Marching to the Fault Line

by David Hencke

  At the pithead, the twenty women saw only about eight police. ‘They didn’t know how to handle women, did they? We weren’t violent but we gave them [the working miners] some stick.’ They had some success: two of the men turned back, first for some reason throwing their sandwiches to the women, who ate them. A few others abused them, but it never looked like getting ugly: ‘We didn’t swear or anything but we did give them some back. It was a lively picket but nobody had overstepped the mark. It was really light-hearted.’ The small group of policemen seemed to join in the spirit of the occasion.

  But then police reinforcements arrived, and the women knew there was going to be trouble, because as they got out of the bus they adjusted their chinstraps. Suddenly the atmosphere was very different. Everyone went quiet. There was a sense of menace.

  Quite how it started, Anne Scargill does not know, but suddenly they grabbed one of the women and bundled her into a police van. Her friend tried to get her from the police, and they took her too. Another woman made a comment about it, and into the van she went. Then Anne, who still had the residual respect for the police that she had learned as a child, approached the inspector quietly and said: ‘Excuse me, can you tell me why you’ve arrested her when she’s done nothing wrong?’ He said: ‘Take her as well.’

  The van drove off with the four women in the back and a policeman in the front. Anne, who found the silence unnerving, asked the young policeman with them where he came from. He was from Somerset, and a very long way from home. One of the women – rather unhelpfully, Anne thought – said she hoped every man in Somerset was making free with his wife.

  They got to the police station, the van was unlocked, and Anne got down the steps and started to run – she needed the toilet. But the policeman must have thought she was trying to escape, because he grabbed her hair.

  They were taken to the desk sergeant, who asked her name. She said: ‘You tell me what I’ve done wrong and I’ll tell you what I’m called.’ He asked again. She tried to lighten the atmosphere. ‘Why, are going to take me on a date?’ she said. ‘You look quite attractive when you smile.’ The sergeant does not appear to have been a man with a lively sense of humour.

  They were put in a dog compound. ‘It was raining and it was full of dog muck. We were in there for about an hour and Lynn wanted to go to the toilet and they wouldn’t come so I started punching the door and shouting.’ A policewoman took her to a room with a bath. She too asked Anne’s name, and Anne said she would give it as soon as she had been told what she had done wrong. The policewoman told her to get undressed.

  ‘I said, “What for, I’m not mucky, I got bathed this morning.” She said, “Just get undressed.” She said, “I’m looking for offensive weapons and drugs.” I said, “I’m old enough to be your mother.” She said, “I’m only doing my job.” I said, “Yeah, that’s what they said in Nazi Germany when they were taking the Jews to be slaughtered, only doing their job.”’

  Off came her clothes, she turned round for the policewoman’s inspection, and then she put her clothes back on. But they kept her shoes. ‘I said, “I’m not walking on this scruffy floor without shoes, even if I have to stop here all day.” I said, “I don’t walk round at home without shoes and it’s a lot cleaner than it is here.”’ So they took out the shoelaces and gave her back her shoes.

  The four women were given a filthy cell and left there for hours, until Anne was separated from the others and shown to a room where sat a man in a suit who offered her a cup of tea and asked her name. Anne gave the same reply she had always given: tell me what I’ve done wrong and I’ll tell you what they call me. He said they could not do that yet because they did not know what they were going to charge her with.

  He wanted to know which newspaper she read. She asked him which he read, and he said, the Daily Mail. ‘Now I know why you’re so biased,’ said Anne, still trying to keep it light-hearted. He told her that she could have one phone call, so she called her office at the Co-op and said: ‘I can’t come into work today, Nottinghamshire Police won’t let me.’ And her colleague said: ‘I know, it’s all over the telly.’ The man in the suit said: ‘Are you Arthur Scargill’s wife?’ Anne Scargill persisted: ‘Tell me what I’ve done wrong and I’ll tell you who I am.’

