Marching to the Fault Line

by David Hencke

  Presumably Scargill did not consult McGahey because he knew his Vice-President would oppose the idea. McGahey found out from one of the industrial correspondents, Donald McIntyre of the Sunday Times. McIntyre had had the story that morning from his newsdesk, and was covering the Scottish miners’ gala at the time, so he asked McGahey what he thought about the Libyan money. McGahey, genuinely perplexed, said: ‘What Libyan money?’ He maintained impassivity in front of the journalist, but afterwards said to Ken Cameron, General Secretary of the Fire Brigades Union: ‘The man [Scargill] is mad.’22

  Roger Windsor is one of the strangest and most unexpected figures in this story. He was a bookkeeper who had worked in the small office of a trade union international, Public Services International, for ten years. According to Cyril Cooper, who was then one of PSI’s top people and responsible in those apartheid days for ferrying large amounts of trade union money secretly to the African National Congress in South Africa, Windsor was a very minor figure in PSI. He did the books, and was responsible for handing Cooper the sums of money he took to South Africa and for booking his flights, but he would not have been involved in any decision about what Cooper was going to do with the money.

  ‘I was amazed when he suddenly turned up as one of the key people in the NUM in such a senior job,’ says Cooper. ‘It was a far more important role than he had had with PSI.’ Cooper adds that Windsor was not well thought of in the office. ‘Whatever you were talking about, he was an expert on it.’

  Windsor was eventually to denounce Scargill in the Daily Mirror, and Seumas Milne, the one journalist to whom Scargill speaks freely, now calls him ‘a cold, fussy man’. At the time, though, he was known to be the one man Scargill trusted.

  The CGT’s Alain Simon worked with Windsor over the Soviet money and he, too, says: ‘I never liked him. And he didn’t like me either. But he was Arthur’s right-hand man and I was obliged to accept this man.’ ‘Someone whom Arthur trusted’ had asked Scargill to give him a job.

  This must be a reference to Rodney Bickerstaffe, the new left-wing General Secretary of the public service union NUPE, and Tony Benn, who were Windsor’s referees. Bickerstaffe today plays down this involvement. He met Windsor because NUPE was affiliated to PSI, and agreed to be a referee, he says, in the casual way that you do with a junior member of staff whom you know nothing against. He was as surprised as anyone when Windsor suddenly became a pivotal figure in the NUM.

  For Scargill, Windsor’s main attraction was probably that he was not in anyway equipped to challenge his master, politically or intellectually. He had no power base in the union apart from what he derived from being Scargill’s man. Perhaps his international experience and fluent French were also factors.

  His appointment was very much in the Scargill style of choosing those closest to him, like Nell Myers for press officer and Maurice Jones for editor. None of these three was ever more than a creature of the President. He never seemed to want strong, independent people around him, who might contradict him.

  Arriving at NUM headquarters in November 1983, Windsor quickly became the President’s right-hand man, and during the strike he became more important almost daily, until by the end he was consulted more than such pivotal figures as Mick McGahey.

  He it was who, before the strike, had been told to prepare, in the greatest secrecy, a scheme to protect the union’s money from sequestration, which involved putting the money in foreign bank accounts and setting up an independent trust to take over the NUM’s assets. At the start of the strike, he set it in motion, and by all accounts revelled in the cloak-and-dagger atmosphere he was able to create. He spirited £8.5m from bank to bank, via the Isle of Man, through the financial systems of seven countries, finally leaving it in Dublin, Zurich and Luxembourg. From Dublin, £5m went to New York to buy Jersey currency bonds. Windsor then hired a small private aircraft and sent the Finance Officer, Steve Hudson, and a colleague to Jersey to pick up £4.7m of dollar bearer bonds and fly them to a Luxembourg bank.23

