Mrs Thatcher had also begun the necessary political preparation by replacing David Howell as energy secretary with her rising star, Nigel Lawson, in 1981. According to Lawson, her brief to him was ‘succinct’: ‘ “Nigel,” she said, “we mustn’t have a coal strike.” ’33 This suggests that, contrary to the view of many on the left, Mrs Thatcher was not going out of her way to pick a fight with the miners. However much she wanted to defeat union militancy, her attitude was essentially defensive. As Gregson explained the task: ‘We were never spoiling for a fight. We wanted as much time as possible.’34 Lawson knew that his brief from Mrs Thatcher was an instruction not to appease the NUM, but to prepare for when the government might be strong enough to resist them. In November 1981, over 70 per cent of NUM members voted for the left-wing extremist Arthur Scargill* to succeed the moderate Joe Gormley as president of the NUM when Gormley’s term of office ended in April 1982. Scargill’s political opposition to the Tory government was absolute. An attack was therefore expected.
It is surprising that more controversy did not surround the build-up of coal stocks. When Mrs Thatcher and senior colleagues discussed the matter, at Lawson’s suggestion, in February 1982, Jim Prior had raised the traditional Wet objection that it would be seen as ‘provocative’.35 But in fact the stockpiling went smoothly. The high cost of the work could be concealed in the huge profits of the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB), rather than adding to the huge losses of the National Coal Board. ‘I was astonished we got away with it,’ recalled Peter Gregson. ‘Everyone could see these mountains of coal at the power stations. Why didn’t Scargill stop it?’36 The extra production was good news for ordinary miners because it helped to keep otherwise threatened pits open, for the railway workers (whose ‘sympathy’ strikes were also feared) because they could earn more overtime moving the coal to the power stations, and for the moderate power-station workers. The build-up worked fast. In July 1983, with the Conservatives’ election landslide won, Robert Armstrong reported to Mrs Thatcher that, by November, power-station endurance would be six months.37
The government gave thought to human resilience as well. Previous confrontations with the unions had proved how weak the leaders of the nationalized industries could be. Mrs Thatcher knew that this must change. In 1982, she strongly supported Lawson’s choice of Sir Walter Marshall,* the chairman of the UK Atomic Energy Authority, as the new chairman of the CEGB. She admired Marshall’s credentials as a scientist and his fierce commitment to the development of nuclear power which, if fully pursued, would get rid of dependence on coal for good. ‘Marshall gave her confidence that he knew what he was talking about.’38 She agreed with Lawson that Marshall would ‘co-operate to the full with the Government in the preparations to withstand a strike’.39 So it would prove. He would be much admired for his ingenuity once the strike began: ‘He found ways of smuggling spare parts from one power station to another.’40
Even more important was the question of who should be chairman of the Coal Board. Sir Derek Ezra, the chairman from 1972 to 1982, was a classic example of the corporatist type against which Mrs Thatcher rebelled, always seeking maximum agreement rather than taking tough decisions, and allowing the union to manage much of the industry. He was blamed for feebleness in the debacle of February 1981. Ezra’s term as chairman expired in 1982, and Lawson appointed the elderly but effective stop-gap, Norman Siddall, for a year. But for some time Lawson had been courting Ian MacGregor, the controversial (and also elderly) Scottish American whom Keith Joseph had appointed in 1980 to turn round British Steel. After the squashing of Joseph’s idea that MacGregor should run both coal and steel at the same time, his appointment to the Coal Board was formally announced in March 1983. By the time he took up the post in September, Mrs Thatcher was securely in office for her second term. After the election victory, having made Nigel Lawson her new Chancellor of the Exchequer, she needed a replacement at Energy. She invited Peter Walker, the chief remaining Wet in government, to do the job. Although she mistrusted Walker, and disagreed with him on economic policy, she also had a high regard for his abilities. ‘If Peter wants to be in every Cabinet of mine, he can be,’ she told her private secretary.41 By Walker’s own account, he had intended to refuse office, but when Mrs Thatcher offered him Energy he realized that if he said no she would say ‘Faced with Scargill, he went.’42 So he accepted.
