The breakaway union was also balloting members in Nottingham and South Derbyshire and the CTAWA.

  But the NCB were worried that without the results of an official ballot the NUM could still take action to stop the negotiated deal because the breakaway group did not legally exist. However, the NUM did not wake up to this and on 31 October all the NCB’s worries were over. The three groups – Nottingham, South Derbyshire and the CTAWA – voted to set up a new union. Lynk wrote as General Secretary designate of the UDM requesting official recognition from the Certification Officer.

  A month later, internal legal advice to MacGregor said that once the new union was registered, the NUM would cease to have a place in Notts and South Derbyshire: ‘a clean and undeniable break’ would have been made. The NCB strategy had triumphed, and the UDM started to recruit outside its Nottinghamshire and South Derbyshire strongholds. The Board was delighted and when the NUM branch secretaries of two collieries, Daw Mill in Leicestershire and Agecroft in Lancashire, persuaded their members to quit the NUM for the UDM through a pit ballot, they received warm personal letters from Kevan Hunt, head of the NCB’s industrial relations.

  MacGregor decided to help the breakaway union by starting informal discussions with other unions on new negotiating machinery. Letters went out on 11 November, the warmest to the UDM. However, another row broke out over the decision of the NUM to hold a political ballot of its members in December, which was strongly opposed by the UDM.

  In the triumphalist spirit in which it had greeted its victory over the NUM, the government had taken the fight to the unions and the Labour Party. It had embarked on a plan which seemed to promise all sorts of good things, from its point of view: embarrassment as well as impoverishment for the Labour Party, as well as a public reminder that Labour was, as Ministers always put it, in the pockets of the union barons. They had decided that if those trade unions affiliated to the Labour Party wished to continue to pay money into a political fund for the benefit of the Labour Party, they must regularly seek permission of their members to do so in a ballot. It did not matter that members could opt out of the political levy, and it did not matter that companies donating to the Conservative Party were under no such requirement to ballot their shareholders.

  The unions had responded by setting up a Trade Union Co-Ordinating Committee chaired by Bill Keys, now retired as General Secretary of SOGAT and, though not a well man, seeking an outlet for his restless energy. His job was to run the political fund campaigns inside the unions. In the end, Keys delivered large majorities for allowing all the unions that had political funds to keep them, which was perhaps the only victory the unions scored during Margaret Thatcher’s premiership after their great defeat in the miners’ strike. But in December 1985 it was far from clear that Keys was going to be able to deliver that victory.

  The NUM saw the political fund ballot as a way of trying to regroup in Notts and South Derbyshire by using it to recruit back miners who had defected to the UDM. By law the NCB would have to provide facilities at the pitheads for the rump of NUM members to vote. Once they provided such facilities, the NUM could use these facilities also to try to recruit UDM members back into the NUM. So this piece of legislation, designed to attack and damage the unions, could provide the instrument which allowed the NUM to get back into Nottinghamshire.

  For this reason, MacGregor wanted to refuse facilities for the NUM in Notts and South Derbyshire to vote in the NUM’s political fund ballot, and the UDM naturally supported his position. They could foresee their hard-won membership ebbing away just as they had launched their new organization.

  Keys was quickly on the case. He was in the extraordinary position of insisting on an anti-union law being carried out to the letter by an anti-union employer, but such paradoxes did not trouble him. How could the NCB possibly obstruct a ballot required by law? he asked with manufactured indignation. ‘This would be the first occasion on which any employer has sought to obstruct the working of the 1984 Trade Union Act in this way.’ He sent a copy to the Certification Officer, who was just about to rule on the UDM.

  Both letters were faxed to Falconer marked ‘urgent’. His advice was clear: Keys had the law on his side. If the NCB was caught failing to comply with the law and the NUM took them to a tribunal ‘it is 99 per cent certain we will lose’. The NCB’s internal advice on 29 November warned that if they lost a case ‘the board might well have to pay for a re-run of the whole national ballot if the Certification Officer held it to be invalid because of our actions . . . The public relations effects of all this would be little short of catastrophic.’

  He also warned that it would be dangerous to allow the UDM to exclude the NUM totally from Nottinghamshire pits while the ballot was taking place, and that the NCB had to be careful not to act in a partisan way over the ballot ‘to prevent the NUM from supporting the Labour Party’. This, said Falconer, would damage the NCB and perhaps the government’.12 However, the NUM, though it may have won back a few members, did not manage to use its access to cause major damage to the UDM.

  On 4 December the Certification Officer recognized the UDM as a trade union, despite a last-minute objection from the NUM. Kevan Hunt wrote to Peter Heathfield saying that the existing machinery was to be reformed to allow UDM representation. It was the end of the NUM as the dominant union in its industry.

  Thus by the time Margaret Thatcher called another general election, in 1987, the NUM had been so marginalized that the NCB could afford to ignore it, and ostentatiously to take more notice of the new UDM, which was – though a polite fiction was always maintained – little more than an NCB puppet.

