by Andrew Marr
So there were plenty of large and obvious targets for competent Opposition politicians to take aim at. In an ordinary election the state of the economy would have had the governing party rocking back on their heels. But this was no ordinary election. After the war the Conservatives shot into a sudden and dramatic polls lead over the two Opposition groups now ranged against them, finishing the equally sudden and dramatic rise of the SDP. In the 1983 general election the new party and its partners, the Liberals, took nearly a quarter of the popular vote. But the electoral system rewarded them with just twenty-three MPs, only six being from the SDP, a bitter harvest after the iridescent bubble-year of 1981-2. Labour was nearly beaten into third place in the votes cast. And the Conservatives won a huge victory, giving Mrs Thatcher a majority of 144 seats, a Tory buffer which kept them in power until 1997. Though there were other factors at play it seems perverse to deny that the Falklands conflict was crucial. It gave Thatcher a story to tell about herself and the country which was simple and vivid and made sense to millions.
88
The Plague
On 4 July 1982, a gay man called Terry Higgins died in St Thomas’s Hospital in central London. He was thirty-seven and one of the first British victims of AIDS, acquired immune-deficiency syndrome, that weakens the body’s natural defences and is passed through a virus, HIV. A group of his friends set up a small charity in a flat, the Terrence Higgins Trust, to spread the word about AIDS among gay men, encouraging the use of condoms – since it is spread by blood and body fluid contact – and offering support for others. Though the disease had undoubtedly been present in the late seventies, it was first identified in California in 1981 when gay men started to turn up in medical centres complaining of a rare lung disease and a form of skin cancer until then confined to the elderly. Within a year hundreds of cases had been found, many deaths were occuring and it was clear that the vast majority were among homosexual men – though other groups began to be affected, including some women, intravenous drug users, Haitians, and in Uganda villagers suffering from a mysterious and deadly ailment they called ‘slim’. The first target in America was the gay bath houses and saunas known for promiscuous, wild and unprotected sex. These had grown up in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and in New York too, as gay men migrated across America during the sixties and seventies to find the most liberal and liberated culture available.
A similar shift had happened in Britain after the legalization of homosexual acts by men. As in America, gay liberation was confined to the most liberal areas of the largest cities only, in this case mainly London – the gay scenes of Manchester, Edinburgh and other towns followed slightly later. Gay clubs, gay discos and gay saunas, the latter really places for as much promiscuous sex as possible, flourished. Men came south and made up for lost time. Something close to a climate of sexual frenzy developed – a frenzy which would later be imitated by heterosexual youngsters on foreign holidays and resorts. After the years of rationing, the sweetie shop was open. Through the seventies, amid the political and economic grime, a street culture of excess flourished. The excess in clothing, music and football violence has already been discussed. It was accompanied for many by a breaking of sexual restraint, the arrival of the freely available pill for heterosexuals and the new climate of legality for homosexuals. If there was optimism around in these years, it was personal – new freedoms that allowed respite from the surrounding climate of national failure.
So the arrival of AIDS came at a particularly cruel time. Just when homosexuals felt the centuries of repression and shame were finally over, along came a deadly and mysterious disease to destroy their new way of life. For social conservatives, this was exactly the point. AIDS was the medical and moral consequence of promiscuous and unnatural sexual behaviour. As you sow, so shall you reap – almost literally. And thus the scene was set for a confrontation between contending moral philosophies that had been at war since the sixties. Gay culture was briefly on the retreat, clubs closed, clerics drew conclusions. Though gay men were at the cutting edge of the AIDS crisis, it had wider implications. It was not only among homosexuals that promiscuity had become more common; in many ways, gay culture had drawn straight culture along in its wake. So for traditionalists there was a message to the whole society, the possibility of a turn away from the new liberalism.
