Marching to the Fault Line

by David Hencke

  Today, more than two decades on, Kinnock wishes he had gone further. He says: ‘I still curse myself for not taking the chance and saying, to a miners’ meeting – I would not have said it to anyone else – you will not get sympathetic action without a ballot, and coal stocks are piled up.’

  Three days later, on 12 April, at the NUM National Executive meeting, right-wing executive members decided to make a stand on the issue, convinced that running a national strike without a ballot was disastrous. They were supported by a prominent left-winger, the Nottinghamshire miners’ General Secretary, Henry Richardson. He was watching the men he led being divided acrimoniously from their fellow miners in Yorkshire, Kent and elsewhere. He told the executive prophetically: ‘The longer we go on the bigger the split. Our men who are striking are getting nothing . . . The majority of Notts miners are saying, “We shall not move without a ballot . . .” We are destroying trade unionism in Nottinghamshire.’

  Nottinghamshire’s Ray Chadburn described what he had seen in the Notts coalfields: ‘Miner is against miner and father against son, family against family.’ Striking miners had been picketing his home, shouting, ‘Come out here, you bastard.’

  Mick McGahey spoke against a ballot: ‘It is the media who have got “ballotitis”. It was war from the moment MacGregor was appointed.’ McGahey seemed, however, in his often unexpectedly subtle way, to open a door for a ballot when he proposed a special conference instead: ‘Nobody here is against ballots, in fact a special conference should consider a ballot vote. You can express an opinion there. We need a conference to unify us.’ The truth was that McGahey, the most respected Communist in Britain, had had to work hard to get the Communist Party to endorse Arthur Scargill’s ‘no ballot’ position, and the Party later regretted its endorsement. This lack of wholesale support for his tactics widened the growing gulf between Scargill and the party under whose tutelage he had first learned his politics. Within days of the end of the strike, the Party’s new industrial organizer Pete Carter wrote an analysis of Scargill’s tactics which concluded that mass picketing was a mistake and there ought to have been a ballot. ‘The Communist Party is ready to settle,’ remarked the NCB Deputy Chairman Jim Cowan two months later, and he had it pretty nearly right.2

  By then the Communist Party was hopelessly embroiled in the bitter internal battle that was to destroy it by 1991, and the miners’ strike was regularly annexed and colonised by both sides in the dispute: the Eurocommunists, who wanted to revise Communist ideology, and the class warriors, traditional Communists grouped around the Communist daily newspaper the Morning Star, who clung to the Marxist verities. Their effectiveness as campaigners for the miners was limited by the amount of time they spent suspiciously watching each other and arguing about what the ‘correct line’ might be.

  Today the remnants of the Communist Party like to foster the myth that their party was united behind the miners and Arthur Scargill, but it was not so, and Scargill knew it. The Communist Mick McGahey had trouble keeping the Party on board right from the start; they stayed because they admired McGahey, and because of the fear of being outflanked on the left by the hated ‘Trots’. The Eurocommunists believed – or seemed to believe – that mass picketing was a mistake. The class warriors were grumbling almost from the beginning that the movement had been dragged into the strike by a man they considered a maverick, who they thought had left the Party because of a terminal lack of discipline and strategic sense.

  So, on the ground, the left sometimes looked at its most unedifying, with Communists manoeuvring against both Trotskyists and other Communists. In June there was an extraordinary row in Birmingham over the trivial matter of whether to invite Mick McGahey or Arthur Scargill to address a rally to celebrate Scargill’s Saltley Gate triumph. At the insistence of the Communists, McGahey was invited, though they pointed out that their man was terribly tired since – they said – he was doing the job of President in addition to his own because Scargill was ‘swanning it on picket lines’. Anyway, they said, Scargill’s diary was booked every Saturday until the autumn. This, it turned out, wasn’t true, and once the non-Communist left contacted Scargill, he agreed to come. It is almost impossible to convey to anyone who does not know the state of the far left in Britain in the 1980s how bitter and unpleasant this trivial row became, with both sides accusing each other of Stalinism.

