Marching to the Fault Line

by David Hencke

  When MacGregor’s appointment was announced the next year, it caused waves of anger not only in the NUM but among fellow directors in the NCB, and even within the least militant union of the lot, the British Association of Colliery Management. The BACM were to continue sniping and complaining privately about the way the NCB was run, as minutes of a meeting between them and the Board in November 1983 (released under the Freedom of Information Act) show. They were also privately appalled at the appointment of MacGregor and his way of doing business without always informing them, which was described at one stage as the Americanization of the Board.

  Thatcher’s landslide election victory on 9 June 1983 gave her fresh impetus for another big reshuffle. She promoted Nigel Lawson to Chancellor and Leon Brittan to Home Secretary. Cecil Parkinson became Trade and Industry Secretary. Tebbit stayed as Employment Secretary and Peter Walker was promoted to Energy Secretary. This was the Cabinet that was to confront the miners’ strike, except for one face, which was to disappear. A crisis blew up at the Tory Party conference the following September when Cecil Parkinson had to admit he had fathered a child with his secretary, Sarah Keays. The furore that followed forced him to leave the government and led to Tebbit taking over his Trade and Industry job, with Tom King becoming Employment Secretary.

  The big surprise in all this was the appointment and promotion of Walker to the Energy brief. He was known to be a wet, yet he now had the job of supervising huge nationalized industries which Tebbit was to describe later that year as ‘a drain on the taxpayer’. But Thatcher knew what she was doing. Walker was to prove the most cool-headed of the lot when the dispute began. He knew that if he was to prove to Thatcher that he could be trusted he would have to take the initiative and show he was in control. From the outset he steeped himself in the detail of the industry and made sure he met the main players, including Scargill and MacGregor. He was going to be a friend of neither the coal chairman nor the miners’ leader. In fact, according to Manley, neither was a clubbable sort: Scargill stood back from participating with the other energy unions when they met the new Secretary of State, while MacGregor wanted little to do with other nationalized industry bosses and as little to do with Walker as possible. MacGregor was furious at Walker’s appointment. He felt he had been let down and the two men never hit it off.

  MacGregor’s natural allies were Tebbit and Lawson, as well as the later public relations guru and Thatcherite Tim Bell and the wealthy Tory right-wing eccentric David Hart. He was not naturally likely to warm to Peter Walker and successive coal ministers Giles Shaw and David Hunt. So if Walker was going to be successful he had to woo Thatcher and neutralize Tebbit, who hated him, and make sure he was in charge. With help from Ivor Manley he was able to do it, by being on top of the job and with the aid of a very efficient Whitehall machine. But he also did it by getting rid of the mantle of being a wet. He succeeded in implementing a redundancy scheme for miners that was the most generous of its time, and he looked for new markets and uses for British coal, which probably put him in the wet tradition. But he was ruthless and as tough as nails in fighting the dispute that was to come, and that is why he gained the increasing confidence of Thatcher as the drama enfolded.

  Meanwhile Arthur Scargill was working his way to the top of the NUM. While the monetarists were grouping around Peter Thorneycroft, Enoch Powell and Nigel Birch in the late 1950s, aiming to shift the balance in the Conservative Party, the Communist Party began working quietly in Yorkshire to shift the balance of power in the NUM. But in the 1960s and the 1970s, the Communist Party found itself outflanked on the left, which was taken over by a new generation.

  The unions had grown used to power. In the 1970s, Jack Jones and Hugh Scanlon, leaders of the two biggest unions, were considered to be two of the most powerful people in Britain, and the NUM President Joe Gormley was a considerable figure too. But Jones and Scanlon were experienced political animals who knew the difference between appearance and reality, and the limitations of their power. Their successors, as they retired at the end of the 1970s, were not always so wise.