  Windsor says he first heard about the Gaddafi project when he was in Paris at the headquarters of the CGT. Their host in Paris was Alain Simon. ‘Scargill and Heathfield told me I was to represent the union and meet Colonel Gaddafi,’ Windsor told us. ‘Over lunch with the Libyan representatives in Paris, we were told that money could only be given with the authority of Gaddafi. We were led to believe it would be about £1m. Someone had to go to Libya. Scargill said, “It can’t be me or Peter, is it OK if Roger goes?”’24

  Scargill gave a rather different account to Seumas Milne. In this version, Scargill himself refused to go to Libya, saying that if Libya wanted to help, it should suspend strikebreaking supplies of oil. Windsor, on the other hand, ‘declared himself more than willing to go.’25 But this feels like an attempt to distance himself from an adventure that blew up in his face, and pin the blame on a subordinate. It is clearly nonsense to suggest that Windsor would or could have gone if Scargill was not very keen on him going.

  Windsor flew from Manchester to Tripoli. ‘I was told I would see the leader fairly quickly but in fact was hanging around for several days.’ He spent the time mostly in his hotel, he says, except when Altaf Abbasi took him to meet some Libyan trade unionists. Abbasi had provided the NUM with an introduction to Gaddafi. He ran a grocery store in Doncaster, South Yorkshire, and, according to Seumas Milne had close connections with the Pakistani opposition group around Benazir Bhutto, for which he had spent two weeks in a dreadful Pakistani prison.

  ‘All this time Arthur Scargill was phoning my wife every day, sometimes several times a day, asking, “When will he be back, will he be bringing something with him?”’ says Windsor. ‘Eventually one day a car came for me and I was driven for about twenty minutes to what I took to be an army camp, and we drew up at a tent. Somebody told me: the protocol is, kiss him on both cheeks. We spoke through a translator.’

  Then came the moment that was to cause the NUM so much misery. According to Windsor it happened like this: ‘Someone said to me, we always take a picture for the record. I gave my speech, the one Arthur and I had drafted in advance, he asked some questions, we kissed again. I don’t know the route by which the pictures got into the Sunday Times. Perhaps the security services picked it up from Libyan television. When I got back to Manchester Airport, I phoned my wife and she said, “You are all over the Sunday Times.”’

  He went to NUM headquarters in Sheffield and sat down with Scargill, Heathfield and Myers to write a statement on the purpose of the visit. ‘We decided to say the purpose was to see Libyan trade unionism,’ Windsor told us. ‘It’s called lying for the cause.’ It’s also called stupidity. Can they really have thought anyone was going to believe that?

  Windsor collected the money that he thought had come from Libya. Then came a moment which, in the long term, was to cause even more trouble than the original trip to Libya. Years after the strike the Daily Mirror ran a story claiming that, on Scargill’s instructions, Windsor brought the Libyan money in cash – all £163,000 of it – to Scargill’s office. There he found Scargill and Heathfield. Scargill explained that the money had to be hidden before the Receiver took over all the union’s accounts. He then counted out money to each of the three of them: £25,000 to clear his mortgage, which the union had given him; £17,000 for improvements to Peter Heathfield’s home, for which the union had loaned him the money; and £29,500 to clear the bridging loan the union had made to Windsor for his home. Finance Officer Steve Hudson was sent for to pick up the money and provide all three with receipts.

  That was the accusation made six years later, in 1990, by the Daily Mirror. And twelve years later still, the Mirror editor who had published it, Roy Greenslade, said the paper had it wrong. The reporter who got the story, Terry Pattinson, still insists they had it right, and has been published in the Guardian repeating his accusation. Greenslade now calls Pattinson, the man he once trusted to report on this major story for his newspaper, ‘testy and excitable’. He said he was
now sure that Scargill had not taken Libyan money, and had not misused strike funds.

  Greenslade does not explain his road-to-Damascus moment. The meeting the Mirror wrote about, where the money was divvied up between the three officials, did take place. The sum on the table was £163,000, and Scargill, Heathfield and Windsor did leave the meeting with the cash. Whether the money was all, or partly, from Libya, as the Mirror alleged, we cannot be certain because, as we shall see, a great deal of cash was getting to the NUM from other sources.