Except, in the end, it did not turn out quite as anyone expected. Gay organizations sprung up to spread the safe sex message very quickly – the Terrence Higgins Trust became a national institution and is now one of the biggest sexual health charities in Europe, with a staff of 300, plus 800 volunteers. The establishment turned out to be far more sympathetic than might have been expected, from Princess Diana opening the first AIDS-specific ward at Middlesex hospital in 1987, to Thatcherite ministers talking about condoms. It was a cultural turning point of a kind, and certainly a national education. In the early days, the media fell prone to ‘we’re all doomed’ panics, and the moral condemnation of homosexuals as unnatural creatures, getting what they deserved. James Anderton, the chief constable of police in greater Manchester, talked of homosexuals ‘swirling about in a human cesspit of their own making’. His language was widely condemned, but many millions of Britons, mainly but not exclusively older people, are likely to have agreed with his condemnation of buggery and other ‘abominable practices’. Dislike of homosexuality was, and still is, strongly rooted. Alongside this was a prudishness about sex generally, which meant early discussion of how AIDS was transmitted was so vague it simply was not understood.
Tabloid newspapers described the ‘gay plague’ which could, according to rumours passed on by newspapers, be variously caught from lavatory seats, kisses, handshakes, communion wine or sharing a restaurant fork with an infected person. In the early eighties, the BBC was predicting that 70,000 people in England and Wales would die within four years (nearly twenty-five years later the total death toll is 13,000) and that ‘by the end of the century there won’t be one family that isn’t touched in some way by the disease.’ The BBC science programme Horizon had led public awareness of AIDS in the early days, but in 1986 its film about gay men’s sex lives and how the disease was actually transmitted was considered so close to the bone that it was banned, and the negatives solemnly destroyed. Yet across the media, as throughout the political world, attitudes changed rapidly. The same newspapers that spoke about buggers getting their just desserts, now enthusiastically promoted AIDS awareness. The homophobic jibes continued but with less self-confidence. Campaigns for abstinence or the reclaiming of gays back into heterosexual life, which have been common among church groups in America, barely touched more secular Britain. Gay Pride parades, which began as angry, edgy affairs in the eighties, slowly became mainstream to the point where politicians rushed to be associated with them. None of this was expected when AIDS first arrived.
In retrospect, part of the shift in attitude happened not in spite of AIDS but because of it. The public health crisis jolted the way sexuality was discussed. There needed to be a new frankness. This wounded, if not fatally, the grand British tradition of titter and snigger. As it became clear that AIDS could be caught from infected needles and blood transfusions, and occasionally through heterosexual sex, the gay stigma was diluted. Indeed, by rapidly changing sexual practices, gay men were for a time ahead of the rest of the population. Coping with AIDS was one of the most effective public information and healthcare stories of modern times. The turn came in 1986 when Norman Fowler, the health secretary, and Willie Whitelaw, Mrs Thatcher’s deputy prime minister, were told to create a national public awareness campaign that would be properly effective. Two more conventional and straight men it would be hard to imagine; Fowler’s main concern was family values and he was quickly lobbied by church groups, MPs and others to send out a traditionalist moral message of abstinence. He did nothing of the kind. The advertising agency TBWA was commissioned to produce a campaign, ‘Don’t Die of Ignorance’, which would shock the country into changing sexu
al habits. They came up with an iceberg image, and a gravel-voiced commentary by the actor John Hurt, which began with the words, ‘There is now a dreadful disease…’ Every single household in Britain received a clear and for the time explicit leaflet.
Over the next few years £73 million was allocated to the campaign. Broadly speaking, it worked. New diagnoses of AIDS, running at more than 3,000 in 1985, fell dramatically over the next few years, staying stable until 1999, when they began to rise again, because of heterosexual cases, mostly connected to Africa, which was undergoing a much worse, indeed genuinely catastrophic pandemic. Because of the wider use of condoms, all sexually transmitted infections fell in the same period, so that cases of syphilis were just a tenth of their pre-AIDS level by the end of the decade. Fowler said later that all the research on his campaign showed that ‘the public saw it, that they understood it, that they remembered the campaign, and most of all it actually did change habits’. Britain’s figures on the fall of new cases were better than almost any other country’s.
