A People's History of Scotland

by Chris Bambery

  In September, management at Monktonhall offered voluntary redundancy to all miners over the age of fifty, without consulting the union as required. The NUM delegate, Davie Hamilton, called a union meeting, but when it ended management would not let the miners start work. That brought the pit to a halt as they walked out.21 The strike lasted until November, with a Scotland-wide NUM one-day strike in solidarity in October.22 At the Frances Colliery in Fife the NUM delegate was sacked after organising a collection for the Monktonhall strikers. Four hundred miners walked out and he was reinstated.23

  When Albert Wheeler announced the closure of Kinneil in West Lothian just before Christmas 1982, the miners occupied the pit and sent out pickets across the Scottish coalfields. Area officials persuaded them to end the action, arguing that Scottish miners could not win on their own.24

  At the beginning of 1984, Wheeler announced the closure of Polmaise Colliery in Stirlingshire. Two years earlier, Polmaise had been described as the ‘success story of the Scottish coalfield’ by Wheeler. It was also known as Scotland’s most militant pit, which many thought explained its closure. At the same time, management also allowed Bogside in Fife to flood, then blamed the workforce for its closure, adding to a growing sense of bitterness.25 By March 1984, when the national miner’s strike began, roughly half of Scotland’s miners were involved in industrial action ranging from an overtime ban to a strike.

  The man chosen to head up the confrontation with the NUM was a Scot. Ian MacGregor was appointed chair of the National Coal Board in September 1983. He was born in Kinlochleven but emigrated to the USA, where he became head of the mining giant Amax, inflicting a major defeat on the mineworkers’ union over the closure of Belle Ayr Mine in Wyoming. Brought back to Britain by the Labour government, he was appointed deputy chair of the state-owned car maker British Leyland and played a key role in sacking the union convener at the company’s biggest plant, Longbridge in Birmingham. The Tories made him chair of British Steel, where he presided over the loss of 80,000 jobs.26

  Later, when interviewed by the Times in June 1984, he explained his outlook thus: ‘I think the only thing the government is interested in is seeing this business run properly … That’s all the politics I know of. I am not one of your local characters. I don’t vote here – I vote in Florida.’27

  The Strike Begins

  On 5 March 1984, Ian MacGregor announced that twenty ‘uneconomic pits’ should close, with the loss of 20,000 jobs. Miners at Cortonwood in South Yorkshire walked out on strike. The president of the NUM, Arthur Scargill, encouraged them to picket other pits in the region, and then across the country. Scargill then travelled to Fallin Miners Welfare Club to address the Polmaise miners alongside Mick McGahey in the miners’ welfare club. The two leaders gave the green light for the Polmaise miners to picket the Scottish coalfield. Mick McGahey told a press conference: ‘I want to emphasise the knock-on effects of the closure in pits and the loss of miners’ jobs, the effect that will have on railways, the steel industry, engineering and electrical industries, because we don’t only produce coal.’28

  On 12 March, pickets brought out Killoch and Barony pits in Ayrshire. The next day, Polmaise miners assembled at Fallin before travelling to Bilston Glen in Midlothian to bring work there to a halt.29 There would be criticism that Scargill and the NUM did not hold a national strike ballot. In March 1984, Mick McGahey replied to that: ‘We are not dealing with niceties here. We shall not be constitutionalised out of a defence of our jobs.’30 As Bobby Clelland recalls, Comrie Colliery initially voted against strike action in 1984, but once it was called out, it was solid in support: ‘We just felt that, once you were called out, you then backed up your fellow miners.’31

  One miner from Fife pointed out: ‘The strike was not about wages and conditions – it was a struggle to defend the very existence of mining communities and it would be fought with bitter intensity to the very end.’32

  On the first day of the strike, 12 March, Breakfast TV announced that Blairhall Colliery in Fife was working normally; however, it had closed in 1969. Whether accidental or deliberate, this would come to be seen as part of a concerted media drive to undermine the strike.33

  The Scottish NUM had agreed to provide coal to the Ravenscraig steel mill to keep it working because the leadership feared it might be closed permanently if work stopped. Mick McGahey explained it was ‘in the interests of Scotland’s future’. In contrast, one Scottish miner argued: ‘The only way to win the strike is by stopping people working.’ Another prophesied: ‘First they’ll chop us, then they’ll chop Ravenscraig.’34

  Before the strike, Ravenscraig had received 4,000 tonnes of coal a day, when it needed just 900 to keep its furnaces going. The plant saw record production in April. When the miners and rail unions agreed to reduce the amount of coal, by allowing just one train a day to run from the Hunterston depot on the coast to Ravenscraig, management at the plant hired trucks to bring the coal in, paying £50 a journey.

