In terms of time, morale and public opinion, the Industrial Relations Act took a terrible toll on Heath’s government. He was left with the worst possible result: an Act that not only failed to set the unions’ house in order, but had virtually destroyed his relationship with their leaders and had thoroughly alienated left-of-centre opinion. In the local elections of May 1971 the Conservatives suffered severe losses, and private polls found that they were seen as remote, elitist and uncaring. Worst of all, Heath had unwittingly set himself up as the unions’ supreme opponent, even though he thought of himself as their friend. The theatre critic Kenneth Tynan spoke for many on the left when he wrote that he hoped ‘the workers react with outright fury’ to what he saw as a disgraceful attack on their historic freedoms. As unemployment mounted, so the bitterness grew, and by New Year’s Day 1972, when the NIRC opened its doors for the first time, Heath’s image as the sworn enemy of the British working classes could hardly have been worse. And then, four days later, came the news that the National Union of Mineworkers had rejected a last-ditch pay offer from their employers at the National Coal Board. At midnight on Saturday, 8 January, every mine in the country fell eerily silent, and one of the most decisive strikes in British history began.34
In the four decades since their defeat in the General Strike of 1926, Britain’s miners had built a reputation for solidity, quiescence and moderation. Since that date there had not been a single national coal strike, even though mining was suffering more than most from the rise of cheap oil and the end of the old industrial economy. During the 1960s, under the chairmanship of Lord Robens, the Coal Board closed 400 pits and got rid of 420,000 miners, more than half of the workforce, yet there was remarkably little protest. Robens even managed to persuade the NUM’s leadership to keep their pay demands low, so that more pits could be kept open in places like South Wales, where there was no alternative employment. At the beginning of the 1960s, coal miners had earned about 10 per cent more than manufacturing workers; at the end, they earned 3 per cent less. It was no wonder that Robens was hailed as a genius: the man who had managed to run down the coal industry without provoking a strike, bringing in mechanization, closing pits and cutting wages, yet somehow keeping the union sweet. Even in 1968, supposedly the year of revolutionary protest, there was barely a whimper when Robens closed 55 collieries and got rid of 55,000 jobs in one fell swoop. The days when governments feared the miners, it seemed, were long gone.35
Beneath the surface, however, resentment and frustration were mounting. Not only were miners in constant fear for their jobs, but they had seen their pay fall well below that of other working-class men, especially in the late 1960s, when they were overtaken by factory workers. In the autumn of 1969 an unofficial strike broke out in Yorkshire on the question of working hours, and in July 1970, just after Heath’s election, the NUM conference voted in favour of a 33 per cent wage demand to recover their position. Just over half of the workforce voted for a strike, but the union’s rules required a two-thirds majority. Instead, a wave of unofficial strikes broke out that autumn in pits across Yorkshire, Scotland and South Wales, traditionally the most militant areas, where entire communities depended on the industry for their survival. For a brief moment the government was worried: John Davies warned the Cabinet in October that if the strikes continued, they ‘could cause serious damage to the country’s fuel and power supplies in the coming winter’. But they soon petered out, and the government’s attention moved on to other things.36
By this point, however, the leadership of the NUM was under enormous pressure from the left. Its rumpled Lancastrian president, Joe Gormley, was one of the labour movement’s more moderate standard-bearers, interested less in sweeping political change than in gradually improving the lives of his members. But his position was never as secure as it looked, because he was surrounded by colleagues far to his left. The NUM’s general secretary Lawrence Daly, who hailed from Fife, had left the Communist Party in the mid-1950s, but he remained an unashamed Marxist and kept the CP supplied with minutes of TUC General Council meetings. Gormley’s vice president, meanwhile, was the Stalinist Mick McGahey, who remained in the Communist Party all his life and whose famously severe demeanour, puritanical style and extraordinarily abrasive Lanarkshire voice – the product of a life working underground and chain smoking – made him a terrifying figure in middle-class households. Like Daly, McGahey kept in close contact with the CP’s industrial organizer Bert Ramelson. MI5 wiretaps revealed that McGahey regularly phoned Communist officials for advice, although his heavy accent and affection for the bottle meant that his words were often impossible to understand. Friends and admirers waxed lyrical about his fondness for poetry and warm companionship in the pub, but none of that came across on television, where all viewers could see and hear was his blazing eyes and fearsome rhetoric. ‘I want the Tories to be the anvil,’ he said ominously, ‘and I will be a good blacksmith.’37