  The man was apparently fending off dozens of reporters, all saying he had Arthur Scargill’s wife in his cells. Anne said: ‘I’m not being funny, but I’m getting tired of this and if you don’t charge me I’m not saying anything.’ They took her away and put her in a cell by herself.

  Anne Scargill was bound over until October and was not allowed to go picketing again in Nottingham until then. In October the magistrate stopped the case and pronounced the four women not guilty. There was a press pack outside, and she refused to leave to face them. The police just wanted to be rid of her, but she told them they would have to throw her out. ‘You’ve got me into this situation for nothing, you can help me out.’ With the worst possible grace, they agreed to show her a back exit, where a friend could pick her up.

  Here is the lesson that Anne Scargill – an ordinary working-class Yorkshirewoman, even if she was married to one of the most famous men in Britain – learned from that day. It was a lesson many other women learned too. ‘I was forty-four years old. I’d read in the papers that this had been done to ethnic people by the police and I thought they must have done something wrong for the police to take them. But that day taught me a real lesson about the police. It frightened me actually.’

  While they were banned from Nottinghamshire, they picketed in Lancashire. The police, she says, ‘were horrible to us.’ One night they were singing after they left the picket line, and one of the police officers said loudly, so they could hear: ‘The cows are in good voice this morning.’ Anne says: ‘We were singing often because we were frightened, and somebody said, “At least singing is better than crying.”’

  The government was prepared to use police as a battering ram, but it was less keen on paying for it. It tried to get Nottingham ratepayers to foot the bill, and partly succeeded. Papers released by the Home Office under the Freedom of Information Act show that the row went on for the first six months of the strike, despite pleas from Tory MPs, council leaders and Chief Constables.

  The government appeared to be displaying generosity towards local authorities by promising not to penalize them for overspending caused by the strike. But ministers were determined not to pay all the bills. In March, Michael Spungin, leader of the Tory group on Nottinghamshire County Council, complained to Douglas Hurd, then a Home Office minister: ‘It would be impossible for any Conservative in the county to defend a government decision to operate in that way on what is certainly a national problem which happens to be being fought out on the territory of Nottinghamshire by others.’

  Home Secretary Leon Brittan appeared to concede, and on 11 May committed himself to paying half the extra cost up to the product of a 1p rate and 90 per cent afterwards. But this did not satisfy the police authorities, who became increasingly angry behind the scenes, as Home Office documents released under FOI reveal. Nottinghamshire was spending £2m a week, including £1.8m on police overtime and £20,000 a week to the Ministry of Defence to rent barracks for the police.

  In May, Jim Lester, Conservative MP for Broxtowe, told the Prime Minister of the ‘strong feeling of disappointment’ in Nottinghamshire because the government was not providing enough financial support. The Prime Minister acknowledged that Nottinghamshire’s police force had the largest bill – estimated at £25m – in a crucial battleground of the dispute. Exchanges between Andrew Turnbull, Thatcher’s private secretary, and Leon Brittan’s aides show that Brittan thought, ‘It would be wrong in principle for central government to pay the full costs: policing is essentially a local matter.’

  The concern went much further than just Nottinghamshire. Minutes of a meeting of the Central Conference of Chief Constables, held in the Home Office on 3 May, show that the government was heading for a confronta
tion with ministers not only over the cost, but also the implications of the police being used by Thatcher and Brittan to stop the flying pickets. So concerned were the chief constables about the situation that they got David Hall, President of ACPO and Chief Constable of Humberside, to write personally to Sir Brian Cubbon, Permanent Secretary at the Home Office, asking for Brittan himself to chair the meeting. Hall thought this was neither practicable nor advisable but went through the motions. In the end Sir Brian chaired the conference.

  A document released under FOI shows Hall issuing an extraordinary statement to the private meeting. He told them: ‘I do not think any of us realized that the dispute would be either so prolonged or incur the enormous financial burden that it has.’

  He warned: ‘Very substantial financial expenditure is still ongoing and, as president, I am obliged to draw your attention to the fact that if the problem is allowed to fester over a long period of time, it is our view that the whole constitutional base of the police service will be brought into question.

