When the commanding heights of the British economy were nationalized in the years following the Second World War, the mines passed into the government’s hands. The National Coal Board was established to manage the industry. But the second half of the century saw the emergence of competing energy sources in the form of oil, natural gas, and nuclear power. The increasing globalization of the energy market ushered in competition from coal-rich and comparatively undeveloped nations such as China, where life and labor were cheap. It is, moreover, the nature of coal pits to become progressively less profitable, for the deeper you have to dig for the coal, the more time, risk, effort, and technology it takes to get it out. At the turn of the twentieth century, 1.1 million British men earned their daily bread in the pits. By 1983, the number was only 240,000.
That year, the Monopolies and Mergers Commission reported that some 75 percent of British pits were making losses. It cost £44 to mine a metric ton of British coal. America, Australia, and South Africa were selling coal to the rest of Europe for £32 a ton. British coal was piling up in mountains, unsold. The industry was surviving because, and only because, the government was spending more than a billion pounds a year to subsidize it—and indeed still more, if you calculate the additional costs to the nationalized steel and electricity industries, which were obliged by law to purchase British coal rather than cheaper imported coal or oil. Indirectly, the high cost of energy was passed on to everyone in Britain. It was, in effect, a completely regressive tax.162 Highly energy-dependent industries were heavily penalized, particularly in the export market, but so were ordinary men and women who heated their homes and turned on their lights. The coal industry had become an expensive welfare program.
And what a cruel welfare program it was.
The place is like hell, or at any rate like my own mental picture of hell. Most of the things one imagines in hell are in there—heat, noise, confusion, darkness, foul air, and, above all, unbearably cramped space. Everything except the fire, for there is no fire down there except the feeble beams of Davy lamps and electric torches which scarcely penetrate the clouds of coal dust . . . 163
Obviously, I do not find Scargill a sympathetic character, but it is nonetheless entirely understandable to me that coal miners so often found themselves tempted by the promises of communism. Frankly, I am surprised that any of them weren’t communists. I needn’t linger overmuch on the horrors of coal mining—they are well-known—but it is worth acknowledging them with a passing nod. Methane explosions. Crushing. Electric shock. Pulmonary tuberculosis, emphysema. The eternal filth, working crouched over, never seeing the light of day. Black lung, black damp, after damp, fire damp, stink damp, white damp, suffocation, drowning.
The safety standards of British mines had much improved—relatively speaking—by the mid-1980s.164 But improving safety costs money, a lot of it, which is one reason Britain could not compete with countries such as China. And still the pits were Stygian, filthy, backbreaking. If I had spent my life going up and down those mine shafts, I reckon I too would have liked the ring of the words “dictatorship of the proletariat.”
All mines close sooner or later. Either all the coal is harvested, or it becomes so difficult to get to the seam that it costs more to mine than the coal is worth—at least, if that worth is measured by the price it fetches on an open market. The National Coal Board had been closing pits steadily since its creation, and every time, miners had been laid off. Under Harold Wilson’s first Labour government, a pit had closed every week. When the coal board announced, under Thatcher, that it planned to close another twenty-odd pits, it was proposing nothing more than the continuation of previous policies. Thatcher presented the argument for pit closure in characteristic terms of housewifely thrift. “You do not go out and buy suits at four times the cheapest price merely to keep people in work. You say: ‘No! I have to use my wages and salaries to the best advantage. I must buy best value!’”165
Alan Clark supposedly told the journalist Edward Pearce that “It’s all absolute crap, of course, to talk about liberal market theory. What Margaret is on about is the Class War.” This is certainly how the miners’ strike was widely perceived, among the miners, at least. But Thatcher herself was not from a privileged class background: As this 1979 photo of Thatcher on the campaign trail suggests, she drew considerable support from Britain’s middle- and lower middle-classes, who identified with her. She was able to pursue an anti-socialist agenda in large measure because her own lower-middle-class roots tempered the perception that she was waging an all-out class war. (Courtesy of the family of Srdja Djukanovic)
There had never before been a strike over pit closures. Previous strikes had revolved around the issue of wages, not closures. Thus the question, at heart, was not the closure of the pits. The great miners’ strike was an ideological struggle. For Thatcher, the miners’ union and the bureaucrats who managed the coal industry represented everything wrong with socialism: waste, inefficiency, irresponsibility, unaccountability. To the miners, Thatcher represented everything wrong with capitalism: avarice, heartlessness, the privi-tation of profits over human dignity. Thatcher had made her goal explicit: She sought to destroy socialism in Britain. In return, Scargill made his goal explicit: He sought to destroy Thatcher.