By the summer of 1971, the miners’ leaders, themselves under pressure from younger elements on the left, were moving inexorably towards confrontation. In July, the NUM conference approved a Yorkshire motion calling for an average pay rise of up to £9 per week, which worked out at 47 per cent, and changed its rules so that strike ballots had to win only a 55 per cent majority. When the Coal Board’s chairman Derek Ezra replied with an offer of no more than £1.80 per head, the NUM promptly declared an overtime ban and called for a strike ballot. Gormley privately advised Ezra that he would have to offer at least £3.50 to get a deal, and in other circumstances he might have obliged. The problem, however, was that the Coal Board’s hands were tied by Heath’s ‘N–1’ pay policy, which prevented them from offering more than 8 per cent. Even then, however, it was close: in December, the NUM announced that, out of 271,000 eligible miners, 145,482 had voted in favour of a strike and 101,910 against, a majority of 58 per cent. Ezra made one last offer, but the NUM executive rejected it without even putting it to the vote. When the clocks struck midnight on 8 January, the strike began.38
Everybody knew that the miners could not possibly win. ‘Rarely have strikers advanced to the barricades with less enthusiasm or hope of success,’ wrote Woodrow Wyatt in the Mirror. The Times forecast ‘only marginal disruption to industry and commerce as a whole’, while the Sunday Times’s labour correspondent Eric Jacobs wrote that, while he wanted them to win, ‘I doubt they will. It is a failure of leadership to have chosen this moment, when coal stocks have rarely been higher [and] when the Government is fighting everybody’s battle by resisting inflationary wage claims.’ In the Sunday Express, Cummings drew Heath as a smirking fisherman preparing to mount a new trophy beside the postmen’s leader’s head; in the Telegraph, Garland drew Joe Gormley as an officer leading his men over the top to certain death; and the New Statesman’s cartoonist showed a middle-class lady in an extravagant hat telling a grinning Heath: ‘So silly of the miners not to realise that we’ve all gone over to oil-fired central heating.’ Ten days later, when Thames Television showed a documentary on the origins of the strike, they prophetically entitled it The Miners’ Last Stand.39
Inside the government, there was no great alarm at the prospect of a national coal strike. Since the vote had been so close, there was every chance that the miners’ unity might not last long. In any case, the winter had been mild, which meant that coal stocks were still high, even though the NUM had been operating a ten-week overtime ban. In the weeks leading up to the strike, the Coal Board had quietly distributed stocks to power stations around the country; the Central Electricity Generating Board reported that it had enough supplies to last eight weeks, and clearly the strike would be over by then. When the Cabinet met on Tuesday, 11 January, two days into the strike, there was a mood of quiet confidence. Carr told his colleagues that the NUM’s efforts to rally support from other unions ‘had met with a poor response’, and that he expected the strike to last for ‘at least a month’, at which point the government might have to broker a settlement along the li
nes of the Coal Board’s final pay offer. As for the wider impact, John Davies reported that ‘the strike should have no immediate effects on the electricity or gas industries and stocks generally were good’; although there might be ‘sporadic shortages’, there was no reason to expect widespread power cuts. The Cabinet recognized that the miners commanded considerable public sympathy, and that ‘a prolonged strike’ might cause ‘growing difficulties with power supplies … particularly if the weather were cold’. But the mood was generally upbeat, and defeat was inconceivable: ‘in general discussion’, the Cabinet minutes recorded, ‘there was general agreement that sure handling of the dispute would be of critical importance to the continued success of the Government’s policies for reducing cost inflation and the level of wage settlements’.40
