CB: I like what I’m drinking very much, the fizzy water.
PW: And um, when they introduced profit-sharing, he delivered a speech, with another very hard-line lady communist, that said, “We must stop profit-sharing. The capitalists are doing this to make capitalism attractive. And if we’re going to achieve the Revolution, we don’t want capitalism to become attractive.” And so he urged unions not to participate in profit-sharing schemes. And right away, anything he could do to bring about the day of Revolution was in all his speeches and all his remarks.
Imagine that.
But before concluding that Scargill may have had a point, you should know this about Lord Walker. He is the son of a factory worker. His father was a union man—a shop steward, in fact. Walker did not emerge from the privileged class of which he is now a member. He, more than anyone, has the right to say that if equality of opportunity is present, the hardworking and talented will rise to the top. He did, after all.
In fact, Walker was the miners’ great champion. I believe him when he says that he did everything within his power to avert a strike. Prior to the strike, Walker proposed to offer the miners an extremely conciliatory deal. It would not have forced a single miner into redundancy. He offered early retirement, on generous terms, to miners over the age of fifty. Miners working at the pits slated for closure would be offered the choice of a job at another pit or a voluntary redundancy package. Another 800 million pounds of taxpayer money would be invested in the coal industry. Given the losses the industry had been running, it is impossible to see this as anything other than a bribe.
Walker went to Thatcher, alone, to persuade her that the bribe, though costly, was essential. “Look,” he said, “I think this meets every emotional issue the miners have. And it’s expensive, but not as expensive as a coal strike. And I think we should do it.”
Thatcher thought about it.
“You know,” she decided, “I agree with you.”
It is often held—it is certainly still believed widely among the miners—that Thatcher provoked the strike deliberately to punish them for the humiliations they had inflicted on prior Conservative governments. Walker says this is a myth, and the logic is on his side. “If you’d wanted a strike,” he reasonably notes, “the last thing you’d have done was make an offer of that sort—I mean, an offer that was superb. You could have made an offer which was reasonable, and you’d have got a strike, or you might have got a strike. But we made an offer that was absolutely perfect.” Since becoming president of the union, Scargill had tried three times to convince the miners to strike; three times the union had voted no. There was no reason to imagine this time would be different: The deal was too good.
Walker was immensely gratified when Thatcher and the rest of the cabinet agreed to his proposal. The wets, he imagined, would save the day. He thought the miners would never reject such a handsome deal. And indeed, they did not.
In principle, the National Union of Mineworkers was a democratic organization. Its charter called for a ballot of all its members, and the agreement of 55 percent of its membership, before the declaration of a strike. “I presumed there was no way he could win a ballot,” Walker says, “so there wouldn’t be a strike. And I was wrong.”
Upon seeing the terms of Walker’s package, Scargill presumably realized that in all likelihood, the union would accept it. To Walker’s astonishment, he simply decided not to hold a vote. “What he did was—with money from the Soviet Union—he paid miners to go and violently picket against miners who stayed at work. And he got a strike by brute force instead of the ballot.”
When the strike began on March 12, miners in the Midlands and Nottingham refused to join. Their pits were profitable. They were not slated for closure. They had cars, mortgages, decent salaries, pension plans—they had no desire to throw themselves on the bonfire of Scargill’s vanity. Their lack of solidarity confirmed Scargill’s deepest instincts about the unwisdom of the unpoliti-cized laboring classes: How easily they were tempted by baubles and trinkets! The dissenting miners demanded a national ballot. Scargill refused. Why, he asked, should a treacherous labor aristocracy be allowed to vote other working men out of a job?
According to Scargill’s logic, the union was a federation; therefore, each region should decide independently whether to strike. He assumed that once it had begun, the strike would spread—he would see to it that it did. Defying him, nine constituent unions held a vote, and to Scargill’s disgust, eight voted against the strike. In Leicestershire, 89 percent voted nay. In the Midlands, 73 percent. In Nottinghamshire, 73 percent.