  It often seemed to trade union activists that the question was not how they should keep and consolidate the unions’ power, but what use they should make of it. Power in the unions was on its way down through the ranks, away from general secretaries and towards shop stewards. The unions had power and influence they had never before enjoyed. But they were not as powerful as their activists, or their enemies, thought they were. The 1977 Grunwick strike portrayed the sad reality: that when unions had to protect workers against really bad employers, as often as not they failed. The long-running dispute broke out after the North London film processing firm sacked workers for joining a union. Mass pickets, often hundreds of them, descended on the firm’s premises each morning to try to stop workers from being bussed in, leading to clashes with police. Arthur Scargill, then the Yorkshire NUM President, already a household name and one of the two or three best-known trade unionists in the country, led coach-loads of Yorkshire miners to join the pickets. He was arrested. He saw it as a triumph. But the strike was lost. The workers stayed sacked.

  Nonetheless, Grunwick and Scargill’s arrest there had a huge place in the folklore of the left. A new, sharp-toothed left wing had grown up – young men and women who were born in the late 1940s and early 1950s and saw their politics through the distorting mirror of 1968. For them, New Jerusalem was just around the corner, its arrival impeded only by cautious, reactionary, elderly trade union leaders, with their fatal addiction to compromise. For them, the Labour Party had failed and betrayed them, and so had the Communist Party – for Communist union leaders like NUM Vice-President Mick McGahey seemed not to be manning any barricades. In many unions there was a ‘rank and file’ organization, which claimed to be the voice of the ordinary member and was actually the voice of the Socialist Workers Party.

  As the new left mobilized to take control, the old guard mobilized against them. Elections to top union posts were hard-fought and divisive. The best-known newspaper columnist of the time, Bernard Levin, frequently used his column in The Times to campaign for his candidates for fairly minor posts in his union, the National Union of Journalists, and no one thought this was disproportionate. Power struggles in smoke-filled rooms seemed to matter dreadfully. Few stopped to ask whether, when the smoke cleared, the power might be seen to have gone with it.

  Of course, in the end far less separated the two sides in the trade union movement than they both imagined. Both sides thought the collective voice of employees, which is what unions really are, was a key protection against exploitation and ought to be strengthened; and, thinking this, weakened it to destruction. For it seemed to both sides that the real battles, and the real victories, were to be had inside the unions. Gaining control of the organization and bending it to their will was the first objective, and often the only one. The internal victory was all that mattered; the outside world could take care of itself.

  The new left needed heroes who would defeat not the Conservative government but the compromisers within – not the Thatchers but the Joe Gormleys. The heroes had to be young, and attractive, and fluent, and charismatic, and preferably romantic, but most of all they had to be impossible to outflank on the left. There had to be no issue on which someone else could take a view that was identifiably more radical than theirs. Those were the days of what Neil Kinnock called impossibilism. Militants put forward demands they knew were unachievable, so that they could condemn ‘union bureaucrats’ for failing to achieve them. ‘I’ve got you double the wages, and you only work Fridays,’ a triumphant union official is said to have reported, and the man selling Socialist Worker called out: ‘What, every bloody Friday?’

  Scargill fitted the bill perfectly. Briefly a Communist when young, he had been trained, and his career nurtured, by Bert Ramelson, first Yorkshire district secretary and then industrial organizer for the Communist Party and, for a time in the 1970s, a surprisingly significant figure with great influe
nce in the unions and, through them, in the Labour Party. Scargill’s other mentor was Frank Watters, the Party’s area secretary in the South Yorkshire coalfield. But Ramelson and Watters were orthodox communists, willing to be bound by Party discipline, and Scargill was not, so he could outflank the Communist Party on the left, a key requirement for a left-wing hero in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

  Relatively young – he was forty-four when he became NUM President – Scargill was a riveting platform presence, he did not seem to know the meaning of compromise, he always wanted to go one step further than anyone else thought wise, he had absolute certainty, and at meetings of the left caucus on the miners’ executive ‘he always seemed to want to appear further left than anyone else,’ according to South Wales executive member Terry Thomas.6

  Vice-President Mick McGahey was the leader of the left on the NUM National Executive, and by end of the 1970s he and Scargill were barely on speaking terms, for they had so long been rivals for the left nomination for President when Joe Gormley retired. McGahey saw Scargill as the sort of ultra-left adventurer that disciplined Communists rather despise.