One enormous flaw in the government’s strategy, though, was that they seriously underestimated their opponents. ‘Our judgement turned out to be wrong,’ Carr admitted later. ‘We just didn’t know the miners.’ Far from being divided, the miners proved to be exceptionally solid, and the NUM brought out virtually every man of its 280,000 members. What the miners had – and what the Cabinet could never understand – was an outstanding sense of tribal unity, based partly on their folk memories of struggles going back to the Victorian era, and partly on the toughness, claustrophobia and suffering of their daily grind. When one young Yorkshireman first went down the pit in the 1950s, he found it a terrifying experience, ‘so full of dust you could barely see your hands, and so noisy that you had to use sign language’. Miners worked six-hour shifts with twenty minutes’ ‘snap time’ to eat their sandwiches (although they had to scrape the black dust from their lips first). Twenty years later, a Kentish miner reported that eight out of ten men in his Snowdown pit worked completely naked because it was so hot underground, and lost so much fluid in sweat that they had to drink eight pints of water a shift, laced with salt. When The Economist’s Stephen Milligan visited a pit, he was horrified by what he found: the atmosphere choked with dust, the conditions ‘incredibly cramped’, the heat so great that ‘the miners work stripped to the waist, the sweat pouring down … confined to this darkness for eight hours a day, usually with only a plastic carton of water and a packet of sandwiches’. Accidents were common: in March 1973, seven miners were killed by flooding at Lofthouse colliery; in May, another seven died in a pit collapse at Kirkcaldy; in July, eighteen were killed in a pit-cage accident in Derbyshire. On top of all that, there was ‘the Dust’, pneumoconiosis caused by inhaling coal dust, an occupational hazard that blighted the lives of tens of thousands of miners, working or retired. It was, said Heath’s adviser Brendan Sewill, who had visited a mine during his Cambridge student years, ‘a bloody awful job’.41
Yet as Milligan also noted, the ‘solidarity and friendliness’ of the miners were legendary, and they had a deep sense of their own history. ‘Sometimes it seems that 1926 was only the day before yesterday’, wrote a reporter from The Times after visiting a South Wales pit village in February 1972. The entire community, he noted, was ready to ‘fight to the finish’. And the miners commanded great respect and affection not just in the world of the trade unions, where they were seen as authentic working-class heroes, but among the public at large. Even though the newspapers thought the miners could not win, they treated them with remarkable sympathy. The Sun, still nominally a left-of-centre paper, offered its own ‘peace plan’ in typical style, headlined ‘Stuff the Norm! Get the Miners Back to Work’, and explaining that they were ‘a special case … because of the exceptional demands of their dirty, dangerous job’, which demanded ‘an over-the-odds settlement’. Even traditionally right-wing papers took a similar line. ‘These men do a hard, dirty, dangerous job,’ said a leader in the Express. ‘All they ask is a decent wage. They deserve it. They should have it … Make a start, Mr Carr – today!’ And for the Daily Mail, which ran several features on the plight of strikers’ families, the attitude of the government and Coal Board was ‘not only insensitive but short-sighted’, whereas the NUM had been ‘restrained and responsible’. The government should set up an inquiry to meet ‘the just demands of the lower-paid miners’, the Mail said. ‘Sympathy for the miners is not only a good cause. It makes sense for Britain.’42
With the miners cast as plucky underdogs heading for certain defeat, it was no wonder they won considerable public support. Gallup found that 55 per cent of the public supported the NUM, with only 16 per cent backing the Coal Board. Ten days into the strike, a Civil Service briefing for Derek Ezra conceded that public sympathy had ‘its roots in history. We are not going to be able to change that.’ Meanwhile the NUM made provisions to deal with the influx of ‘members of the public … offering help on picket lines’. On the far left, in universities and in countercultural circles, support was particularly marked: the underground newspaper Frendz, one of the last survivors of the late-1960s bohemian boom, greeted the strike as a ‘dress rehearsal for the uprising’, and looked forward optimistically to a future of ‘wildcat strikes, one-day stoppages [and] demonstrations’. What most miners would have made of support from such a publication, which was best known as a cheerleader for women’s liberation, hard drugs and the Angry Brigade, can only be imagined.43