By the autumn of 1983, then, with all the key lieutenants in place, Mrs Thatcher felt ready to move forward. Peter Gregson advised her that stocks at power stations were now almost as great as was physically possible. If a strike came, therefore, it could be better resisted than in the past and ‘there is no case for making a special effort to avoid a miners’ strike this year in particular.’43 It was time to push ahead with efforts to put the industry on an economic footing. The newly arrived Ian MacGregor produced his ‘preliminary conclusions’ on how to achieve this to which, he said, he did not want to be ‘held’. Peter Walker, fearing leaks, unveiled these to Mrs Thatcher in a meeting whose record was not circulated beyond the private office. MacGregor, who, said Walker, ‘was clearly handling the situation very adroitly’,44 saw a future for the coal industry which could be ‘bright indeed’. He wanted continued investment in new, low-cost capacity to be ‘presented to the workforce as a quid pro quo for closures’. Between then and 1985, he was minded to suggest that a further seventy-five pits would close, reducing manpower from 202,000 to 138,000.* Some areas would be badly hit by closures: in Wales, for example, two-thirds of miners would lose their jobs.
There is little evidence that Mrs Thatcher had strong views on the precise content of the MacGregor package as it developed. She trusted him to work out the details according, as far as was possible, to commercial principles. Her chief concern was to be ready for a strike. The first rumbles of confrontation were felt on 31 October 1983, when the NUM began an overtime ban in protest at the current pay offer and rumours of pit-closure plans. In a meeting of ministers two days later, which Mrs Thatcher chaired, it was agreed that the danger of a strike was ‘likely to increase in the second half of 1984’.45 Ministers assumed that the NUM would not be so foolish as to begin a strike in the spring just when demand for coal would fall. Preparations for the inevitable confrontation continued. ‘The first priority’, Mrs Thatcher told the meeting, ‘should be to concentrate on measures which would bring benefit over the next year or so.’46
Despite the careful preparations, the actual moment when the strike began was a surprise. On 1 March 1984, the South Yorkshire Coal Board director announced, erroneously, that Cortonwood, a pit in South Yorkshire, would close in five weeks’ time. On 6 March, MacGregor disclosed that 20,000 jobs in the industry would go in 1984. Mrs Thatcher’s Policy Unit, however, minuted her office to say, ‘we do not think that the Prime Minister should be unduly alarmed at this stage.’ The Yorkshire and Scottish miners could strike with the approval of their executives and without a ballot, the unit’s memo went on, but ‘a national strike could not take place without a national ballot.’47 At Cabinet on 8 March, Mrs Thatcher set up a ministerial group (MISC 101) of senior ministers to keep abreast of the situation. On the same day, the NUM executive declared strikes in Yorkshire and Scotland official, invoking the right to ‘area action’. In a move that would assume tremendous significance, Rule 43, which demanded a ballot before any national strike, was not invoked, despite minority demands that it should be. Most miners in Nottinghamshire and Lancashire, in particular, did not want to come out on strike.
Mrs Thatcher was eager to make clear that her government’s approach was different from that of her Conservative predecessors. She told the Cabinet that ‘the dispute in the coal industry was strictly between the NCB and the National Union of Mineworkers and the Government should neither intervene nor comment on the issues. The Home Secretary should continue to ensure that the law was upheld.’48 There was sense in this doctrine. Many of the disasters in the Heath era had come from the false idea that intervent
ion by politicians would solve matters: in reality it had given the strikers exactly the political leverage they sought. Only if labour disputes were conducted between employers and employed, rather than becoming political confrontations, could sanity return to British industry. It is precisely because she did not want to become a party to these disputes that Mrs Thatcher had been so keen to appoint people like Ian MacGregor. On the other hand, the doctrine of non-intervention was a fiction. The government was paying for the enormous losses of the NCB. The government was ultimately responsible for the rule of law, for public order and for ensuring energy supply. And, in the case of the miners, if everything went wrong, the government would fall. It was therefore inextricably involved in any dispute.
