Marching to the Fault Line

by David Hencke

  Gregson saw the dangers ahead where perhaps Margaret Thatcher did not. His memo was blind copied to Sir Robert Armstrong, the Cabinet Secretary, and to an interesting shadowy figure, Brigadier Budd, a member of the Civil Contingencies Secretariat of the Cabinet Office who, in the 1990s, would become very keen on setting up a National Alert and Information System in government.

  Gregson’s memo showed that the government had no grounds for complacency. The figures were blunt. Current assessment of ‘endurance’ – the phrase used to describe how long the government could hold out – suggested months and weeks, not a year. Power stations could last for another six months, ‘assuming build up to maximum oil burn over four weeks’. Large-scale industry like steel that relied on coal had only six weeks, while the privately owned cement industry had fourteen to eighteen weeks’ supply for its furnaces. Domestic stocks ran to six weeks, which in the middle of March was probably not going to be such a problem.

  The memo went on to specify the scale of the problem facing power stations. To keep the power stations going for six months, the amount of oil needed was going to have to jump from 60,000 tonnes a week to 350,000 tonnes. No easy solution there either.

  Gregson warned: ‘It will not be possible to build up to maximum oil burn . . . in less than four weeks without running into logistical difficulties and precipitating a major disturbance in the oil market.’ Nor was the CEGB, despite being ordered by the government to draw up contingency plans, keen to order a sixfold increase in oil deliveries. ‘They will be . . . reluctant to enter into firm commitments until they are reasonably certain that they have to increase oil burn, and they will not wish to start extra oil burn (net additional cost of maximum oil burn is £20m a week) until a national strike seems inevitable.’ Thatcher was advised to steer the CEGB in that direction. She did. The CEGB came into line and was seen as a staunch government ally throughout.

  Gregson also described how the government was already acting to contain picketing. The Home Office and the Scottish Office were meeting with chief police officers in areas where picketing had begun and ‘mutual aid’ plans, involving sending police from other trouble spots, were being prepared.

  At that very early stage the government was already thinking about how to break the strike using the employment laws. According to the memo, the official public stance was that it was for the NCB and other parties to decide whether to bring a civil case against the NUM. Gregson’s assessment was that the government’s best hopes lay in the internal opposition within the NUM. So it might be best not to use the Employment Acts, since this might cause a backlash. He conceded that this might change, prophetically warning: ‘There is in any case the possibility of action by some businessman in the private sector and the government would have no way of preventing that even if it wished to do so.’

  Gregson advised Thatcher to seek MacGregor’s assessment of how the situation would develop, find out what further steps the NCB had in mind to influence the rank-and-file miners against strike action, and ask him how he thought the government could best help.

  The Thatcher–MacGregor meeting was not about the miners’ strike, but another issue altogether, the Channel Tunnel rail and road link. MacGregor – on the very day the NCB was in court obtaining an injunction against the NUM for illegal picketing – had requested the meeting with the PM to get her support for Euroroute, a combined road and rail link. The note of the meeting made by Andrew Turnbull later that day7 revealed that MacGregor opened the meeting with a strong defence of the feasibility of the project. Mindful of the power of the unions, MacGregor began by insisting the new Channel link must carry road traffic. He argued that ‘The rail-only tunnels would perpetuate and even enhance the monopoly powers of rail unions on both sides of the Channel.’

  MacGregor then said: ‘Prime Minister, are you are aware that we are facing a very serious situation in the pits?’8 But Thatcher knew much more than her NCB Chairman realized, because she had read Gregson’s brief. Like Gregson, MacGregor saw grounds for hope that the strike might be quite short. He told Peter Walker, the Energy Secretary, that the strike would be certain to be over by May when the deduction of benefits hit miners and their families came into play.9 But MacGregor went on: ‘You have got to do something, because you are dealing with a well-rehearsed and organized rebellion here . . . You know, from what Scargill has said, that he is out to topple the government. If it goes on, I fear he will succeed.’10

  The Prime Minister, who had already reached this conclusion for herself, immediately picked up the phone and called Leon Brittan, the Home Secretary. Her request was simple and she wanted an immediate response. She told him to get on to the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) and organize a national centre to co-ordinate action to stop the picketing. This was done that very day – and the result was to activate the National Reporting Centre (NRC), which was to play a huge role in containing the dispute and give enormous power to the Centre to direct operations.

  The NRC, based at New Scotland Yard, had come into existence during the 1972 miners’ strike, and was activated when police forces in more than one area judged they were likely to need reinforcements to deal with threats to public order. It maintained full details of police availability throughout England and Wales. It deployed Police Support Units consisting of twenty-three officers. By mid-March the NRC was making daily deployments of up to 8,000 officers, who often travelled hundreds of miles a day.

  Civil liberties groups were concerned that, with officers being deployed nationally, how they policed a particular situation could easily become subject to national political direction, and the police could become a bludgeon with which to beat the strikers – as indeed they did. There was close liaison between the NRC and the Home Secretary, which made it possible for the government to influence the way in which the strike was policed. The NRC also acted as a clearing-house for information on the strike. Journalist Nick Davies, in the second week of the strike, reported an officer passing on pickets’ coach registration numbers to a Midland force being mobilized by the NRC, and instructing that the coach be monitored until it reached the Nottinghamshire border, then turned back there.11 The scene was set for one of the most co-ordinated and brutal police operations in British history.