  But did the three officials, as the Mirror alleged, take for their own use money that had been given for their desperately hard-up members? Here the case against them is very far from being proven, and it is unlikely that it can ever be proved either way, because so much cash was sloshing about, unaccounted for because any accounts might make it vulnerable to the Receiver.

  It would have been a dreadful thing to do, a betrayal of everything they were supposed to stand for. To accept that they effectively stole from their members at a time of their members’ greatest need would require a revolution in our view of Scargill, and an even greater one in our view of Heathfield. Anyway, Scargill had already paid off his mortgage, and Heathfield’s home was owned by the Derbyshire area of the NUM.

  Seumas Milne provides a detailed account of what happened to the money that was handed out round that table, an account echoed in a report by Gavin Lightman QC which the union commissioned.26 It seems likely that the meeting, and the divvying up of the cash, was part of the extraordinary efforts that had to be made to keep the union afloat after its funds were sequestrated on 25 October. The union no longer belonged to the members and their elected leaders: control passed to a Receiver appointed by the court, and the Receiver remained in charge until 27 June 1986, when the strike was long over. Trade unions and others in Britain and throughout the world provided huge sums of money to keep the strike and the union going. They provided it in cash because that was the only way they could keep it out of the hands of the Receiver. No one is ever likely to be able to put a figure on the amount of cash that passed through the miners’ leaders’ hands and their various bank accounts, money that they struggled to keep from the prying eyes of the Receiver, but it was certainly many millions of pounds. It came from all sorts of places. Alan Meale, now MP for Mansfield, then a junior official working for the co-ordinating committee that was designed to act as a link between trade unions sympathetic to the strike, such as the Fire Brigades Union and NUPE, believes that altogether some £6m was redistributed to the NUM from other left-wing union leaders.

  Left-wing union leaders, though they may have disappointed Scargill by not calling their members out at his bidding, were generous when he came to them for money. Ken Cameron of the FBU, which had already given the miners money, recalls an early morning telephone call from Scargill. The miners’ President told him that he needed £200,000 in cash. Cameron said that to loan such a large sum of money he needed authorization from his executive, which was not due to meet for another month. Scargill told him that unless Cameron could give him the cash that morning, he could not pay his staff. Cameron took the decision to give Scargill the money and clear it with his executive later. He went to the bank and, as arranged, met Scargill’s driver Jim Parker there. Cameron and Parker went into the bank and the money was ready for them. It would not fit into Cameron’s briefcase, so they found some cardboard boxes that had once held packets of crisps, and stuffed the notes into those. The bank manager asked what Cameron wanted the money for, and Cameron said: ‘Where’s the nearest bookie?’

  As they drove away, Parker said: ‘He’s odd, that bank manager.’ Cameron replied: ‘He’s stupid. He didn’t ask the name of the horse.’ Scargill had a flat in the Barbican, provided by the NUM for his use when he was in London, and that was where they took the money. Scargill emptied it out on the floor and thanked Cameron, who left for his next meeting.

  Many unions, including the TGWU, found ways of channelling suitcases full of banknotes to the NUM. Rodney Bickerstaffe was another left-wing trade union leader who helped Scargill with money: his NUPE, like the firefighters, gave substantial sums of money during the dispute. Bickerstaffe also hid NUM money from the Receiver. Sequestration did not come as a complete surprise, and miners’ leaders had made some preparations. Bickerstaffe recalled for us a lonely drive to a railway station, some time before sequestration. He pulled his car into the station car park alongside that of the leader of one of the NUM’s regions. This man handed him a suitcase, told him it contained £100,000, and drove off. Bickerstaffe took the suitcase back to his office and called his finance officer in to be with him while he put the case, unopened, into his office safe.

  ‘Shouldn’t we count it?’ asked his finance officer. ‘Don’t be so stupid,’ replied Bickerstaffe. He told us: ‘It was all done on trust. We trusted each other. We had to or it couldn’t have worked.’