  Scargill was effectively running for the top job from 1977, when he was arrested at Grunwick, and founded the Yorkshire Miner as a rival to the Union’s national paper The Miner. His first editor was a young left-wing local journalist, Maurice Jones. One of Jones’s first outings with his new boss was to the Grunwick picket line, where he too was arrested. Apparently thinking the police were making veiled threats to his daughter, Jones dramatically rushed to East Germany and asked for political asylum. Scargill sent a colleague to East Germany to calm his editor down and bring him home.

  Scargill took the traditional trade union leader’s view that real power rested in the unions, not with politicians. In the late 1970s, playwright John Mortimer interviewed him. Scargill, reported Mortimer, was quite offended to be asked if he would like to be in Parliament. ‘I was asking King Arthur if he’d care for a post as a corporal. He has been offered four Labour seats, but why should he forsake the reality of union rule for the pallid pretensions of Westminster?’

  Joe Gormley was determined that the presidency would remain in right-wing hands after he went, so much so that he deliberately delayed his retirement until Mick McGahey was too old under the union’s rules to stand for the job. The tactic might have seemed clever at the time, but Gormley miscalculated badly. He thought the right could beat Scargill. He was wrong. In November 1981 Arthur Scargill was elected President of the NUM with over 70 per cent of the vote. The man who had led the militants in the defeat of Heath was now leading the miners. The message to the government could not be clearer. It is no wonder that at the same time confidential memos were sent out by the NCB to its regions telling them to start stockpiling coal, implementing the first stage of the MISC57 plan.

  Scargill was a new sort of union leader. There was a razzmatazz about him that was entirely different to the grey, elderly men in grey suits muttering ‘I ’ave to consult my executive committee’ who mostly led the unions. He was new, exciting, he had carefully coiffured hair and neat suits and apparently an ocean of self-confidence. He sat for a portrait of himself, and hung it in his office. He said he supported extra-parliamentary action to defeat Norman Tebbit’s labour law reforms; he attacked Labour leader Michael Foot for not being left-wing enough; he called the split in the Labour ranks which led to Roy Jenkins and the others leaving to form the Social Democratic Party ‘the best thing that has happened to the Labour Party. It has provided a siphon to take out of the party those elements that were poisoning it, because of their non-belief in socialism.’ He announced that all the elements that caused Heath’s downfall were now present.

  His first strike call, over pay, was rejected in a ballot of the membership after Joe Gormley argued against it in an article in the Daily Express. Scargill accused Gormley of ‘an act of betrayal without parallel in the history of the NUM’ and ‘collaborationist use of the capitalist press’ and tried unsuccessfully to persuade the executive to condemn Gormley. He also made himself deeply unpopular with the union’s staff, demanding a level of day-to-day control that the relaxed Gormley had never wanted, taking away the small Christmas bonus they had received since 1956, demanding that the names of all incoming telephone callers were recorded on a central log, and eventually moving the union’s headquarters from its fine London building to Sheffield, to bring it closer to the coalfields, or so the President claimed. ‘London is a place where you can very easily get sucked into the system and I have no intention of allowing that to happen,’ he said.7 Sheffield, as it happens, is close to the village of Worsborough, just outside Barnsley, where Scargill has lived all his life. Only a tiny handful of the original staff went to Sheffield, and the rest were made redundant.

  The Labour Party was having the same battles as the trade unions – unsurprisingly, because at that time the link between the two was, as it had always been, very close, and they saw themselves as the two branches of what was then collectively called the labour movement. Union leaders were still the key power brokers in Labour Party politics. Scargill was a crucial figure in the Labour Party’s early 1980s internal warfare, fighting alongside Tony Benn for the soul of the Party, helping to make Michael Foot leader rather than Dennis Healey, then in 1981 throwing himself into the campaign to get Tony Benn rather than Healey elected to the meaningless post of deputy leader. At the Scottish Miners Gala Scargill cranked up the rhetoric to the point where Labour’s division took on the status of a holy war. Anyone who criticized Benn was, he said, ‘sabotaging not only the candidature of Tony Benn but the principles of socialism which are basic to our movement.’