  The 1987 election produced another landslide for Mrs Thatcher, and a far more surprising one than in 1983. In 1983 the Labour Party had been led by the elderly Michael Foot, who had been characterized by the press, unfairly but effectively, as senile and out of touch; it ran one of the most incompetent election campaigns any major British political party has ever run; and the election came in the wake of a military triumph in the Falklands. In 1987 Labour was led by the young, charismatic Neil Kinnock; its campaign was the first (and easily the best) to be orchestrated by Peter Mandelson, with the help of media gurus who produced, among other things, probably the best party political broadcasts that British politics have ever seen; and there was no Falklands factor. Yet the result was only marginally better than 1983. On 11 June 1987 Margaret Thatcher swept back into Downing Street with a majority of 102. No one seriously doubted that the miners’ strike was one of the most important factors. It had frightened people badly, for they had seen a glimpse of civil war; and it had exposed the deep and bitter divisions in the Labour Party.

  After the election, Kinnock was in the blackest of depressions. It took him a year to recover; there is a sense in which he has never recovered. The wounds of his long and acrimonious battle with the Bennites, and the now ferocious media campaign waged against him, went very deep in this complex and sensitive man, and the ebullience that came naturally to him in 1983 was starting to sound very forced. His conclusion from the defeat was that Labour had to change its poli
cies even more thoroughly than it had already done, in order to make itself electable; and he knew this meant another few years of infighting and bloodletting. It also meant isolating – cauterizing – the Scargill factor.

  This became even more necessary in 1990, when the Daily Mirror published its famous allegations against Scargill (see Chapter 6), allegations that were disowned twelve years later by the editor who published them, Roy Greenslade. During the strike, according to the Mirror, Scargill not only received money from the Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi but misused it to clear his home loan from the NUM, and Peter Heathfield and Roger Windsor similarly misused the money for their own benefit.

  The Mirror’s main source was Windsor, who had fallen out with Scargill, leaving the NUM’s employment in 1989 to live in France. ‘I left because of the way Scargill was treating the UDM. I felt there was a more intelligent way to deal with the split in the union,’ he says. The Mirror paid Windsor £50,000 for the story, and the same sum to Scargill’s former driver Jim Parker, who had been Scargill’s close friend, supporter and admirer before turning against him.

  Their evidence by itself was not enough for the Mirror to consider the story libel-proof. So Terry Pattinson, the industrial correspondent whom Windsor had approached in the first place, persuaded the NUM’s Finance Officer Steve Hudson to drive to London overnight to confirm the story on tape. Hudson was not paid. Since then he has refused to discuss the matter with anyone.

  Heathfield, it’s said, broke down in tears at the NEC meeting which discussed the report, and his health never recovered. The abuse heaped on his head during the strike had not affected him in this way, but the unhappiness of being believed to have defrauded his members – which would be a betrayal of everything his life had been about – was very great. Scargill, in a different way, is said by his friends to have been permanently psychologically scarred as well.

  Greenslade expected Scargill to sue. Pattinson was sure he would not. Pattinson was right. The man who used to boast that he had launched nineteen libel actions against journalists and won them all simply denounced the Mirror’s ‘vicious lies’. But things had changed. Time was when the NUM executive, faced with a choice between the word of Arthur Scargill and that of a tabloid newspaper which wanted to disparage him, would not have hesitated for a moment. Now, doubtless with heavy hearts, the NUM executive voted to set up an enquiry under a distinguished lawyer, and Gavin Lightman QC was commissioned to do the job.

  In Labour movement circles, how you view the Lightman Report depends on whether you are among Scargill’s admirers, like Ken Capstick, Alain Simon, Seumas Milne and Tony Benn; or his detractors, the fiercest of whom are either the closest admirers of Neil Kinnock or the many old friends of Arthur Scargill who have fallen out with him. The pro-Scargill camp is furious that Lightman spoke so ill of their man. Seumas Milne, the only journalist Scargill trusts, calls the report ‘littered with errors . . . highly political . . . unexpectedly hostile’.

  The anti-Scargill camp feel Lightman missed a chance to nail the NUM President, and question whether he had sufficient evidence to acquit Scargill of the charge of misusing the money.

  Both views are unfair. The Lightman Report is precise, remorselessly logical and so clearly written that a non-lawyer has no difficulty following it. Lightman seems to have done as thorough a job as was possible when key players refused to co-operate with him – for the Mirror team and Roger Windsor refused to see him, and Alain Simon gave only limited help. Lightman does acquit Scargill of the most serious charge against him, that of taking for himself the money meant for his hard-up members. But he paints a ghastly picture of a leadership which, from about summer 1984, clearly, at the kindest estimate, lost its way, and never, in the intervening years, found it again: a leadership that was centralized around Scargill and his closest associates, from which Mick McGahey was largely, and even Peter Heathfield partly, excluded.