  The next day, 15 March, in a statement to Parliament about the unrest and picketing, the Home Secretary told MPs: ‘A major co-ordinated police response, involving police officers from throughout the country, has been deployed to ensure that any miner who wishes to work at any pit may do so.’ The police, he said, already had extensive powers under the common law. They could stop coaches, cars and people on foot who clearly intended to join a mass picket, if the picket was intimidating or if they thought there was a risk of violence, or even just because of the sheer numbers involved.

  Meanwhile the Energy Secretary, Peter Walker, was working along different lines. His job at that stage, as he saw it, was to make sure the miners rejected a strike in a ballot, for he was sure that the union would be true to its history and not maintain a strike without a ballot. He says he had already put together ‘the most generous package miners have ever been offered in terms of a pay deal, incredibly generous payments for moving collieries and voluntary redundancy at an early age; the total package was enormous and the Treasury weren’t terribly amused.’

  Now, as the strike began, Walker moved to make it even more attractive for the miners to leave the industry, by increasing redundancy payments to £1,000 for each year of service for all miners between twenty-one and fifty. He was terrified that the proposals would leak before the announcement. ‘I never circulated this around all ministers but just sent it to those on a need-to-know basis.’ He also feared that his department – which had strong links with the miners’ union – would leak his every move in advance. Walker did not trust his civil servants.

  One civil servant was alleged to be victimized because he was a known Labour supporter, and he was kept out of the loop to such an extent that h
is career was at risk. In an interview with the authors Walker could not recall the incident but said that there was a worry about leaks getting back to the unions. Only the intervention of Brian Hayes, then Permanent Secretary at the Department of Industry, saved the mandarin’s job; Hayes persuaded his boss, Norman Tebbit, of the injustice of the case. The civil servant was transferred to Tebbit’s department after assurances that he was not a far leftie or Scargillite. When he was summoned to meet his new boss, he was asked: ‘Do you know why you are here?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s because your Secretary of State is such a shit,’ Tebbit told him.

  On 15 March, two days after Gregson’s memo, and the day that Nottinghamshire miners’ leaders called their members out, one of the flying pickets, 24-year-old David Jones, was killed at Ollerton colliery in Nottinghamshire during violent scenes between the pickets and working miners. The cause of death was later confirmed at an inquest as a severe blow to the chest from a brick, and to this day no one knows for certain who threw it. The police had stopped the bus carrying David and other miners to picket in the south of Nottinghamshire, so they were forced to get off the bus and walk to picket at the nearest pit, Ollerton. His family are full of bitterness that the police should have stopped the coach on lawful business; if they had not, David Jones would be alive today. Stopping coaches like that was to become one of the most controversial police activities for the duration of the strike.

  David Jones’ death was dismissed in one sentence in the minutes of the Directors of the North Notts Mining Board of 15 March. ‘A flying picket died of natural causes during the fighting with other pickets, it is alleged he had been wounded by a brick’ is the only reference. Next to it is a call for more affidavits from managers to stop the picketing. There was little or no publicity.

  For striking miners, this added to their growing resentment and sense of alienation from society. They had watched newspapers manufacture public indignation against them over attacks on, and intimidation of, working miners, and they had listened to the government’s emphasis on the threats made by Scargill to law and order. In all this they saw no reference at all to David Jones.

  David’s father, Mark Jones, wrote a book about the son he had lost. It is an artless but heart-rending account of how his grief turned during the strike into the blackest pit of anger and bitterness. ‘If someone had to die why could they not take me instead of him? The years I have left I would gladly have given for him,’ he writes, and then: ‘Every trade unionist should look into his or her heart and stand up and be counted on the miners’ side in this struggle.’

  Mark Jones took comfort from Arthur Scargill coming back to the family home after the funeral. The family tried to cheer up David’s mother ‘by saying she had done one thing that Margaret Thatcher would never do, and that was to have Arthur Scargill on his knees, as he knelt down when she was sitting in a chair to offer her comfort and solace. This was a joke that went through the house for weeks after.’

  In Mark Jones’ account of learning of his son’s death, you can hear the powerless rage that was overtaking him and many people in mining communities. His loathing of the press is only exceeded by his loathing of the police. ‘They covered up what really happened. If it had been a policeman, they would have found out everything. They even found a woman who threw an egg at a lorry in Wales because she was a picket’s wife, but they couldn’t find out who threw a brick and killed my son . . . The police are a paramilitary force now.’12

  How could Mark Jones and his wife not have been bitter? They saw their fit, strong, enterprising and energetic son go out to picket one day, and come back in a coffin because some thug threw a brick at him, and the media and the authorities seemed not to give a damn. Almost no effort was made to find the brick-thrower. Yet a few months later, when a man was killed driving a strikebreaker to work, they watched the media whip itself up into a state of fury, saw a huge police manhunt and long prison sentences handed down. How could they fail to draw the lesson that whether your death mattered depended entirely on whether the establishment approved of your political views? How could they fail to go for solace to what seemed to them like the most extreme political group they could find?

