Just before Mrs Thatcher, Walker and MacGregor sat down to discuss all the issues, at the beginning of July, Peter Gregson sent her a wide-ranging memo. He reported the feeling of stalemate. It was ‘common ground’ in government that ‘unless the NUM position is crumbling fast by the end of September, the prospect of winter will give Scargill a major psychological advantage.’94 At present, ‘We have not so far identified any initiative … which could be relied on to bring the matter to a head in our favour.’ In these circumstances, Gregson proposed a three-pronged strategy. The government should get more men back to work; it should maintain public support by being reasonable about talks and showing Scargill as an ‘anti-democratic bully with ulterior motives’;95 and it should do everything possible discreetly to prolong endurance into 1985. If this strategy failed, it might be necessary, by September, to change tactics, start closing pits, making strikers redundant and getting imported coal into power stations (something which the government had hitherto avoided in order not to alienate working miners). Gregson also touched delicately on the question of how to get the best out of Ian MacGregor: ‘As he is so laconic, it is all too easy to put words into his mouth and it would be much better for you to hear from him at the outset how he thinks the battle is going.’96 Between the lines, one can read an official’s exasperation at Mrs Thatcher’s tendency to talk non-stop.
All the problems of strategy and tactics suddenly deepened when, on 9 July 1984, a dock strike broke out almost without warning. The Transport and General Workers’ Union claimed that the British Steel Corporation, by using contract labour to move iron ore from stockpiles in Immingham docks to its steelworks in Scunthorpe, was flouting the National Dock Labour Scheme, which protected dockers’ privileges. The strike was not, on the face of it, concerned with the miners’ dispute, but the TGWU leadership were close to the NUM, and Downing Street immediately understood what was going on. ‘The extreme Left’, wrote John Redwood, ‘is mounting a major extra-parliamentary challenge to the Government on a number of fronts,’97 including coal, the dock strike and local government. ‘There is only one thing worse than presiding over industrial chaos,’ he went on, in a passage which Mrs Thatcher underlined, ‘and that is giving in to the use of industrial muscle for unreasonable ends … it is dangerous to blow hot and cold, to be out of the fray one week and then in it another.’ Any ‘fudged formula’ on closures ‘is defeat’, said Redwood. There had to be a return to the ‘war of attrition’.
The government’s priority now was to keep the docks working, at all costs. On 15 July Mrs Thatcher and ministers discussed the possibility of deploying troops to keep dock traffic moving. The Ministry of Defence estimated that 2,800 troops could move 1,000 tonnes (fifty lorries) a day.98 Ministers feared that these estimates were ‘far too low’ to make much of a difference99 and there was, in any case, little enthusiasm for the idea. Mrs Thatcher realized that there would be no tactical advantage but considerable adverse publicity.* The government’s focus was, in fact, not on breaking the dock strike, but on settling it. The political and economic stakes were much higher in the coal strike, Gregson reminded Mrs Thatcher. Therefore the government should ‘end the dock strike as quickly as possible, so that the coal dispute can be played as long as necessary’.100
The fact that contingency plans were being discussed, however, does show the government’s precarious position. It was made worse by the return of a quite separate union problem. On the same day as Mrs Thatcher’s dock-strike meeting, judicial review of the union ban at GCHQ found that the government had acted beyond its powers in imposing the ban without prior consultation. Mrs Thatcher first saw the news on a newspaper hoarding as she and Robin Butler were passing in the car:
She said to me: ‘We’ll appeal, of course, but if we go down, we’ll have to accept this. The law is the law.’ I admired her very much that this was her first reaction. Think of how defeat on this issue would have helped the miners. For her, the judgment of the courts should always be respected.101
So uncomfortable did the situation seem that President Reagan took the step, highly unusual in an ally’s purely domestic political difficulty, of writing to Mrs Thatcher. In recent weeks, he said, ‘I have thought often of you with considerable empathy as I follow the activities of the miners’ and dockworkers’ unions. I know they present a difficult set of issues for your Government.’102 Sending his ‘warm regards’, he concluded, ‘I’m confident as ever that you and your Government will come out of this well.’ On 18 July 1984, the same day as Reagan sent his letter, the sky, at least as Mrs Thatcher perceived it, began to brighten. First, NCB talks with the NUM broke down over the question of whether uneconomic pits could be closed. ‘I have to say I was enormously relieved,’ wrote Mrs Thatcher in her memoirs.103 This ‘marked a new phase’, she told the Cabinet: the government should increase pressure for a return to work and help ‘in a sustained publicity campaign’.104 The following day, the dock strike collapsed for lack of support from TGWU members. On 23 July, Mrs Thatcher wrote to thank Reagan for his letter, excusing her delay by saying she had been waiting for an end to the dock strike. As for the NUM strike, she told the President, ‘I am confident that in due course firmness and patience will achieve a victory for the forces of moderation and common-sense which are Britain’s traditional sources of strength.’105