  Foot had hoped for a little respite from perpetual warfare, and a respite in 1981 meant electing Healey unopposed. But the spirit of the times was against him, and the new machinery for electing Labour leaders and deputy leaders, which placed the unions centre stage, cranked into motion. The six-month campaign hinged on how the big unions were going to vote, and by the end of it the Party was looking like exactly what Margaret Thatcher said it was – the plaything of the unions. It was, though few of the union leaders seemed to see it at the time, the worst possible introduction to what would be, in 1984–5, a life or death struggle for the unions.

  Labour went down by a landslide in the 1983 general election, Foot resigned and, even before the contest for the succession had properly begun, two Welsh trade union leaders, whose unions were affiliated to the Labour Party, announced they were supporting Neil Kinnock, which effectively ensured that Kinnock got the job. The two leaders were the TGWU’s Moss Evans and Clive Jenkins of the white-collar union ASTMS; they were collectively known as the Taffia. Neither of them saw any reason to hide the enormous power they wielded, and both of them rather enjoyed the fact that they had effectively chosen the next Labour leader and probably the next Prime Minister. A year later, as the miners took on the government, the unions started to realize what harm their hubris might do to them.

  Of course the new NUM President’s core business was not fighting for Tony Benn but fighting pit closures. In November 1983 the union ordered an overtime ban. This was successful in cutting production by between 25 and 30 per cent over the next few months and became a worry for NCB officials who were secretly committed to creating a stockpile of coal. The worry is shown by the meticulous weekly figures kept by the NCB on coal production. But, unfortunately for the union, it was too late to dent significantly the stockpile that been built up since November 1981.

  Under MacGregor the NCB refused to agree a pay deal unless the miners agreed to job losses and pit closures. The NUM refused to agree and there was still a dispute when the miners began their strike in 1984.

  Meanwhile a dispute between one of the print unions, the National Graphical Association, and a local newspaper proprietor spiralled out of control. The NGA refused to obey Norman Tebbit’s new union laws about mass picketing and was first fined £675,000, then had the whole of its £11m asse
ts sequestrated – confiscated by the state. Scargill watched, fulminated against the TUC for its refusal to support the NGA and defy the law, and started secretly to make preparations for the day when this would happen to the NUM.

  There was one last key change to be made. NUM General Secretary Lawrence Daly was persuaded to take early retirement, and Scargill’s nominee Peter Heathfield, secretary of the Derbyshire miners, was elected in his place. Heathfield had a reputation for integrity and quiet, solid competence, and assured everyone that he was ready to stand up to Scargill. Within two years all this was to be tested to destruction.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE GREAT STRIKE

  6 MARCH TO 31 MARCH, 1984

  The great strike for jobs started by accident. Of course no one admitted it at the time. Both sides had gone far too far to admit that they didn’t really mean it. Only years later did it emerge that when, on 1 March 1985, George Hayes, the South Yorkshire Coal Board director, told Yorkshire union leaders that Cortonwood would close in five weeks’ time, on 6 April 1984, he had misunderstood his instructions and jumped the gun.

  The Cortonwood announcement derailed government plans, and overshadowed the national challenge the NCB intended to throw down. It was not until 6 March, six days after Hayes’ announcement, that NCB Chairman Ian MacGregor told the unions nationally of plans to cut four million tonnes of capacity and make 20,000 men redundant. He expected this to lead to a strike ballot, which he hoped the NUM executive would lose, and he thought that would be an end to resistance. He did not realize that it was too late for such tactical considerations. The strike, bottled up for months, was already under way.

  And it was all a mistake. The NCB never intended to include Cortonwood in the list of pits to be closed at that time. An internal report says: ‘In procedural terms the Area Director was wrong to announce closure at a General Review Meeting . . . Closure has not yet been confirmed by the Board . . .’ No proper closure procedure had begun at the very pit which started the strike; it had all been wrongly handled from the beginning. It was a little like the famous spoof headline: ‘Archduke Ferdinand alive – First World War fought by mistake.’ Only this time it was no spoof.