  On 4 May, the rail unions halted that one train in response to the use of lorry convoys. Three days later, a thousand miners clashed with police outside Ravenscraig as they tried to stop the convoys getting in. Fifty-two were arrested but fifty-eight trucks got in through the rear entrance. Mounted police were then used to attack pickets, sixty-five of whom were arrested. The next day, eight coachloads of Fife miners were stopped en route to Ravenscraig. When the miners sat down on the road they were dragged off, with nearly three hundred being arrested. John McCormack from Polmaise recalls: ‘I told the cops that we were all going on a seaside picnic to Largs. I showed him the pies and crisps in the back. But they wouldn’t believe me. So I said to the guys to get off the buses and stand on the road as I thought they wouldn’t arrest us all. But they did. More than 200 of us. Every police station in Glasgow was full of Polmaise miners.’35

  On 8 May, 1,500 miners determined to shut down the coal supply dock at Hunterston faced 1,000 police and mounted units. John McCormack remembers that when the miners lined up on the picket line, mounted police charged. He was surprised no one was killed. His brother was knocked down by a police horse before being arrested, kept in a cell for ten hours and ended up being fined £150 for breach of the peace.36

  The biggest single number of arrests in the strike occurred at the Lochgelly depot for open-cast coal, which Fife and Lothian miners tried to shut. Instead, 133 were arrested. In one instance, lorries carrying coal tried to access the depot via Ballingry. A local resident takes up the story:

  They were met by great hostility from pensioners, housewives and youngsters who poured abuse on them at every point along the road. The final straw for the lorry drivers came when well over 100 youngsters, between twelve and fourteen years, instead of going into school, marched out on the road down through the village to Lochore Miners’ Institute singing and shouting and blocking the way of the worried lorry drivers. They never re-appeared.37

  It was a rare victory in the year-long strike.

  On 17 May, the Scottish NUM agreed to 18,000 tonnes of coal entering Ravenscraig each week, once more citing the national interest.38 The plant kept running for the rest of the strike, so the miners failed to stop steel production.

  A feature of previous miners’ strikes had been the role of women in organising solidarity and joining the picket lines. That reached new heights in the 1984–85 strike. The first priority was to ensure the strikers and their families were fed and had some money to live on. In Fife, local miners’ wives set up ten communal kitchens in the Dysart area, with the help of the local NUM. Cath Cunningham explains how women quickly wanted to contribute more: ‘Soup kitchens and bingo nights soon became insufficient for many women … We started visiting factories and union meetings; we were invited to speak at meetings, a skill many of us acquired quite speedily. Wherever the men went to speak the women went too.’39

  As the strike went on into the summer it was clearly becoming a war of attrition, as Margaret Cowie from Fallin, the daughter, mothe
r and wife of a miner, recalled: ‘In the beginning we thought it would be over in a few weeks but when we saw it wasn’t going to be, the ladies got together to see what we could do. We needed to show the world that we were right behind the men.’

  Initially, the main aim of the Women’s Committee was to make sure that everyone, especially the children, had at least one hot meal a day. In many homes in the community there was no money coming in, so the Women’s Committee was raising funds, collecting donations and addressing meetings. They had a caravan in nearby Stirling where people could donate food. There was a clear polarisation between those who supported the miners and those who took Thatcher’s side, as Margaret Cowie recollects, ‘Some people believed everything they said about us. We had a caravan in Stirling where people could bring food and sometimes folk would scream and shout and tell you to get back to work. But others were generous. Old ladies with nothing would give cash.’