The war of attrition resumed, but Mrs Thatcher felt less uneasy. She had been reassured by the trusted Walter Marshall that, on current trends, endurance would last until June 1985. The leaders of the various unions in the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB) ‘had privately told him that their ability to provide moderate leadership would be totally undermined if the hard left leadership of the NUM were successful’.106 She had also been spurred on by advice from Walker,107 normally more cautious than she in this area, that the government should encourage two Nottinghamshire miners who were bringing a legal case claiming that the NUM attempt to embroil them in a strike was unlawful. She had constantly been advised that ‘if she were in league with the working miners, that would undermine their position’.108 Intellectually, she accepted this view, but emotionally she longed to do more for her heroes. The prospect of the court case cheered her up. So did some of the clandestine work by David Hart, who produced an itinerant co-ordinator of working miners codenamed ‘Silver Birch’ (who later became known as ‘Weeping Willow’ because of his lachrymose tendencies). At the beginning of August, Silver Birch gave newspaper interviews, and was revealed as Chris Butcher, a miner from Bevercotes colliery in Nottinghamshire.
Mrs Thatcher was inspired not only by her determination not to suffer the fate of Edward Heath, but also by her understanding of what Arthur Scargill was up to. Ever since the 1970s, she had agreed with those who saw a serious, semi-organized attempt by the extreme left to subvert British parliamentary democracy. Fear of this phenomenon played a part in her attitudes on many issues – détente, local government, education policy, police reform, the Labour Party, intelligence, sanctions against South Africa, and IRA terrorism, as well as trade union militancy. After her landslide general election victory in 1983, the left turned away from the parliamentary politics which they had failed to capture. In his speech to the NUM conference in July of that year, Scargill had told his members that ‘Extra-parliamentary action will be the only course open to the working class and the labour movement.’109 The miners’ strike was intended to be part of a wider phenomenon. Scargill’s approach paralleled that of many Labour activists in local government, notably the members of the Militant Tendency, such as Derek Hatton in Liverpool, and Ken Livingstone,* the leader of the GLC. As the miners’ strike proceeded, so did the government’s legislation fulfilling its election promise to abolish the GLC and the metropolitan counties.† ‘I was up to my neck with Scargill,’ recalled Livingstone.110 ‘We broadly merged the miners’ strike and the GLC campaign.’ In August, Livingstone and three others resigned their seats in the GLC to fight by-elections in protest at the abolition. S
cargill’s local government allies did what they could to help the striking miners. Council funds, sometimes illegally, provided relief. In some areas, left-wing police authorities sought to punish the police for their fights with the mass pickets. In South Yorkshire, for example, the scene of the Orgreave battles, the police authority tried to have the Chief Constable suspended. The fact that Scargill had publicly justified the strike as necessary to overthrow the elected government gave Mrs Thatcher the permission she sought to have some of the strikers’ activities monitored by the Security Service. Stella Rimington,‡ who later became the head of the service, classified Scargill, whose telephone had been tapped for years because of his links with the Soviet-backed Communist Party of Great Britain, as ‘an unaffiliated subversive’.111
For Mrs Thatcher, all this showed what would happen to Britain if her policies did not prevail. At the traditional ‘end of term’ meeting of the 1922 Committee before the summer recess, when the Conservative leader addresses the backbenchers, she gave full vent. The occasion is always a private one, but details of her speech quickly leaked. From Mrs Thatcher’s surviving manuscript notes (there was no formal text), her drift is clear. Indeed, her short notes convey the essential Thatcher more than a full draft would have done. She was speaking the night after the NCB–NUM talks had collapsed, and she was fired up: ‘Winter of Discontent We were returned to Parliament Supreme Uphold Rule of Law,’ the relevant passage of her manuscript notes began:
Mrs Thatcher’s notes for her speech to the 1922 Committee, July 1984. Her notations referring to the ‘Enemy within’ begin at the bottom of the left-hand page.