Mrs Thatcher had to face this contradiction the very next day. Ian MacGregor came to see her, by long-standing arrangement, about the Channel Tunnel project in which he was, for non-NCB commercial reasons, interested (see Chapter 12). Before turning to the business on the agenda, the two discussed the miners’ dispute, with Peter Walker also present. MacGregor explained that the NUM was trying to bring the union out on strike nationwide without a ballot. Flying pickets from Yorkshire were preventing men in Nottinghamshire from going to work, while the police did nothing. He emphasized Arthur Scargill’s political purposes.49 This, then, was Mrs Thatcher’s first real test: where miners wished to continue working, could pits be kept open in the face of intimidation from those on strike elsewhere? Would the law be upheld? According to Andrew Turnbull, her response was ‘a great explosion’.50 The Prime Minister was ‘deeply disturbed’ that the disasters of the 1970s might be recurring. ‘The events at Saltley cokeworks* were being repeated,’ she declared. It was essential to ‘stiffen the resolve of the Chief Constables’.51 With MacGregor and Walker still present, she got Leon Brittan, the Home Secretary, on the line, and ordered him to urge the head of ACPO, the Association of Chief Police Officers, ‘to tell the police that they must allow people to get to work rather than just maintaining order’.52
She then chaired a wider ministerial meeting. Mrs Thatcher told ministers she had just met MacGregor and had learnt that pickets were preventing men who wanted to work from doing so: ‘at the start of the week 93 pits were open and 71 were closed,’ but by then, Wednesday 14 March, 133 pits were closed. ‘It appeared’, she went on, ‘that the Police were not carrying out their duties fully.’53 Brittan replied uneasily that he was not satisfied with the police response, but ‘He had gone to the limit of what the Home Secretary could do while respecting the constitutional independence of Police Forces.’
While Brittan was right, constitutionally, that the Home Secretary could not issue operational orders to the police, this was not quite the point at issue. There was a precedent for police forces stopping flying pickets out of area: this had been done during the dispute over Eddie Shah’s* union-busting newspapers the previous year, when police in Bedford had interdicted pickets heading for Shah’s offices in Manchester. The principles of ‘mutual aid’ were also well established between police forces. What the chief constables needed to know was that they would get the political and financial backing required. For all his careful, formal statement of the rules, Brittan understood this. He had noted Mrs Thatcher’s extreme anxiety, and he shared it. He recalled putting it to Brian Cubbon,† the Permanent Secretary at the Home Office, thus: ‘I know there’s reticence in the police about enforcing the picketing law. I like operational independence, but if they don’t do what’s necessary to stop violence, that constitutional arrangement will not survive.’54 Rather than saying this to Mrs Thatcher,‡ or directly to any police officers, he asked Cubbon to pass it on.
Cubbon agreed that some chief constables ‘needed a prod’.55 He sent them all what he called ‘a stiffening letter’. He also got in touch with the Chief Constable of Nottinghamshire in particular, to encourage him. ‘He was a tough man,’ Cubbon recalled, ‘but he needed help.’56 The chief constables needed money too to defray the extra costs. As the dispute went on, they would get most of what they demanded via special subventions from the Home Office. In order to strengthen the central grip on the dispute, Brittan took advantage of the Home Secretary’s power to ‘call for reports’. The National Reporting Centre at New Scotland Yard, which had been used to co-ordinate information about the riots in 1981, became the nearest thing the British constitution would permit to a national command post. Later in the dispute, a secret centre in Leicester also co-ordinated all police intelligence. All forces in England and Wales and half of those in Scotland took part in mutual aid.
The messages from Cubbon to ‘stiffen’ the police had an immediate effect. On Monday 19 March 1984, Andrew Turnbull reported that forty-four pits were working that day, compared with only eleven the previous Friday. As a result, the Coal Board, which had won an injunction against the secondary picketing of Nottinghamshire§ by the Yorkshire NUM, dropped its legal action for the time being.57 As MacGregor had already informed Walker, ‘all the actions he is taking on this front [legal challenge] can of course be changed if the Government so wishes.’58 Turnbull, who worked on the miners’ strike more closely than any other member of Mrs Thatcher’s staff, believed that her angry reaction on 14 March was crucial to the course of the entire dispute. Commenting to Mrs Thatcher on the strike in retrospect, he argued that:
The key point was possibly right at the start on Wednesday 14 March when, by chance, Mr. MacGregor came to see you to discuss Euroroute … At the meeting which immediately followed, you galvanised the Home Secretary, who in turn galvanised the police into keeping the entrances to the pits open. This led immediately to the activation of ACPO. If that first battle had been lost, the rest would have been academic.59
Mrs Thatcher underlined his last sentence approvingly.