  ‘They [the Communists] were trying to isolate Scargill, saying there’s got to be reorganization at the top,’ one left-wing Birmingham activist claimed, adding that the Eurocommunists in the NUM ‘tried to isolate Scargill three months into the strike. They wanted to fight the strike on the basis of negotiation and cups of tea and pieces of cake.’3

  Certainly many Communists were critical, but the official Party leadership was struggling to hold the ‘line’ of total support for Scargill’s leadership. A Middlesex Communist, David Pavett wrote a paper for his district committee which criticised the policy, and the Communist Party tried to put him down in the traditional manner. The West Middlesex District of the Communist Party set up disciplinary proceedings. He found great hostility among his comrades, for they, he says, ‘only wanted to talk about total support for the miners and did not want to have any discussion of difficulties.’ The District Committee, ‘after huffing and puffing about suspension from the Party and making various dark threats about “grave consequences”, eventually passed a “motion of censure” against myself and another Party member.’4 But the District Committee was trying to stop a deluge. The Communist Party was terminally split on every possible issue, including the strike. Especially in South Wales, people saw – as one former NUM lodge secretary put it to us – the Communist Party visibly breaking with Scargill during the first three months of the strike.

  The Socialist Workers Party, probably the most significant of the groups to the left of the Communist Party, also got itself into a terrible ideological tangle. Here the issue was about putting together food parcels for miners who needed them. Until Orgreave, SWP leaders were describing food collections derisively as charity work that kept people away from the important work of joining the picket lines.5

  There was at least a significant section of Mick McGahey’s party that thought Scargill’s policy of refusing to hold a ballot was a mistake. It seems likely that McGahey shared this view, but kept his own counsel because he was sure a split between himself and Scargill would damage the union and the strike even more. His proposal that the question of a ballot should go to the conference did not satisfy the right-wingers on the executive. They knew that such a conference would be dominated by left-wing areas, and the ballot proposal would stand no chance. So they demanded an immediate ballot, in the knowledge that several executive members had been mandated to vote in favour of having one. They thought they had enough votes to swing it. They probably did, and Scargill probably knew it, because he scuppered the ballot with a procedural manoeuvre.

  Scargill made a presidential ruling from the chair that the ballot proposal could not be put: it could only be put at the special delegate conference which he proposed should be called on 19 April. His ruling was upheld by 13 votes to 8.6 Several executive members who had been mandated to vote for a ballot but wanted to vote against one were able to vote as they wished without breaking their mandate, because they were simply able to support the Chairman’s ruling.7

  There was never any realistic chance that the conference would insist on a ballot against the President’s opposition, and it did not. It voted to spread the strike. Now the NUM leadership’s task was to convince members that they were going to win – which at that stage, despite the problems with Nottinghamshire and ballots, looked perfectly likely. Morale was high. If commitment and energy and confidence were enough to win, the miners had it sewn up.

  The NUM paper The Miner tried hard from the first to make coal stocks into a heartening story for the striking miners. THE COAL BOARD’S GREAT STOCKS BUBBLE HAS BURST was its lead headline at the start of April. The story beg
an: ‘Repeated claims that there is no immediate threat to supplies have proven untrue.’ But they had not been proved untrue. The claims were still to be tested, and Neil Kinnock for one felt fairly sure that the Board had sufficient stocks to sit out a longer strike than the miners could stage.

  He tried to tell Scargill so in that 9 April telephone conversation: ‘The other thing I’m interested in is this stocks position. Obviously the CEGB are increasing their oil – that doesn’t cause them any problems, does it? And what time would it cost them? It still means, as you say, seven or eight weeks. I mean, what is the strategy over that period? Because you know they are in no trouble, MacGregor or the government, over such a period because that takes us then into May, June, the end of June. . .’8

  The same issue of The Miner ran a stop press item: ‘In a magnificent display of solidarity with the country’s miners, six key unions are to black the transport of all coal.’9 The National Union of Railwaymen had voted not to move coal. ‘All coal is black,’ read one deadpan miner’s placard.