Yet in at least one part of the country, miners and students did form an effective alliance. By the second week of the strike, hundreds of miners from South Yorkshire had poured into East Anglia, where they had been detailed to stop the movement of coal by picketing the docks and power stations. The NUM’s chief contact in the area – not exactly a hotbed of working-class socialism – was a lecturer in Norwich who happened to be a member of the Trotskyist International Socialists. He helped to arrange for the miners to be billeted with sympathetic students, and this proved a roaring success, especially at the University of Essex, whose student body had a particularly left-wing reputation. It was ‘an absolutely tremendous experience’, the South Yorkshire miners’ leader said later. ‘Our people were becoming politically educated and were becoming aware of what the class structure and the class war were’, while ‘we showed to the university students a degree of discipline and organisation which they had probably read about in the Marxist books, but had not seen for themselves’. As he proudly put it, ‘the barriers were down’. But it does not take a cynic to suspect that for many miners, breaking down the barriers of class meant something rather different from listening to young men with beards talking earnestly about the revolution. When Lawrence Daly rang the pickets after reading some disturbing tabloid revelations, he was told: ‘It’s OK, Lawrence, we’re doing the work – and we’re getting our leg over every night.’ The South Yorkshire men ‘were very comfortable there’, their leader admitted. ‘We had difficulty in getting them home.’44
For the man who led the South Yorkshire miners into battle, the strike of 1972 was a turning point. Born into a poor mining family in Worsbrough Dale, Barnsley, Arthur Scargill had first gone down the pit when he was 15. The only child of doting parents, he was brought up in an intensely old-fashioned working-class atmosphere, a world of brass bands, whippets, pigeon racing and community singing, dominated by the local colliery. His father was a committed Communist and even in the mid-1980s took a staunchly pro-Soviet line, and Arthur himself joined the Young Communist League in 1955. He left the group in the early 1960s, later giving different reasons for his decision: in one version, he said that he ‘objected to the moving of Stalin’s body outside the mausoleum and changing the name of Stalingrad’, and indeed he remained a keen admirer of the murderous Soviet dictator for the rest of his life. His biographer Paul Routledge, however, suggests simply that ‘Scargill was a man in a hurry, and the Communist party got in the way’. Leaving the Young Communist League allowed him to get ahead in the local branch of the NUM, which was then fiercely anti-Communist; in any case, Scargill does not seem to have altered his principles, which remained so close to the party line as to be practically indistinguishable. As he made a name for himself within th
e South Yorkshire NUM as a cheeky, flamboyant, self-promoting hardliner, he made no attempt to downplay his vision of a centrally planned Marxist society with the abolition of all private property except for homes and gardens. And whenever there was pressure for a new wage demand or a strike, Scargill was always at the forefront. ‘I’m completely convinced that victory is won by militancy,’ he told Yorkshire Television the week before Heath’s election. ‘I’ve never known the employer who gives you anything. You get as much as you are prepared to go out and take.’45
Scargill was a relatively minor figure in the NUM when the strike started in January 1972, but he immediately saw the opportunity to make a name for himself. For most miners, the strike was simply about getting a better wage, but to Scargill it was ‘a political battle’. ‘We were in a class war,’ he told the New Left Review three years later:
We were not playing cricket on the village green like they did in ’26. We were out to defeat Heath and Heath’s policies because we were fighting a government. Anyone who thinks otherwise was living in cloud-cuckoo land. We had to declare war on them and the only way you could declare war was to attack the vulnerable points. They were the points of energy; the power stations, the coke depots, the coal depots, the points of supply. And this is what we did.
Well, the miners’ union was not opposed to the distribution of coal. We were only opposed to the distribution of coal because we wished to paralyse the nation’s economy. It’s as simple as that.
State of Emergency: the Way We Were Page 16