And so the strike began.
In September 1979, six months after Thatcher won the first general election, John Hoskyns sent the prime minister a memorandum: Begin your preparations now, he warned her. The miners are going to give you grief. The received wisdom in the Conservative Party, he tells me over lunch, was that the miners couldn’t be defeated. The attitude was “part of that whole postwar malaise, this sort of deep-down defeatist ‘we won the war but we can’t win the peace, somehow—there may be some way that you can make peace with the miners, so they don’t bring you down and they don’t cripple the economy, but don’t think that you can actually defeat them, because they’ve got the biggest guns, and they’ll just bring everything to a halt.’”
In his memo, Hoskyns urged her to challenge this received wisdom. At the time, Joe Gormley was head of the miners’ union. Gormley was “an honorable, old-fashioned, democratic trade unionist,” Hoskyns recalls. But he would be retiring. And it was increasingly clear that he would be replaced by Scargill. Gormley’s interests, says Hoskyns, “were not ours. But there is a big difference between an old-fashioned trade unionist and a raging Marxist, there really is. One’s just someone you disagree with, and the other’s the enemy.”
Despite Hoskyns’s warnings, nothing was done at all. Hoskyns wrote, in his memo, that it might well be possible to change the balance of power. Thatcher returned the memo to him with her reply: “Only at the margins, I fear.” Hoskyns decided it would be unwise to insist. “I didn’t push her on that, because there’s a lot of importance, in my view, in the handling of someone who is under enormous pressures. You cannot go on and on banging at them, because eventually they say, you know, ‘Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?’”
Thatcher put the issue on the back burner. As a result, when the miners challenged her in 1981, the government was entirely unprepared. Thatcher was forced to capitulate. Hoskyns was disgusted, and while he was too savvy to say “I told you so” explicitly, I expect his sentiments were clear enough. Hoskyns was not invited to the urgent meeting Thatcher subsequently convened to discuss the miners. He suspects this was because she did not want to be reminded that he had, indeed, told her so. “You know, she’s only human. And she knew that we’d been right on that.” Not long after this, Hoskyns resigned. “Our relationship,” he says, “was quite a difficult one. I wasn’t part of her sort of feel-good factor, as it were.”
But following this humiliation, Thatcher began to prepare for war. “It was that strike threat, which, to put it bluntly, scared the shit out of her,” says Hoskyns. “Suddenly the whole of Whitehall was on a war footing.” Thatcher instructed the Civil Contingencies Unit, usually charged with preparing for national disasters, to beg
in studying the possibility of withstanding a strike. Plans were drawn up for stockpiling coal, training the military to drive trains in the event of a sympathy strike by the railway workers, accelerating the development of nuclear power, importing electricity by cable from France, and refurbishing coal-fired power stations to permit them to run on oil.
Thatcher asked Nigel Lawson to be her energy secretary. He too had been appalled that the government was forced to stand down. “I was determined,” he writes in his memoirs, “that, if I had anything to do with it, it would never happen again.”166 He was not seeking a strike, he stresses. “But it was clear that Arthur Scargill was, and I was determined that he should lose it when it came.”167
I believe it to be true that the government was not going out of its way to provoke a strike. But obviously, if these characteristic words are any guide, by 1984 the mood in Downing Street had become distinctly Clint Eastwoodish. Go ahead. Make our day.