  Overseas trade unions were very generous too. Ken Cameron led a small delegation to the USA in search of money, coming back with a respectable sum from such unions as the Teamsters, though the American TUC, the AFL/CIO, was not helpful, since it was at loggerheads with Scargill over his support for eastern bloc internationals.

  But by far the most generous was the CGT. Not only did the CGT give generously from its own funds, it also appealed to its members for money for the British miners, and they responded with great generosity.

  Jeff Apter had worked for the CGT. He had recently left, but remained in Paris working as a freelance journalist, which he still does – he is now the Paris stringer for English-speaking newspapers and magazines all over the world, and still has excellent trade union and industrial contacts there. Apter became the crucial link between the collectors in France and the NUM. There was a limit to how much foreign currency a French person could bring to the UK. So a team of French printers used to book their passage on a ferry to Folkestone, each carrying the maximum permitted amount of currency, and Apter booked himself on the same ferry. After they disembarked, one of the printers collected all the parcels of money and met Apter in a pub. The printer walked into the pub with a case, they had a drink together, and Apter walked out with the case. In a small side street, a car waited, usually driven by Jim Parker with Nell Myers in the passenger seat. Apter put the case in the car, and Parker drove away. And, as with the £163,000 that was divvied up in Scargill’s office that day, no one knows exactly what happened to this money, or to the other millions of pounds in cash that found their way to the NUM from various sources. As Rodney Bickerstaffe says,‘It was all done on trust.’

  CHAPTER 7

  THE COLLAPSE OF GENERAL WINTER

  14 NOVEMBER TO 31 DECEMBER

  One of Norman Willis’s first acts as the new TUC General Secretary was to attend a big miners’ rally in Aberavon on 14 November – a symbol of his intention that in future the TUC was to be an active player in the dispute. And there something dreadful happened, something that showed the trade union movement was irreparably split and the hatred that had built up: a hatred not of the government, not of the NCB, but of the union leaders who Scargill told his members were class traitors, ready to betray the miners as their predecessors had in 1926.

  It happened because Willis did something difficult and courageous. He spoke at the end of a day that had seen dreadful violence in Yorkshire, where striking miners erected barricades to try to stop the trickle back to work from turning into a torrent.

  It was one of those big, fairly conventional halls, with a stage at one end and a table set up on the stage behind which sat the platform party - five or six union leaders including Scargill and Willis. Scargill made one of his barnstorming speeches. The text hasn’t survived, but we can be certain that he told his loyal members that right was on their side, that they were on the path to victory, and that it was time for the whole trade union movement to come to the aid of the miners. He sat down to the torrent of cheering that always followed these speeches, and the stout man seated be
side him rose and took the microphone. If Norman Willis was nervous, he did not show it.

  Standing beside Arthur Scargill, he began by saying that he wanted to give the miners all the support he could. ‘But the TUC is not an army and I’m not a Field Marshal,’ he said, raising his voice to be heard above the shouts and jeers. Scargill looked straight ahead, impassive, and left it to his members to guess what he was thinking, which they had little trouble in doing. Willis went on: ‘When I see the hardship, when I see the sacrifice, I wish I could guarantee you all the support you need. But I don’t kid trade unionists and I’ll never mislead the miners about the true picture.’

  He condemned the violence of the police and the attitude of the government. And then, to howls of outrage, he went on: ‘I could leave it there, but I will not. For I have to say that any miner, too, who resorts to violence wounds the miners’ case far more than they damage their opponents’ resolve. Violence creates more violence, and out of that is built not solidarity but despair and defeat. I have marched proudly before many miners’ banners and I know there will never be one that praises the brick, the bolt or the petrol bomb. Such acts, if they are done by miners, are alien to our common tradition, however, not just because they are counter-productive, but because they are wrong.’

  And as he spoke, a noose was lowered from the ceiling, to hang over his head. What was worse to Willis, the lifelong professional union negotiator, was that his fellow union leader Arthur Scargill sat beside him, still looking grimly straight ahead, saying nothing. A word from Scargill, as Willis pointed out afterwards, would have been enough to have the noose removed. He did not say it.