It was an appalling display of false consciousness, Scargill concluded. He dispatched flying pickets from Yorkshire to close down their mines—for their own good. This, too, was an extraordinarily stupid decision. The miners of Nottinghamshire, in particular, were enraged. They took vengeance.
Mr. Fields: How does the Prime Minister feel, having attempted to display to the world a caring mother’s face and a preparedness to travel anywhere in the interests of her children, when she sees miners’ children and families seeking sustenance from soup kitchens and charities? Is she aware of the repugnance felt by millions of people at her attempts to starve miners back to work? Is she not ashamed of herself, and does she agree that she has disgraced her motherhood? Will she consider joining a closed monastic order as quickly as possible to repent of her sins and reflect on her crimes against humanity?171
Scargill called at the beginning of the strike for the “total mobilization of the trade and labor movement,” and Linda Sheridan is right: Had the call been heeded—had the miners hung together, and had the other unions come out in support of them—the strike would have been won. But the other unions demurred, and this was no accident. Thatcher made sure of it.
I say “Thatcher,” but this was not how it was presented. Officially, this was a dispute between the National Coal Board and the miners’ union; Thatcher maintained the pretense throughout that it was not her role to interfere. “The government,” she said, “will leave the National Coal Board to deal with the matter as it thinks fit.”172 Unofficially, Thatcher supervised every detail of the operations. She established and chaired “Misc. 101,” the cabinet committee that debated and determined every aspect of the government’s response to the strike. She met her key ministers daily to receive reports on recent developments and guide the government’s response. In her memoirs, she recalls that even when she went to Switzerland on vacation, “The telex chattered constantly . . . I sometimes thought at the end of the day that I would look out the window and see a couple of Yorkshire miners striding down the Swiss slopes.”173
When the railway workers threatened to strike, she offered them a 7 percent raise. In September, the union of mine supervisors—responsible for the maintenance and safety of the pits—threatened to join the pickets. The supervisors had until then been reluctant to strike on the reasonable grounds that mines, when shut, can quickly flood or otherwise become so damaged that they cannot safely be reopened. Showing more foresight than the men they supervised, the supervisors had thus far argued against the strike on the grounds that prolonged closure could physically destroy the mines and put them out of jobs permanently. This is in fact what did happen to quite a number of pits.
A supervisors’ strike would have meant the end for the government. “We were in danger of losing everything,” Thatcher recalls. Fortunately, this problem had been anticipated. The government had a mole inside the supervisors’ union. Thatcher knew the supervisors’ bottom line. She bought them off too.
“Scargill,” Nigel Lawson says to me, expressing what is distinctly a minority view, “wasn’t an imposing personality.” (Mind you, this is from one of the few men who was not intimidated by Thatcher, so it may simply be that Lawson is not particularly gifted at recognizing imposing personalities.) “I mean, his resistance to rational argument gave him a strength of a kind, but it was not he who was strong, it was the president of the National Union of Mi
neworkers who was strong, provided he could count on the loyalty of the mineworkers. And that was why it was very important to try and engineer a state of affairs in which he didn’t have the complete support of the mineworkers.” That is just what Thatcher did. When Lawson was energy secretary, and against the strenuous objections of environmentalists, he had rammed through proposals to sink two new mines in “a lovely stretch of countryside” in Leicestershire.174 The miners of the Midlands had been itching to get their hands on the coal seam there, which was underneath the Vale of Belvoir.
Lawson: Beaver.
CB: I’m sorry?
NL: It’s pronounced “Beaver.”
CB: Is it really?
NL: Yes. But English pronunciation is always a bit weird.
CB: Yes, that’s definitely weird.