  As winter approached, such solidarity was key to ensuring the miners were not starved back to work. As the strike went into December it was crucial every striker and their family had a very merry Christmas. Margaret Cowie describes Christmas in Fallin: ‘We had the room here stacked high with presents. And we sat up all night wrapping them and making sure there was something appropriate for everyone. No miner’s child went without. Then we cooked the Christmas dinner.’40

  Endgame

  The miners were facing the full might of the state, hostility from most of the media and a government prepared to break their morale by any means. Tory ministers later admitted that the figures for strikers returning to work had been inflated to damage strikers’ morale. The strike ended on 3 March 1985, nearly a year after it had begun. At a special conference the NUM voted, by a tiny margin, to return to work without any agreement with management. James Armitage remembers returning to work at Polmaise: ‘The managers were lined up to sneer at us. But when they saw us with our heads held high, they slunk away.’41

  The strike cast a dark legacy, not least for the mining communities and above all for those arrested and victimised during the strike: The Tories spent £26,000 per miner in defeating the NUM. We now know Thatcher came near to conceding defeat on at least two occasions but the miners were left to fight alone by the rest of the trade union movement and went down to a defeat that still casts its shadow today.42

  Jim Finlayson was arrested at Bilston Glen, and was one of 170 local miners sacked. Speaking after Margaret Thatcher died in March 2013, he said: ‘I feel, personally, she destroyed Scotland. You know, 250,000 workers were put out of work eventually and she got all the tax and revenue from the oil: she took that off us as well.’43

  Caterpillar Occupation

  At the Uddingston plant of the giant US corporation Caterpillar, the workforce left for the Christmas break in 1986 happy about the future of their jobs. The company had announced it would be expanding the factory. The trade union convener, John Brannan, recalled that the company laid on a party for the workforce and their families. That Christmas, the foundations were being dug for the expansion.44

  Then, on 14 January, the multinational made a terse announcement of closure. The workers said the plant would remain open, and that afternoon they occupied it, telling management they could enter but only to collect their personal belongings.45

  On 24 January, more than 100 shop stewards from engineering plants across Lanarkshire gathered in Motherwell to organise support. The Scottish TUC backed the occupation and support came from Caterpillar workers in France and Belgium. Whipping off the cloth cap he always wore, John Brannan told the meeting in Motherwell: ‘Fill this bunnet and we’ll not let you down.’46 Substantial donations came from the workers at Hoover, UKC Laird, Rolls-Royce and Anderson Strathclyde.

  As the campaign got under way solidarity began to flood in. Street collections, three times a week, were organised in Hamilton, Airdrie, Motherwell, Paisley, East Kilbride, Cumbernauld, Larkhall, Wishaw and Carluke, with more than £5,500 being collected in the first week, including £1,300 at a Rangers versus Aberdeen football match at Ibrox Park. Celtic supporters soon began competing as to who would donate more. As the collections spread they could total £17,000 a week.47

  As the occupation went on, local shops sent food parcels, workers got free haircuts at local barbers – it seemed like all of Scotland wanted to help. The Labour leader Neil Kinnock, Shadow Scottish Secretary Donald Dewar and the former cabinet minister Tony Benn came to visit. The comic Andy Cameron was part of a star-studded troupe who staged shows at the plant.

  Inside, security staff ceded control of the gates to the Joint Occupying Committee. Using materials left in the plant, combined with donated parts and supplies from outside, they built a tractor, painted it pink and announced to the world that they wanted to donate it to War on Want, which planned to send it to needy farmers in Nicaragua. The workers parked the Pink Panther in the middle of Glasgow’s George Square as a landmark for strike fund collections until a court order on behalf of Caterpillar prevented it going to Nicaragua.48

  The then War on Want general secretary, and future Labour and Respect MP, George Galloway, said: ‘The air was thick with talk of famine and there was a desperate need for the machinery they were making in the Third World. In the end the company defeated our bid to use the Pink Panther, but we got it to George Square where we guarded it twenty-four hours a day in the winter weather. It was a joy to behold.’49 John Brennan added: ‘The Americans couldn’t believe what was going on, and that we were allowed to do this. At one of the meetings, one of them said that back home they would just shoot us.’