Since Office
Enemy without – beaten him
& strong in defence
Enemy within –
Miners’ leaders.
Liverpool & some local authorities
– just as dangerous
in a way more difficult to fight
But just as dangerous to liberty
Scar across the face of our country.
Then she quoted Walt Whitman: ‘There is no week, nor day, nor hour when tyranny may not enter upon this country if the people lose their supreme confidence in themselves and lose their roughness and spirit of defiance.’112
Her speech was noisily applauded by the traditional banging of desks (clapping being, by convention, forbidden in the Palace of Westminster); but not all Tory MPs present liked its tone. The phrase ‘the enemy within’ was taken up by critics as the epitome of her divisive approach.* Although she had spoken only of the miners’ leaders (and the left-wing local authorities) as being the enemy within, this was quickly misrepresented by her opponents as her description of all miners, proof of her hostility to the organized working class. It would be used against her forever afterwards.
Yet what she actually said was not far from being a statement of plain fact, and was surely not something with which Arthur Scargill himself could have disagreed. The main miners’ leaders were proud of being the enemy of the government and were declaredly set on bringing it down. They did consistently refuse their members the ballot for a national strike which their constitution demanded. And they did, by means of violence and intimidation, try to prevent other miners from working. In addition, some of them, most notably Scargill himself, were in alliance with revolutionary elements and, as later events were to show, in contact with foreign regimes hostile to Britain. They were the enemy within, though of course being a declared enemy of the government led by Margaret Thatcher did not of itself make anyone a subversive.
One reason which emboldened Mrs Thatcher to speak so fiercely was the agony of the Labour Party. From the start of the dispute, Labour had been torn between its hereditary, instinctive loyalty to trade unions – especially miners, especially against Tory governments – and its anxiety about the circumstances of the miners’ strike. Early in the dispute, the veteran political commentator and expert on the Labour Party Alan Watkins noted that just as Labour people had spoken of ‘a Michael problem’ in the era of Foot’s leadership, so they were beginning to talk about ‘a Neil problem’.113 Neil Kinnock, said Watkins, had already missed the chance to take a stand on the issue of the ballot. From the beginning, Kinnock had favoured a national ballot, and had publicly said so, but somewhat obliquely. When Scargill was about to embark on the strike in March, Kinnock recalled, ‘I told him in terms that if there were no ballot there couldn’t be unity … My deep regret was not to have been louder and more emphatic.’114 As the child of a mining family from South Wales, Kinnock was emotionally committed to the NUM cause, but he was no friend of Scargill and was only too aware of the disastrous potential of the strike for the industry, for trade union solidarity and for his own party’s unity. Once the strike got going, he sympathized with those in the coalfields and felt that publicly ‘to attack the absence of strategy would have been an attack on them’.115 He could not quite decide which line to take.
Mrs Thatcher played on this. The twice-weekly Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons, which should have been good moments for Kinnock to arraign her for all the problems with the strike, were often the other way round. It was Kinnock, not she, who was suffering internal political embarrassments over the strike, as she did not hesitate to remind him. She was particularly fond of throwing back at him a remark he had made on 12 April when he had welcomed a national ballot as ‘a clearer and closer prospect’. By July, however, as the struggle had intensified and attitudes become more polarized, he said that ‘There is no alternative but to fight.’116 What had made him change his mind, she taunted him? Kinnock was therefore reluctant to go on the attack. Despite the provocation of her ‘enemy within’ speech to the ’22, he did not raise it or the miners’ strike at Prime Minister’s Questions on the three occasions that remained to him before the summer recess. In those sessions, his preferred subjects were merchant shipping, the bid by an American company, Standard Telephones, for ICL, and mortgage-capping. Kinnock’s visible evasiveness on the strike emboldened her. In the no-confidence debate* in the Commons on 31 July 1984, she accused him of ‘appeasement’ because he refused to call for a ballot.117
Her parliamentary victory over Kinnock that day, so soon after the crisis of the dock strike had loomed, put heart into her MPs as they left for their summer break.