  ‘You will agree that the operational independence of Chief Constables must remain sacrosanct, and under no circumstances should police forces be drawn into the political arena . . . but the financial implications are being questioned by even those police authorities who, in the past, have been regarded as extremely supportive of the police. Even they are starting to ask the question, “Who is directing the control of the NRC?” (and this is a most worrying aspect)’ – a reference, no doubt, to the fact that the Home Secretary could direct the NRC.

  Hall’s outburst was all the more surprising, since his public stance was revealed rather differently in an interview with the Guardian some seven weeks later (‘The force to be reckoned with’, 23 June), when he claimed that he never met the Home Secretary ‘specifically to discuss the miners’ strike’, and played down any suggestion that he was worried that the NRC could be a forerunner for a national police force or be used as a tactical weapon against the miners. He told the paper: ‘I want to be very, very forceful on the fact that there is no discussion between the police service and the civil servants acting on behalf of the politicians, or the politicians themselves, as to the way we should react.’

  The minutes of the meeting show that one of the main objectors was Sir Philip Knights, Chief Constable of the West Midlands. He is minuted as saying that there was concern in the police service that ‘the police were bearing the weight and opprobrium of a political problem not of their own making, and that perhaps the very efficiency of the police operations was delaying a solution to the problem by those properly concerned.’ In other words, the use of the police was helping the government to avoid coming to any settlement with Arthur Scargill.

  It was not until June that Brittan changed his mind. In a letter dated 6 June to Peter Rees, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, he admitted that Nottinghamshire was in trouble because of the cost of policing the picketing. The Chief Constable had stopped recruiting staff and frozen computer projects. A letter from the Home Office’s F3 division two days earlier revealed that Nottinghamshire had set a date of 1 October to quit the regional crime squad and criminal intelligence unit. Derbyshire and South Yorkshire were expected to follow.17 So Brittan had little choice. He announced extra funding at the Tory conference in October.

  Even though the decision was effectively taken in June it did not get through to ACPO until a month later. A meeting of the ACPO council in July led to an internal Home Office memo, which revealed further criticism from Hall. He had told Sir Brian Cubbon that he was facing ‘jibbing at sums involved’ from authorities as different as Suffolk and the City of London, and that training and community policing ‘had virtually ceased in some areas’ and ‘the overall performance against crime was being affected – for example, the number of arrests was down.’ There were also problems with providing police support units to stop picketing, and operating the NRC now that its work had been extended to take in South Wales, Durham and Cleveland as well as the Midlands.

  Another major cost for the government was where to billet all these extra police officers. Internal Home Office documents reveal the ministry was desperate to find suitable accommodation to house all the police, so they could be at the picket lines early in the morning. Morton Hospital, a closed NHS hospital at Clay Cross, was used because the spare capacity in every military base in the Midlands was full to overflowing and the MoD could not release any more space because ‘it had been earmarked for a major military training programme’.

  The hospital was needed urgently as police from Devon and Cornwall, Cambridgeshire, Lancashire and Cheshire had all been drafted to Derbyshire and could not travel there every day. Derbyshire County Council had refused to find or offer any accommodation for them and had objected on planning grounds to the use of the hospital. But a ‘strictly confidential’ letter from the head of the North Derbyshire Health Authority to the police showed he was only too happy to cooperate at £250 a week for rent, plus another £325 a week if they wished to use the Ashgate Maternity Home. His helpful advice included the useful information that, as the hospital was technically on Crown land, no planning application was required.

  Such were the private deals made to aid the police and probably repeated up and down the country. We can now trace the story from the internal official note prepared in order to answer a question two months later, in June, from Dennis Skinner, MP for Bolsover, about the use of Morton Hospital to billet police.