  For after David’s death, Mr and Mrs Jones joined the Workers Revolutionary Party, the most extreme and centralist of the tiny, warring Trotskyist groups. It was the WRP that published Mark Jones’ book.

  Perhaps Arthur Scargill also influenced their choice, for he is thought to have become close to the WRP, whose paper Newsline was the only one he was prepared to help. The WRP did reasonably well out of the strike, making many new members – unlike the Communist Party, which gained only about seventy additional members in the whole twelve months. The Joneses offer a good illustration of why.

  Despite the NCB’s High Court injunction demanding the withdrawal of the Yorkshire flying pickets, it was very quickly clear that they were not going to be withdrawn. So the Board went back to court on 16 March and got leave to bring a contempt action against the Yorkshire miners. The Board wanted to have the union fined and a writ of sequestration, which would ensure that it could not use any of its money or assets. But when the court came to consider it on 19 March the hearing was adjourned indefinitely by Mr Justice Caulfield because miners were already returning to work in Nottinghamshire following an area ballot.

  The same day, striking miners suffered a significant defeat when area ballots in the Midlands, North East and North West coalfields revealed a heavy vote against a national strike. Arthur Scargill was forced to concede that he did not have full national support for a strike. ‘I am prepared to consider what my membership wants,’ he said; but he still opposed a ballot.

  On the other hand, the embattled Nottinghamshire leader, Henry Richardson, with half his members still at work, felt he had no alternative but to go for a national ballot. ‘If we don’t hold a ballot we are never going to get out of this mess,’ he said. But there was no ballot, and no let-up in the activities of the flying pickets.

  In the intervening twenty-five years, Scargill has not changed his view about the ballot. Today Ken Capstick still insists, as Scargill did at the time, that having a ballot only mattered to the media, the government and the NCB, and points out that the miners who were striking did not want a ballot. Here’s how Capstick sees the question. ‘If you have two armies opposing each other, would you ballot one of the armies because the other army was screaming at them to do it? No. We were out on strike. We had voted with our feet. The strike was on, it was effective. Why on earth would we? Tactically, the pits were stood, there was no coal coming out. Why on earth would we go and ballot the members in that circumstance?’ He does not believe a ballot would have brought Nottinghamshire into the strike.

  On 16 March, the day after the death of David Jones and the decision by Nottinghamshire leaders to call their members out, and a week and a day into the strike, the NUM finally got round to informing the TUC officially that there was a dispute. Scargill, who encouraged the NUM to remember the TUC’s betrayal of 1926 as well as the repeated betrayals of the Nottinghamshire miners, wanted to keep the TUC at arm’s length – though, as we shall see, this started to change when the outlook became grim. According to the TUC General Council’s laconic report to the 1984 Congress, ‘On March 16,1984, the NUM, in accordance with Rule 11 (a), informed the TUC that the union’s National Executive Committee had endorsed strike action in the Yorkshire and Scottish areas of the union. The NUM also said that it would endorse similar action taken by any of the union’s other areas. The NUM indicated that they were not requesting the intervention or the assistance of the TUC and said that should such be required, they would contact the TUC again.’

  Two days later, on 18 March, it began to become clear that the police were to be used as a weapon to break the strike. Three thousand police were sent into Nottinghamshire – it later rose to 8,000 – and pickets from Kent were turned back hundreds of miles from their destination, at th
e Dartford tunnel. The forty-two pits still open in the Midlands were dependent on a huge police presence.

  By the end of the month a Labour MP was accusing the police of questioning nineteen pickets on their political beliefs and what they thought of Arthur Scargill – which police continued to do throughout the strike. The police denied that they were acting outside the law, or that they were creating a police state. David Hall, President of the ACPO and controller of the NRC, insisted on 20 March: ‘There is nothing paramilitary about our operation.’

  This was not true. The build-up of an efficient police operation to co-ordinate action against aggressive picketing by strikers was one of the planks of Thatcher’s planning for the eventuality of a strike. The scale of the operation in Nottinghamshire can be seen in the meticulous records maintained by the North Notts Mining Board during this period.13 They kept a daily tally of the number of pickets and police in the area. After a week when they had been able to produce only 82,000 tonnes of coal and deliver only 46,000 tonnes by rail, collating details of picketing was essential – and it was even more essential to ensure a big police presence. The following week it became clear that the strategy to contain picketing by a mass police presence was working. On Monday, 19 March, 430 pickets came to the area, rising to 550 on Tuesday. But by Tuesday a mass picket of Thoresby colliery by 300 pickets was outnumbered by 800 police. On Wednesday, 435 pickets were facing 1,300 police. By Thursday, 1,350 pickets had come to North Nottinghamshire, but they were still outnumbered by 1,880 police officers. On Friday, picketing had fallen to 727 but there were 1,135 police. This pattern was to continue throughout the strike, the picketing miners very rarely getting the upper hand.