  After three months, the numbers occupying the plant were falling. In the end, the men went back to work on 27 April, having been given improved redundancy payments. The plant closed in November.

  The history of the occupation contrasts with the UCS sit-in a decade and a half before. The main difference was that in 1971 there existed a mass shop stewards’ movement that had been blooded in struggle and alongside left-wing organisation within the workplace. By 1987, ‘… there was only a residual remnant of Broad Left stewards. There had been some experience of large-scale industrial battles, but there was no organized left to ensure cohesion within the workforce. The shop stewards movement outside the factory had been decimated by factory closure and the forces of the Left were divided and in disarray.’50

  Those words still ring true today.

  Direct Action Against Trident

  The decision by Margaret Thatcher to lease long-range Trident nuclear missiles from the US, and to base them at Faslane on the Gare Loch, which leads into the Firth of Clyde, was met by widespread protest in Scotland. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament called a protest in Glasgow at Easter 1982 and a peace camp was set up outside the base. Faslane would become a scene of direct action, surpassing what took place at the Holy Loch two decades before.

  Jim Ainslie served in the army for ten years before buying himself out because of his Christian beliefs. He went on to become a community minister in Glasgow’s Easterhouse in 1986, where he joined CND and campaigned against the presence of Trident at Faslane. One incident he was involved in was a direct-action protest against the nuclear submarine Victorious as it returned to the base:

  Four or five of us were in canoes, but at one point three of us, more by chance and the flow of the current, were directly in front of it, about one hundred yards ahead. The Captain said afterwards he gave the order to stop engines, but with a few hundred yards to stop there’s no way he could have stopped. What then happened was that the chap immediately to my side, who was a very good canoeist, was rammed and turned over. He was basically washed right over the front of my canoe, he was in the water. I canoed a wee bit away. I was capsized by the MoD police and that eventually came to court.51

  Another CND activist, Brian Quail, was involved in ‘Operation Braveheart’ when fifty or sixty protesters near Hadrian’s Wall, eight miles west of Newcastle, halted a nuclear weapons convoy heading to Faslane.
Brian was one of those handcuffed to a transporter and recalled, ‘The lovely thing about that, half of the people who were shouting “Scotland doesn’t want Trident” were English, from Manchester and Durham and Newcastle. It was great to get that solidarity.’52

  By August 1998 several hundred people had gathered outside the Faslane base to blockade it, with more than 100 being arrested. A year later, three women swam aboard a research vessel and dumped computers and files overboard, then tidied up and laid out anti-Trident pamphlets. They then called a press conference and, as a result, military police arrived. Looking at the tidy desks, they asked the women why they’d gone to such trouble to put out some pamphlets. It was only when staff arrived the next morning that they realised what had been done. The three women were arrested but subsequently acquitted.53 Such action continues today and will until Trident and its successor are removed.

  Nae Poll Tax Here

  The Thatcher years were a pivotal moment in the history of Scotland. When she was first elected in 1979 there seemed no possibility of a Scottish parliament being achieved, support for the Scottish National Party had collapsed and the union seemed totally secure. Under Tory rule all changed utterly.

  At the 1987 general election, the Tory share of the Scottish vote had fallen to 24 percent and they had lost eleven MPs, holding just ten Westminster constituency seats. Norman Stone, the Glaswegian Thatcherite academic, attributed the Scottish Tories’ electoral annihilation to ‘the decline of Imperial consciousness’, observing with sadness and nostalgia for the days of the Empire that the Tories in Scotland were a ‘foreign’, ‘patrician’ group of outsiders.54

  Something else had changed too. So far in this book, since the days of Thomas Muir in the late eighteenth century, Scottish workers mostly fought back alongside their Welsh and English sisters and brothers. In the 1970s, Scottish workers fought as part of a British movement. This had been true at the time of the Chartists, in the Great Unrest, during the Red Clyde years and in the 1930s. But now there was a divergence between the political situation in Scotland and that south of the border. The Tories never won a majority in Scotland under Thatcher, and by the time she quit they were facing annihilation.