89
The Enemy Within
If the first Thatcher government had been dominated by monetarism and the Falklands War, the second would be dominated by the miners’ strike. This was the longest such strike in British history, one of the most bloody and tragic industrial disputes of modern times, and resulted in the total defeat of the miners followed by the virtual end of deep coal-mining in Britain. For Thatcher the lessons were even bigger: ‘What the strike’s defeat established was that Britain could not be made ungovernable by the Fascist Left. Marxists wanted to defy the law of the land in order to defy the laws of economics. They failed and in doing so demonstrated just how mutually dependent the free economy and a free society really are.’ It was a confrontation which was peculiarly soaked in history on all sides. For the Tories, it was essential revenge after the miners’ humiliation of Heath, a score they had long been waiting to settle; Margaret Thatcher did indeed speak of ‘the enemy within’, as compared to Galtieri, the enemy without. For thousands of militant members of the National Union of Mine-workers it was their last chance to end decades of pit closures and save communities under mortal threat. For their leader Arthur Scargill it was an attempt to pull down the government itself and win a class war. As we shall see he was not interested in the detail of pay packets, or in a pit-by-pit discussion of which coalmines were economic. He was determined to force the government, in Thatcher’s contemptuous but accurate words, to pay for mud to be mined rather than see a single job lost.
The government had prepared more carefully than Scargill. An early dispute with the NUM had been settled quickly because the battlefield was not yet ready. For two years the National Coal Board had been working with the Energy Secretary, Nigel Lawson, to pile up supplies of coal at the power stations; stocks had steadily grown, while consumption and production both fell. After the Toxteth and Brixton riots the police had been retrained and equipped with full riot gear without which, ministers later confessed, they would have been unable to beat the miners’ pickets. Meanwhile, Thatcher had appointed a Scottish-born American, Ian MacGregor, to run the NCB. He had a fierce reputation as a union-buster in the United States and had been brought back to Britain to run British Steel where closures and 65,000 job cuts had won him the title ‘Mac the Knife’. He was briefly idolized by the Prime Minister, rather as she admired John King, later Lord King, who had turned round British Airways in the same period, sacking 23,000 staff, about 40 per cent of the total, and turning the loss-maker into a hugely profitable business. These were her tough, no-nonsense men, a refreshing change from the cabinet, though later she would turn against MacGregor, appalled by his lack of political nous. MacGregor’s plan was to cut the workforce of 202,000 by 44,000 in two years, then take another 20,000 jobs out. Twenty pits would be closed to begin with. Though elderly and rich, he was no suave PR man. When MacGregor turned up to visit mines he was pelted with flour bombs, abused and, on one occasion, knocked to the ground.
Arthur Scargill seemed to be relishing the fight as much as the Prime Minister. We last glimpsed him in the miners’ confrontation with Heath, when he had led the flying pickets at Saltley coke depot, and then tangling with Kinnock during Labour’s civil war. Some sense of his unique mix of revolutionary simplicity and wit comes from an exchange he had with the Welsh miners’ leader Dai Francis, when he called to ask for flying pickets to come to Birmingham and help at the coke depot. Francis asked when they were needed:
‘Tomorrow, Saturday.’
Dai paused: ‘But Wales are playing Scotland at Cardiff Arms Park.’
There was a silence and Scargill replied, ‘But Dai, the working class are playing the ruling class at Saltley.’