For her customary but always unwelcome summer holidays, Mrs Thatcher went, as she had done several times before, to Schloss Freudenberg, the lakeside home of Lady Glover in Switzerland. She did not take advantage of her break, however, to stop thinking about the miners’ strike. At the end of August, Peter Gregson was up a tree in his garden, tending to his apples, when the telephone rang. ‘She’s coming back!’ wailed an official from No. 10. ‘She’ll be here by lunchtime. She’s worried it’s all going wrong. Come and reassure her.’118 Gregson did so. It turned out that she had no very specific anxiety, just the unease she always felt if she was ever out of touch. She sought reassurance about endurance: ‘I have to have it from Walter [Marshall], from his own lips.’119
Mrs Thatcher was right to be anxious. The return to work had slowed since July, and the season of conferences produced a plethora of peace plans. These tended to expose the Coal Board’s vulnerability. As Peter Gregson recalled, Ian MacGregor was ‘a very good manager, but he didn’t understand the politics of the British coal industry.’120 On 3 September 1984, the government’s internal Daily Coal Report recorded that MacGregor had just confirmed that further talks were being arranged between the NCB and the NUM: ‘He said that it appeared the NUM was taking “a more realistic” approach,’ words which Mrs Thatcher marked with her wiggly line of scepticism.121 She and many of those round her were suspicious of Peter Walker’s game, and anxious about MacGregor’s tendency to make mistakes. Andrew Turnbull suggested she ask them to explain ‘the understandings on which the talks have been re-launched’.122 Walker alleged, he went on, that Scargill now wanted to discuss the closure of uneconomic pits, but MacGregor’s public statement had ma
de no explicit reference to such closures: ‘What is to stop a repetition of the last meeting? … The NCB offer last time was perilously close to going too far.’
The following day, Arthur Scargill announced that the NCB had cancelled the talks, though this was not the case. In a meeting with Walker and MacGregor that day, Mrs Thatcher insisted that a line be drawn – ‘It was agreed that the NCB could make no further concessions on the principle of closing uneconomic pits,’ although Peter Walker held out for the value, in terms of public opinion, of being seen to welcome talks. Mrs Thatcher was unconvinced, even suggesting that ‘In future it might be better if such discussions were conducted on paper.’123 Nevertheless, talks and meetings continued. One series of them between the NCB and the NUM, which were supposed to be secret, took place in early September at the Norton House Hotel near Edinburgh. The press got wind of it, and when MacGregor came down the drive for the talks, he was spotted. Climbing out of the car, he covered his face with a green plastic bag. This was supposed to be a joke about the secrecy of the meeting, but the photographs and film in the media ‘made him look divorced from reality’.124 The pictures contributed to the public sense that MacGregor was a peculiar leader for the industry, and to Downing Street’s growing dismay about his conduct of the dispute. It was ‘ghastly’, recalled Sherbourne.125
It was a Coal Board mishandling, indeed, which brought about ‘the single most dangerous moment’126 of the entire strike. In the completely unionized world of coal mining, there were other, minor unions as well as the mighty NUM. Of these, the elaborately named National Association of Colliery Overseers, Deputies and Shotfirers (NACODS) had an importance beyond its modest numbers. This was because its members were chiefly responsible for safety. If safety cover were not present, the pits would be legally obliged to close. Then Arthur Scargill would very likely win. In the middle of August, seemingly without thought for the possible consequences, the Coal Board issued a circular to NACODS members ordering them all to cross picket lines, on pain of losing pay. Until that point, policy had varied from area to area, with many NACODS men who were employed on strike-bound pits being allowed to stay away on full wages. Since the NACODS men, in a ballot in April, had voted for a strike (though not by the two-thirds required to trigger action), this was a dangerous move. The leaders of the union, Ken Sampey and Peter McNestry (known as ‘Scampi and Chips’), were more sympathetic than most of their members to Arthur Scargill. Now they grasped their moment. They called a strike ballot for 28 September. The hard left saw their chance. ‘I always thought the miners could defeat Thatcher,’ Ken Livingstone remembered. ‘I thought NACODS could do it.’127
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