Lawson appointed the physicist Walter Marshall to head the Coal and Electricity Generating Board. Scargill’s ally Tony Benn—remember him? Wedgie?—had sacked Marshall from his position as chief scientist at the Department of Energy. Lawson was well aware of this. Marshall devoted himself with vindictive relish to developing plans to defeat Scargill; Lawson recalls Marshall’s “great zest” for devising schemes to smuggle strategic chemicals into the power stations. Those that could not be smuggled would be flown in by helicopter; landing sites were identified near every power station.
Stockpiling coal is no trivial matter. It is costly, and it is tricky: In critically large quantities, coal can self-ignite. It was, moreover, viewed by many of Thatcher’s advisors as a risky gambit. “Up went the great defeatist cry of the most useless civil servants,” recalls Hoskyns. “‘If we start moving coal to the power stations, that’s an outright provocation!’” Thatcher’s cabinet was divided; Jim Prior, in particular, considered these preparations a dangerous escalation. Hoskyns draws an analogy to the debate about Reagan’s military spending: “I’ve been through exactly the same process that clearly he and his advisers went through about the Cold War. I mean, I felt ratcheting up economic costs and staying in the struggle was the way to destroy the economic union. I mean, the Soviet Union. Just the same. If you just do everything bit by bit, and try to avoid any single action that makes their alarm bells ring, there’s a habituation to what’s going on. I mean, thinking through the eyes of Scargill, ‘Oh, they’re moving a lot of coal, aren’t they, well, you know, yes, but it’s not too bad,’ six months later, ‘Hmmm, really a hell of a lot of coal . . . ’”
Thatcher ignored the pleading of the wets. The preparation continued. By 1982, trains ferrying coal to the power stations were running twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
Meanwhile, her government ushered in significant changes in the trade union law. The 1982 Employment Act made it vastly more difficult, almost impossible, to form a closed shop, a union with mandatory membership. Unions that engaged in sympathy strikes or dispatched flying pickets could now be sued, fined, or held in contempt of court. By making unions liable to civil suits, Thatcher gave the judiciary a more prominent role in labor relations. The judges ultimately proved, as Thatcher had hoped, to be no friends of the striking miners.
In September 1983, Thatcher named Ian MacGregor chairman of the National Coal Board. MacGregor, who was half American and spoke with an American accent, had previously managed British Steel, cutting its workforce by 100,000. “Ian,” recalls Lawson, “was widely seen as an overpaid, over-aged, ruthless American whose main achievement at British Steel had been to slash the workforce.”168 What more could you want? Everything was in place.
Then Scargill was elected. “The moment that happened,” John Hoskyns remembers, “we basically said, ‘There will be a war. Perhaps the last battle.’”
Yet there remains a great mystery. Clearly, a hell of a lot of coal had been stockpiled. Equally clearly, the government was determined to win a strike. So why, given this, did Scargill call for a strike against pit closures, when no such strike had ever been called, no less won, before? And why did he call it in the springtime, in particular? By this point, Scargill could not have been ignorant of Thatcher’s nature. General Galtieri had said to the American envoy, Vernon Walters, “That woman wouldn’t dare” attempt to retake the Falklands. Walters raised an eyebrow. He recalled Thatcher’s willingness—even eagerness, truth be told—to let the Irish hunger strikers perish. “Mr. President,” he replied, “‘that woman’ has let a number of hunger strikers of her own basic ethnic origin starve themselves to death without flickering an eyelash. I wouldn’t count on that if I were you.”169
Scargill had seen what happened to Galtieri. I simply cannot understand why he thought he would meet a different fate.
Hoskyns shrugs. “He did something quite crazy. I mean, he was actually, I suspect, in strategic terms, a fool. A stupid man.”
Neil Kinnock: They deserved each other. Scargill and Thatcher deserved each other. But nobody else deserved them.