Many found Scargill inspiring; many others found him frankly scary. He had been a Communist and retained strong Marxist views and a penchant for denouncing anyone who disagreed with him as a traitor. Some found a megalomaniac atmosphere at his Barnsley headquarters, already known as Arthur’s Castle. Kim Howells, then a Communist and later a New Labour minister, visited him there and was taken aback to find him sitting at ‘this Mussolini desk with a great space in front of it’ and behind him a huge painting of himself on the back of a lorry, posed like Lenin, urging picketing workers in London to overthrow the ruling class. Howells thought anyone who could put up a painting like that was nuts and returned to express his fears to the Welsh miners. ‘And of course the South Wales executive almost to a man agreed with me. But then they said, “He’s the only one we’ve got, see, boy. The Left has decided.” ’
Scargill had indeed been elected by a vast margin and had set about turning the NUM’s once moderate executive into a reliably militant group. His vice-president, Mick McGahey, was a veteran Scottish Communist who, though wiser than Scargill, was no moderate; and the union’s general secretary, Peter Heathfield, was well to the left in union politics. Scargill had been ramping up the rhetoric for some time. ‘Sooner or later our members will have to stand and fight,’ he said repeatedly – not on the traditional issue of wages, but on the very future of coalmining in Britain. He told the NUM conference in 1982, ‘If we do not save our pits from closure then all our other struggles become meaningless…Protection of the industry is my first priority because without jobs all our other claims lack substance and become mere shadows. Without jobs, our members are nothing…’ Given what was about to happen to his members’ jobs as a result of the strike, there is a black irony in those words. By adopting a position that no pits should be closed on economic grounds, even if the coal was exhausted – more investment would always find more coal, and from his point of view the losses were irrelevant – he made sure confrontation would not be avoided. Exciting, witty Arthur Scargill brought coalmining to a close in Britain far faster than would have happened had the NUM been led by some prevaricating, dreary old-style union hack.
The NUM votes which allowed the strike to start covered both pay and closures. But from the start Scargill emphasized the closures. To strike to protect jobs, particularly other people’s jobs, in other people’s villages and other counties’ pits, gave the confrontation an air of nobility and sacrifice which a mere wages dispute would not have enjoyed. Neil Kinnock, the new Labour leader, the son and grandson of Welsh miners, found it impossible to forthrightly condemn the aims of the dispute despite his growing detestation of Scargill. As we shall see, it cost him dear. With his air-chopping, flaming rhetoric, Scargill was a formidable organizer and a conference-hall speaker on Kinnock’s level. Yet not even he would be able to persuade every part of the industry to strike. Earlier ballots had shown consistent majorities against striking. In Nottinghamshire, 72 per cent of the area’s 32,000 miners voted against striking. The small coalfields of South Derbyshire and Leicestershire were against, too. Even in South Wales, half the NUM lodges failed to vote for a strike. Overall, of the 70,000 miners who were balloted in the run-up to the dispute 50,000 had voted to keep working. This is crucial to understanding what happened. Sc
argill felt he could not win a national ballot so he decided on a rolling series of locally called strikes, coalfield by coalfield, Yorkshire then Scotland, Derbyshire and South Wales. These strikes would merely be approved by the national union. It was a domino strategy; the regional strikes would add up to a national strike, without a national vote.
But Scargill needed to be sure the dominos would fall. He used the famous flying pickets from militant areas and pits to shut down less militant ones. Angry miners were sent in coaches and convoys of cars to close working pits and the coke depots, vital hubs of the coal economy. Without the pickets, who to begin with rarely needed to use violence to achieve their end, far fewer pits would have come out. But after scenes of physical confrontation around Britain, by April 1984 four miners in five were on strike. To Scargill’s horror, however, other unions refused to come out in sympathy, robbing him of a re-run of the 1929 General Strike. It became clear that the NUM had made other historic errors. Kinnock was not the only one from a mining background baffled as to why Scargill had opted to strike in the spring, when the demand for energy was relatively low. The stocks at the power stations were not running down at anything like the rate the NUM hoped, as confidential briefings from the power workers confirmed. It seemed the government could indeed sit this one out. There were huge set-piece confrontations with riot-equipped police bussed up from London or down from Scotland, Yorkshire to Kent, Wales to Yorkshire, generally used outside their own areas to avoid mixed loyalties. It was as if the country had been taken over by historical re-enactments of civil war battles, the Sealed Knot society run rampant. Aggressive picketing was built into the fabric of the strike. Old county and regional rivalries flared up, Lancashire men against Yorkshire men, South Wales miners in Nottinghamshire.