  Each step this leadership took created its own unforeseen disasters, to which the NUM President responded with another convoluted step which brought its own consequences. The blizzard of overseas bank accounts; the fatal blurring of the distinction between money that belonged to the union, to the International Miners’ Organization and to Scargill and Heathfield personally; Scargill’s dual role as President both of the NUM and the IMO; all these factors left them open to accusations of all sorts of impropriety, and created a rumour factory which did further damage to their already dreadfully weakened union.

  It was four years since the Receiver had been discharged on 27 June 1986, but Scargill was still spending his days twisting and turning, creating yet more elaborate schemes in order to try to undo the damage created by the last one. In 1989, after Windsor left the NUM and Scargill knew that the Daily Mirror had IMO bank statements, Scargill created two more secret bank accounts in Germany, Lightman reports.

  Part of the trouble was that Scargill had acted without taking qualified advice from lawyers and accountants. The Miners Action Committee Trust Fund, created at the height of the strike in October 1984 to receive donations and loans without having them taken by the sequestrator, was constituted by a deed ‘drafted by Mr Scargill without any legal advice shortly after the sequestration order, and backdated to before sequestration’, according to Lightman. The trust deed constituting the Miners Research, Education, Defence and Support Trust (MIREDS),based in Ireland and also designed to receive funds and save them from sequestration, can no longer be found: Scargill told Lightman that it was destroyed in 1987 because it was not anticipated that it would be needed again. Was MIREDS’ money the NUM’s money or the IMO’s money? Scargill says it was the IMO’s. Lightman says that if it received funds aimed at supporting British miners, which it did, then that part of its money at least belonged to the NUM.

  During the strike, Scargill’s methods of handling and accounting for the vast sums of cash that were being brought to him from all quarters were so inadequate that ‘there is now no way of ascertaining what amount of cash may have passed through Mr Scargill’s hands’. Lightman wonders why the National Executive was never told what was going on, why it all continued, and why records were still not kept, after the Receiver was discharged and the reason for the secrecy had therefore disappeared.

  Of course there are all sorts of wild rumours – we heard several of them, from several sources, while researching this book, and the reader is welcome to take a guess at their nature – and, while most of them are probably false, Scargill has only himself to blame for them. The same can be said of Peter Heathfield, who comes out of the Lightman Report with his reputation for integrity badly dented. He apparently told the QC that one reason for not telling the NEC about £580,000 held in the MIREDS account was that the national officers needed to get the NEC to accept the need for economies and rationalization, and they had therefore to convince NEC members that the union was in real financial trouble. If NEC members had known there was £580,000 that they had a call on, this would have been harder.

  The report also revealed that, when striking miners were staring starvation in the face, the union was spending £6,560 on improvements to Scargill’s home and £13,511 on improvements to Heathfield’s. Scargill and Heathfield were not taking their salaries at the time. Nonetheless, it is not surprising that the decision was made not to report these payments to their members at the time.

  Scargill and Heathfield told Lightman this was entirely Windsor’s idea. This is reminiscent of the suggestion from Seumas Milne, briefed by Scargill, that the visit to Gaddafi was Windsor’s idea too. But Windsor was entirely Scargill’s creation. While McGahey and Heathfield had their own power bases in the union, Windsor had been taken from obscurity elsewhere and given a job far bigger than anything he had ever had. Scargill made him effectively the second man in the union after himself. He was consulted before the elected national officials McGahey and Heathfield. Windsor never did anything of the smallest importance that Scargill did not wish him to do, and trying to blame Windsor whe
n those decisions exploded in his face does no credit to Scargill.

  Another means of avoiding the attentions of the sequestrator was a company called Oakedge, set up by Windsor. In October 1989, just after Windsor had left the union’s employment, Scargill complained to the Fraud Squad about Windsor, citing the dealings of Oakedge. Lightman says he can see no justification for this complaint. Unsurprisingly, the Fraud Squad turned out to be much more interested in the missing Soviet and Libyan money than in Windsor. But Windsor understandably resented it, and it played a large part in his decision to go to the press.13

  In the year of the Lightman Report, 1990, the future for Neil Kinnock held real hope at last. Thatcher had finally slipped, clinging to the unfair and deeply unpopular poll tax long after it had been shown to be political suicide, and that year she was forced out of office by a Cabinet finally convinced that to keep her was to court electoral disaster. The Conservative Party replaced her with John Major. The polls were, most of the time, showing Labour with a small lead, enough for Kinnock to form a government.

  The Scargill factor had been cauterized. The NUM, once the biggest and most powerful union in the land in the days when unions were themselves powerful, was now tiny, powerless and ripe for a takeover in a land where unions had been tamed. The giant TGWU was busily hoovering up small unions, and the best future for the NUM seemed to be as one of the TGWU’s many trade groups. But in 1991 negotiations stalled because Scargill insisted on a higher position within the TGWU than TGWU leaders thought the NUM’s importance now entitled him to. The NUM therefore remains to this day a tiny and shrinking union of those miners who still keep the faith.

  All in all, Kinnock went into the general election on 9 April 1992 with high hopes of forming a government – hopes that looked justified right up to the moment when the results started coming in.