  Nonetheless, some coal was still moving, and the steelworkers’ union ISTC refused to follow the NUR’s example. ISTC leader Bill Sirs found himself under furious attack from Mick McGahey at the TUC General Council meeting on 22 May for failing to support the miners. The miners had supported the steelworkers when they were in dispute, McGahey told Sirs.10

  John Lyons, leader of the Engineers and Managers Association, received a letter from Peter Heathfield telling him that miners would picket power stations where Lyons’s members worked, and that they should be deemed to be picketing even if they were not there. Lyons did not, even for an instant, consider instructing his members along these lines.11

  Mick McGahey once told one of the authors: ‘Other union leaders who wanted to help us had to face the question from their members: why should we sacrifice our jobs when 20 per cent of the miners are producing coal?’ He added: ‘When you’re in a class battle with the full offensive of the enemy against you and the bullets flying around, it’s a luxury to sit back and analyse.’ But it was the reason why the ban on coal movements imposed by the transport unions was not very effective, and many transport workers continued to move coal out of the areas where it was still being mined.

  The language used by other union leaders seemed to betray the sense of foreboding they felt for the whole movement. Moss Evans, General Secretary of the TGWU, Britain’s biggest union, called for financial support so that the miners should not be ‘starved into submission’.12 The powerful print union SOGAT, like many others, gave money – £15,000 to start with – after hearing from its General Secretary Bill Keys that, while one might dispute the miners’ tactics, other unions could not stand by and watch them being defeated.

  Bill Keys also used his extensive media contacts, and his union’s considerable muscle in the newspaper industry, to try to do something about the daily condemnation of the miners that appeared in the press. He got Arthur Scargill a right of reply to one particularly vitriolic piece in the Daily Express (and was disappointed that the miners’ leader, he felt, used it to pay off old scores instead of setting out his case). He was a vital figure in a secret group of left-wing union leaders who met regularly to decide how best they could help the miners. He was their liaison with the miners – and, significantly, they decided he should work through McGahey, not Scargill.

  At his own union’s conference, Keys took the opportunity of meeting two South Wales miners’ leaders, Terry Thomas and Emlyn Jenkins, who had appealed for support and understanding, and of pressing the case for a ballot. ‘They took the attitude, well, how can you invite a scab in Notts to partake in a ballot. To which my reply was, well, you could have had the ballot before these people became scabs. They remained loyal, but I could not help but get the impression that they agreed with me.’13 This was the beginning of a secret mission, never before revealed, which almost secured the miners something that could have been dressed up to look like a partial victory.

  The NUM Nottinghamshire leaders called on their members to join in the action and not cross picket lines set up in the county by Yorkshire miners, a call the members rejected in a ballot at the start of April. The pickets came anyway. If those picket lines could be broken, MacGregor was confident that enough Nottinghamshire miners would allow themselves to be escorted through by the police. There were even reports of teams of men being paid to go into Nottinghamshire and persuade miners to go back to work. Their paymaster was David Hart, a wealthy Old Etonian (he had inherited a fortune from his father) of very right-wing views, who was keen to break the strike to teach the unions a lesson. He was close to MacGregor and had once, in The Times, welcomed high unemployment as a stage in emancipating the working class from wage slavery. During the strike he co-ordinated, financed and encouraged the groups who were breaking it. He was sure the NUM must be defeated at all costs. MacGregor, apparently with affection, called him ‘Stalin’.14 The Times industrial correspondent Paul Routledge complained bitterly to his editor, William Rees-Mogg, that Hart should not be allowed to comment in the newspaper in the guise of an independent freelance journalist, when in reality he was funding the return-to-work campaign.