Understandably, the Vale of Belvoir’s residents did not wish to see slag heaps rising from their backyards, but Lawson persuaded Thatcher that it was more important to shore up the support of the Midlands miners than to placate a handful of eager Belvoir environmentalists. The deal, he argued, would increase the likelihood that the miners who stood to benefit would defy Scargill: If push came to shove, Lawson reckoned, they would shovel, not push. And that is just what they did. During the strike, with the government’s very active support, those miners broke away from Scargill’s union and with miners from Nottinghamshire formed their own union—the Union of Democratic Mineworkers. They kept working, and thanks to their output, stockpiles remained high throughout the winter.
In August, two miners from Nottinghamshire took the National Union of Mineworkers to court for failing to hold a ballot. David Hart, one of Thatcher’s friends, paid their legal costs. He organized their legal campaign from his luxury suite at Claridge’s, where he met miners who wanted to return to work. When finally they did go back to work, he paid for them to be protected by former SAS bodyguards.
In September, the court ruled in the Nottinghamshire miners’ favor, finding that the union had indeed breached its own constitution. The union was fined £200,000.175 The court ordered the union’s assets sequestered. Other unions, observing this, came to the conclusion that strike action might be financially imprudent.
Thatcher determined that violent picketers would be met by an equally violent police force, but she feared that local authorities might be hesitant to do the needful. They would, after all, be arresting the citizens of their own hometowns, people with whom they had grown up. Appropriating Scargill’s tactic of deploying flying pickets, the government took the unprecedented step of coordinating the police at a national level and bringing in forces from distant counties to confront the picketers. Over the course of the strike, 11,291 miners were arrested; an untold number injured; eleven killed.
Thatcher also had the wisdom to go no further than this. When it was suggested to her that were this America, the National Guard would be called in with tanks, she immediately dismissed the idea as “political suicide.”176
The dockworkers were told they would be fired if they refused to handle coal.
The steelworkers, likewise.
The electricians’ union was so completely co-opted that its leaders supplied the government with intelligence about the miners.
The Special Branch infiltrated a spy—codenamed Silver Fox—right into Scargill’s inner circle.177 This is one of those assertions that is usually prefaced by “allegedly.” I’ll let you judge for yourself:FINAL SCRIPT OF “TRUE SPIES”
Archive of miners
Commentary
But it was in the epic showdown between Mrs. Thatcher and the miners that the Secret State was tested to the limit. Could the tide of so-called subversion be stopped?
Commentary
At its secret spy school at Fort Monkton, MI5 planned for the worst—virtually a civil war scenario. [PAUSE] It summoned selected Special Branch officers for advanced training in agent handling.
Curzon street pix
Commentary
To meet the political threat, the Secret State decided that covert means would have to be used to spy on its enemies. At the time, Stella Rimington was Assistant Director of the MI5 division that countered domestic subversion.
ASTON
STELLA RIMINGTON
Director General, MI5, 1992–96
Stella Rimington sync
S.R.: The leaders of the miners strike themselves had actually said that one of the purposes of the miners strike was to overthrow Mrs. Thatcher who was the elected Prime Minister of the country and the industrial department of the Communist Party was very involved in all sorts of different ways in the strike and that was of concern to us, that’s what we were interested in.
ASTON
ARTHUR SCARGILL
President, N.U.M. 1981–2002
Arthur Scargill sync
A.S.: . . . There were agents planted within the NUM both for a number of years prior to 1984 in readiness, almost like sleepers. I believe that all our offices were constantly bugged . . . I also know that I was under close personal supervision, so to speak, wherever I went and whoever I met.
Orgreave violence
Orgreave, June 1984
Set to BILLY BRAGG
Commentary
The strike became increasingly violent as flying pickets from all over the country converged on Orgreave coking plant. Scargill hoped to repeat Saltley Gate. The dramatic images of that violent day are etched on the memory of the senior officer in charge on the ground.