CB: Do you see a lot of similarities in their temperaments?
NK: Well, temperament, maybe not, but there are similarities. Infinite self-belief. A huge sense of superiority, coupled with some chips on their shoulders. Scargill thought that anybody who wasn’t actually kissing his ass was patronizing him. Or plotting against him. And Margaret Thatcher was more conscious than she should have been about being a grocer’s daughter, and had changed her accent, her voice—C
B: You know, can you explain that to me? Because this is something—for an American it’s a little bit hard—170
NK: Yeah, sure.
CB: Can you tell me what she sounded like before? Can you imitate it?
NK: Well, for instance, I’ll tell you what, I’ll give you a couple o’ words whose pronunciations she would’ve changed. Margaret Thatcher, prime minister, Oxford graduate, millionaire’s wife, would say, “graaaahz.” With a long “a.” Margaret Thatcher, schoolgirl, would say, “grass.” With a very short “a.” C
B: Do you speak the same way as you did when you were growing up?
NK: Yeah, pretty much . . . I’ve made absolutely no conscious effort to change it. Whereas I can give you the names of a few Welshmen, roughly of my generation, who have changed their accent—
CB: I don’t know why a Welshman would want to lose his accent—
NK: Well, yeah, I . . . I don’t begin to understand it.
CB: Look, this is fascinating, but I’m losing the thread, which is Margaret Thatcher, and her changing her accent, and her class background, which you think she had a chip on her shoulder about—
NK: Well, yeah. Because it made her acutely conscious of not picking up the wrong fork, you know? In Britain maybe more than anywhere else. I don’t know, Turgenev wrote about it in Russia, and I guess there are German writers and French writers who’ve noticed the same tendency, but I think it may have been more pronounced in the United Kingdom then.
CB: Well, you say that she had “a chip on her shoulder” about it, but then what you just said suggests that she was quite right to be self-conscious about it.
NK: Well, no, of course she wasn’t—I mean, there was never any danger. I mean, bloody hell, my father was a coal miner, I was brought up to hold my knife and fork properly and know which fork to use, and how to eat—
CB: OK. So your point here—is it that she was or she wasn’t right to have a chip on her shoulder? Because you’re telling me on the one hand that there’s an incredible attention to these subtle signals of class, and you’re also telling me that this “chip on her shoulder” was somehow not rational—
NK: ’Course it wasn’t! I mean just—first of all, she had nothing to fear—
CB: But there was a lot of prejudice against her because of her class background. I mean, I’ve heard it dripping out of the mouths of her own cabinet members.
NK: Oh, sure. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But that’s their kind of stupidity. That’s their chi
nless delusion. She was in charge! She was in charge! She could have said, “I’m me. I’m bright. I’m Margaret. I’m a Tory. Get out of my bloody way—”
CB: She did say that.
NK: Well, she—
CB: I mean, if anybody ever said, “I’m a Tory, get out of my bloody way,” it’s Margaret Thatcher.
NK: Yeah . . . [long pause] Maybe.
Let us return to Peter Walker, who is telling us how he discovered that Scargill was a Marxist.
Lord Walker: He spoke at loads of Marxist conferences all over the world. And—
[Waiter interrupts]
PW: Now, my guest is having the, um, the halibut and asparagus. And I will have six oysters please. [Sound of clock chiming.] And then my guest is having the scallops, and I’ll have the Dover sole.
Waiter: Will you have it off the bone, Milord?
PW: Off the bone, yes, I’m a very lazy man. And, um, now, vegetables.
Waiter: Spinach, French beans, broccoli, cauliflower?
PW: Potatoes?
Waiter: Potatoes, I’ve got sautéed, new, French fries . . .
CB: What do you recommend?
Waiter: What do I recommend? Well, spinach is fine, and, er, sautéed potatoes—
CB: Sounds good to me.
PW: I’ll have spinach and new potatoes, please, and, um, we’ll have a bottle of the nice Chablis. Fizzy water or still water?
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