  Hart was described in the press as an adviser to Thatcher over the strike. Andrew (now Lord) Turnbull, who was Thatcher’s private secretary at the time, believes his connections to Thatcher were overblown. He recalls considerable anger in Downing Street over the suggestion that Hart was an adviser to Thatcher. He recalled few occasions when Hart managed to see her. When he did, he was shabbily dressed in jeans and a sweater, or sometimes a not too well-fitting check jacket. Hart’s main interest in seeing her was to rubbish Walker, whom he perceived as a wet only too ready to get a settlement. But any effort he might make to influence the Prime Minister would be quickly overturned by Walker’s more regular appearances at Downing Street, sharing the day’s developments in the strike over a late-night glass of whisky with the PM. David Hunt, later the coal minister, and Ivor Manley, Walker’s Deputy Secretary, both said Walker made a point of keeping Thatcher regularly briefed, so he could control events and keep his lines into Number Ten open. Turnbull observed: ‘Peter Walker came out of this extremely well.’

  Tim (now Lord) Bell describes Hart as an eccentric figure who later, like MacGregor, became emotionally attached to the working miners in Nottinghamshire. According to Bell, Hart and MacGregor built up quite a rapport with the UDM’s working miners and drank with them in pubs. Bell said: ‘David Hart had a habit of taking snuff and used to go down to the local pub and share his snuff with the miners.’

  To complement Hart’s efforts, MacGregor needed strong-arm tactics to make the pickets ineffective. Riot police were used from the start. The National and Local Government Officers Association (NALGO, now called Unison) condemned this at the start of April in curiously ambiguous language: ‘Whatever the rights and wrongs of mass picketing, it is clearly a disturbing and dangerous development for Continental-style riot police to be unleashed on trade unionists in an industrial dispute.’15 On 9 April, 100 pickets were arrested outside mines in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, and many people were injured, both miners and police. By 12 April more than 1,000 miners had been arrested on picket lines.

  After the first couple of weeks, all over the country, the police attitude towards strikers was cranked up. Strikers suddenly found themselves being treated as enemies of the state, and the friendly bobby turned into a ferocious figure with a horse and a lethal truncheon.

  The tiny Kent mining workforce was among the first to notice the difference. They had been allocated the ports to picket, and told to try to persuade dockers not to unload foreign coal. A few Kent miners picketed the Wivenhoe port in Essex peacefully for several days; the manager even gave them a brazier beside which to warm themselves. But on 10 April, two days before the special miners’ conference that rejected a ballot, everything changed suddenly. A convoy of police vans and nearly 100 police arrived and told the men they had no right to p
icket. ‘They came across to us and said we were not pickets, we were demonstrators. They said it was secondary picketing – we were breaking the law and we shouldn’t even be in the county.’ And from then on, as elsewhere in the country, the picket line was hobbled by the police presence. Roadblocks were set up, and pickets routinely beaten up by police. The manager took back his brazier.

  The confrontations at Wivenhoe followed a pattern that became sadly common throughout the country. Every picket you speak to has bitter stories about the police. ‘They generally try to have digs at you on the line by saying, “I hope the strike goes on longer as I’m on £500 a week.” They ask us how we spend our £3 a day picketing money – things like that. They make remarks about getting three holidays a year and living off the backs of the miners . . . They come out with comments about your wife or girlfriend you’ve left behind at home. They say: “Who’s giving it one at home, like.”’16

  The National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL) reported disturbing allegations about how miners and their wives were treated when arrested. Police were questioning them about their political views, including such matters as their views about Arthur Scargill and how they voted at the last general election. Since the strike, far too many such allegations have emerged for them all to be mistaken or mischievous. It happened, quite often.

  Another routine practice identified by the NCCL was for officers to conceal their numbers by covering up their shoulders, thus making it impossible for pickets to lodge complaints against any individual officer.

  Police determination to keep Nottinghamshire working is well illustrated by Anne Scargill’s experiences. Anne, wife of Arthur and the inspiration behind the organization which became nationally known as Women Against Pit Closures, was a regular and encouraging presence on picket lines. In April she led a group of women to picket peacefully in Nottinghamshire, and they met with some Nottinghamshire women in a supermarket car park.