ASTON
TONY CLEMENT
Asst Chief Constable, S. Yorks Police, 1981–85
Tony Clement sync
There was violence, there was violence on both sides. You cannot expect that sort of situation to arise when police officers are not at times going to lose their temper or lose their cool or their discipline disappears. It would happen to me, I feel sure, if I was in that situation. There were what, 30 or 40 police officers a day being taken to hospital. We didn’t have that sort of situation in this country, they didn’t attack police officers like that, not at that time, not until our friend Mr. Scargill decided that that was the way to impose his will.
Commentary
Scargill was on the front line, marshalling his troops to confront the police who’d been drafted in from the Met and Forces nationwide.
Tony Clement sync
T.C.: He thought he was going to win. It was symbolic, it was a trial of strength. He said I’m going to close that. We said you’re not.
IX OF BARNSLEY
Exterior and interiors
Commentary
Although Stella Rimington steadfastly refuses to be drawn about monitoring Scargill’s Headquarters, we can reveal that the Secret State was running a highly placed agent, close to Scargill and the leadership of the NUM. We understand the agent’s codename was “Silver Fox.”
Tony Clement sync
T.C.: There was a fairly senior man within the NUM who was talking to Special Branch. He was at the level where he would sit round the table with the NUM leadership.
John Nesbit sync
We were in a position to get information, very, very specific and precise information that was correct every time, as to where the violent picketing would be taking place, particularly when the miners started to go back to work.
Commentary
“Silver Fox,” the Secret State’s spy in Scargill’s inner sanctum, gave the police the crucial advantage.
ACTUALITY Police control room
Arthur Scargill sync
INTERVIEWER: Did you know that there was an agent very close to you at your shoulder almost who was feeding information to his or her Special Branch handler about the movement of pickets during the ’84 strike?
Arthur Scargill: I would be amazed if there wasn’t.
INT: Doesn’t come as any surprise?
A.S.: Not at all.
INT: Do you know who this person was?
A.S.: I haven’t got a clue and I wouldn’t like to guess, because I k
now from experience that you can always make assumptions that are wrong, and so I rule nobody in, and I rule nobody out.178
“I rule nobody out.” Imagine the world of paranoia in which Scargill lived that year.
The strike wore on and on and on. The miners suffered desperate impoverishment. But the preparations put in place by the government, the output from the Nottinghamshire pits, and the intelligence “allegedly” provided by the Silver Fox ensured that the lights stayed on. The other unions stayed sweet. The power stations kept running. The steel furnaces kept burning. It was a mild winter. The government, it was now clear, could last until the spring. Springtime is not a striking miner’s friend.
Mr. Parry: Is the Prime Minister aware that this Christmas thousands of striking miners, workers sacked from Cammell Laird, single-parent families and people on lower incomes will not be able to buy their children food or toys or new clothes and will tell their children that Father Christmas is dead? Is she aware that, in addition to having blood on her hands, she will go down in history as the woman who killed Santa Claus?179
Scargill kept telling the miners the coal stocks would run out soon. Within weeks, he promised. Within weeks. When the press started repeating Scargill’s assurances, Walker arranged for journalists to be taken up in helicopters and flown over the power stations to see the size of the stocks.
Neil Kinnock remembers visiting a coal miners’ lodge in his constituency: “The boys were pretty frigid at the start, and they’re asking me questions, and you know, they’d never be vicious, but obviously, they’d swallowed all this crap about me not supportin’ the miners and all that stuff. But nevertheless they asked their questions, and eventually I said, ‘Now listen. I wasn’t going to do this, because I think you’ve had enough punishment. But my union, the Transport and General Workers Union, has just sent me last week’s figures for coal stocks in several power stations. And I’ll read ’em out to you.’ And I read them out. And the guys just sort of looked at me. And I said, ‘Now, I don’t know’—and there were only several hundred men there—‘I don’t know how many of you are surprised. I guess there are some of you who’ve been picketing the power stations who are not surprised, because you’ve looked through the fence. And you’ve talked to the drivers. And you’ve talked to the guys working in the power stations. And you know bloody well that when Scargill said there’s three weeks left—there’s three years left.’ And the guys said—yup.”
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