  MacGregor was talking loosely about bringing the army in, but the next day he struggled to distance himself from this, no doubt after a sharp rebuke from sources close to the Prime Minister. But it was starting to look and sound like warfare. Mick McGahey told the Scottish TUC: ‘We are fighting for this country and we are telling this country we will not be bought off by your filthy money. We will keep our jobs and our dignity.’18 He was rewarded with a resolution for mass secondary picketing to take place for one day in support of the striking miners.

  As May began, Nottinghamshire was still producing coal. All its pits were working, and the split in the NUM was starting to become ugly. TUC leaders looked at the increasingly divided miners’ union and could do little except fret. At this time, Scargill was asking them for nothing; it was not until later, with the strike crumbling around him, that he condemned them for not coming to his aid.

  On 2 May, 6,000 Nottinghamshire miners, some with banners saying ‘Adolph Scargill’, staged a ‘right to work’ demonstration at the NUM area office in Mansfield. Scargill replied with a demonstration in Mansfield on 14 May, when striking miners sang ‘There’s only one Arthur Scargill’ to the tune of ‘Guantanamera’. The internal Home Office records sent to Peter Walker record that 12,000 people participated. The rally ended in violence when demonstrators fought with the 1,035 police, some of them mounted. Eighty-seven arrests were made, eighty-eight police officers injured and fifty-seven people charged.

  Yet despite the NUM’s problems, the strike was having a serious effect, and the government was far from certain of victory. The same day as Scargill’s Nottinghamshire demonstration, 14 May, Peter Gregson at the Department of Energy sat down to write another of his remarkably blunt memos to the Prime Minister. The occasion this time was a private meeting between Thatcher, Walker and Nigel Lawson, the Chancellor. The meeting had been requested by Walker after receiving some startling figures of the costs facing the taxpayer, even if the strike was brought speedily to an end.

  Gregson was less sure than MacGregor that there was no threat to coal stocks. The NCB could deliver only 1.85m tonnes of coal a week to power stations. There would be huge costs to the taxpayer to keep the power stations going. Gregson’s memo revealed that even if the strike was called off at the end of May, the oil – 350,000 tonnes a week – would have to continue to be delivered until mid-September to keep all power stations open. If it ended in June, huge oil deliveries would be needed until December, while if it continued until July, oil deliveries could be not reduced until March 1985.<
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  The memo concluded: ‘This has serious implications for costs, bearing in mind that the net extra cost of burning oil rather than coal is £20m a week and that, during the recovery period, the CEGB would be buying the oil in addition [underlined] to buying coal, so that the relevant figure would be the gross cost of £50m a week.’

  Gregson told Thatcher secretly that he was not quite clear what his boss Peter Walker made of this, but he suggested that Nigel Lawson might want to put up electricity prices to pay for it. He warned: ‘This might however give Scargill a useful propaganda advantage, although it has to be conceded that, as the weekend press showed, the cost of extra oilburn is already becoming an issue and the government may have to make its position clear on where the cost is to fall before long.’ If only Scargill knew.

  There were more negotiations in May, but it’s likely that neither of the principals really wanted a resolution. MacGregor scented victory, and was more interested in what he could do to encourage the drift back to work, especially in Nottinghamshire. Scargill also believed in victory, and, in any case, negotiating was never what Scargill was best at, as the NCB’s director of industrial relations, Ned Smith, told Paul Routledge: ‘He could put a case across very well indeed. But once his brief was finished, if the answer was “no”, Arthur was buggered because he wasn’t a negotiator. What he said was right and had to be accepted.’19

  Scargill told MacGregor that the closure list must be withdrawn before he would talk. The NCB offered to extend the timeframe for closures, but said it would still reduce capacity by 4m tonnes and cut 20,000 jobs. Scargill would not talk about it: ‘As far as I’m concerned, pit closures and job losses are not negotiable.’

  The talks collapsed, but not before Scargill had secretly assured Neil Kinnock that the NCB was about to cave in. On 1 June he spoke to Kinnock’s adviser Dick Clements. He wanted Clements to tell Kinnock that the Board was now saying their closure plan could be withdrawn. Kinnock was not to tell anyone; he was, said Scargill, the first person to be told this.