The strike retained the same essential character throughout. During its entire course, the NUM refused a ballot, and Nottinghamshire and a few other areas, often under heavy police protection, went on working. At the lowest point, 20 per cent of normal national coal production was maintained, and at the highest point – towards the end – 50 per cent. Since government calculations of endurance had obviously not been able to factor in continued working, this ‘scab’ production was all gain from Mrs Thatcher’s point of view. Looking back, one is tempted to see the strike as a war of attrition which – given the coal stocks built up – the government was bound to win. It did not feel like that at the time, however. Indeed, it was not so. At any moment, it was possible that trade union solidarity, or the effect of NUM violence, or legal disaster, or the mishandling of negotiations by the Coal Board, or a loss of political nerve would produce defeat. Even a national ballot, which Scargill refused and for which Mrs Thatcher repeatedly called, was full of risk for the government. Suppose the vote took place, and went the ‘wrong’ way. Then Scargill’s actions would gain a democratic legitimacy which would be politically hard to resist. As Leon Brittan recalled: ‘We never thought we’d definitely lose, but only two-thirds of the way through did we know that we would win … The miners’ union was considered as unstoppable as the rain.’60
Mrs Thatcher and those close to her had it constantly in their minds that the miners’ strike was ‘a seminal event in British history’.61 If it went wrong, the ill-chosen, never properly answered question of the February 1974 general election, ‘Who Governs Britain?’, would be decided against the elected government which Mrs Thatcher led. As in a war, the picture could change dramatically each day, and on several fronts. A ‘Daily Coal Report’ was supplied to ministers and officials, listing statistics of tonnes produced, pits operating and miners working, injuries to police, legal actions proposed, and so on. Downing Street staff studied these details with almost as much anxiety and attention as they had devoted to the Falklands conflict. Instead of names like Bluff Cove, Goose Green and Mount Longdon, they became familiar with pits like Shirebrook, Manton and Bilston Glen. As Stephen Sherbourne, Mrs Thatcher’s political secretary throughout the dis
pute, put it, ‘Remember that nobody knew in 1914 it would go on for four years.’62 The endurance required was not only that of coal stocks, but that of will, concentration and morale.
But Scargill’s failure to call a ballot and the refusal of Nottinghamshire to do his bidding meant that the war, as well being a conflict between government and union leadership, was also internecine. Once the violent picketing had started, Mrs Thatcher was quick to tell the public: ‘This is not a dispute between miners and Government. This is a dispute between miners and miners.’63 This line never failed her throughout the dispute.
Also as in wars, there was a debate about command. In formal terms, the pattern was quickly established. MISC 101 was the rough equivalent of a war cabinet (although, unlike war cabinets, it included the Chancellor of the Exchequer). Ian MacGregor and the Coal Board were solely responsible for dealing with the NUM. The Department of Energy, as the sponsoring department, dealt with the Coal Board. It followed that it was not considered appropriate for Mrs Thatcher to meet MacGregor regularly. For a line into the Coal Board, she was reliant on Walker.
This all made theoretical sense, and no one doubted Walker’s ministerial ability. But Mrs Thatcher’s congenital anxiety to understand the detail of everything could not be satisfied by the arrangement; nor could her suspicion of Walker be allayed by it. According to Butler, she thought Walker and MacGregor, whose business toughness she respected but whose tactical abilities she increasingly questioned, would ‘do a fudge, like Pym and the Foreign Office in the Falklands had tried to do’.64 She was not alone. Memos from ministers and officials during the strike quite often refer to the opacity of what was happening and to tensions in MISC 101. The lingering fear was that Walker might concoct a deal which would ‘solve’ the strike on terms politically favourable to him but disastrous, in the minds of Mrs Thatcher and those who agreed with her, for her and her policies. There were constant efforts to prise more information out of Walker. A typical private office note to Mrs Thatcher before one important meeting informed her that Walker would have just spoken to MacGregor ‘and will, therefore, have no excuse for not knowing or not telling what the NCB is planning’.65
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