Marching to the Fault Line

by David Hencke

  There were all sorts of reasons why an election that was Labour’s for the taking slipped out of the party’s grasp, and the miners’ strike, now seven years in the past, could only have been a small one. But given the narrowness of the result – Major won by twenty-one seats – many people believe that, without the lost year in Labour’s recovery, Kinnock would have been Prime Minister in 1992. Here is Kinnock’s own view, looking back in 2007: ‘All the programme for recovery I was starting to pursue was stalled, not just for 1984–5, but for two years, from about January 1984 to nearly the end of 1985. That was two years in which almost the whole attention of the labour movement was focused politically, emotionally, in one area. Everything was defined by where you stood in relation to the miners’ strike.’

  The public, he thinks, were being constantly reminded of the winter of discontent. And they were being shown Thatcher in the best light, as an iron lady and a force against disorder. The result of all that, in Kinnock’s words, was that ‘We did not make the advance in 1987 that we were looking for,’ the advance that would have provided a springboard for 1992. The additional twenty-one seats Labour needed in 1992 all had small majorities.14

  Kinnock does not say it in so many words, and he insists he is not making excuses, but there is no doubt he believes that without Scargill and the miners’ strike, he would have formed a Labour government in 1992. He is not alone in this belief.

  After the election Kinnock resigned at once, and John Smith became Labour leader. Two years later Smith died suddenly of a heart attack and was succeeded by Tony Blair, who swiftly made it clear that the process of moving Labour rightwards was going to be accelerated. For Arthur Scargill this was the last straw: he resigned from the Labour Party and formed his own tiny grouplet on the far left, the Socialist Labour Party. The far left is, of course, grossly over-populated with tiny, warring grouplets, and Scargill might have been expected to join one of the existing ones, but he chose to form his own, while remaining President of the NUM.

  Blair is something that, before the miners’ strike, would have been a contradiction in terms: an anti-union Labour leader. Before the strike, Labour, in its darkest hours, for instance after the 1931 general election when it was reduced to a parliamentary rump, had always turned to the unions for succour, support and guidance. The unions had always been Labour’s financial bedrock, for, without their money and the people they could put on the streets at election time, the Labour Party could never have fought and won general elections. The Labour Party had been created by the unions to be their political voice. Now, for the first time, it was deliberately distancing itself from the unions, and there was nothing they could do about it. To have a Labour leader who did not feel at home with the unions, who rather disliked them and was not interested in consulting them about anything, was a nasty shock.

  Neil Kinnock and John Smith had already forced the unions to accept a vastly diminished role in the running of the Labour Party, but at least by 1994 they thought they had eaten all the humble pie their party was going to force down their throats. They had atoned for the miners’ strike, and could begin to poke their heads above the parapet again. Blair’s arrival changed all that, and his first major initiative was an indication of the direction of travel: he forced through the repeal of Clause Four of Labour’s constitution, which promised public ownership, and he made it clear to the unions that their voice was not going to count for a lot.

  Union leaders swiftly began to hope that Blair’s majority would not be too large, for then he would have no need of them. Blair’s trade union adviser in his first term, John Cruddas, now MP for Dagenham, says Blair’s big 1997 majority filled them with gloom: ‘They thought, this means the full Blairite agenda, including ditching the unions and linking up with the Liberals.’15

  Blair may or may not have been right in his view that the public, after the miners’ strike, loathed the unions and would not elect a party that was seen to be close to them. What we can be sure about is that, without the miners’ strike, no Labour leader could or would have so firmly rejected the unions and all they stood for.

  Labour’s landslide 1997 victory did not bring the trade unions back to anywhere near the place in the sun they had occupied before the strike. Early in the life of the government, John Monks, now TUC General Secretary, summed it up in one of those great memorable phrases. The unions, and those who had been involved with Labour before Blair, were being treated, he said, as ‘embarrassing elderly relatives at a family gathering’.

  New Labour, as Blair’s Labour Party was known, thought the unions were unpopular, and did not want their government tainted. So in the early days of the Labour government, when it met the TUC, the TUC chiefs would open their newspapers on the morning of a meeting and, with tedious regularity, read the results of a government briefing to the press: whatever it was the unions were going to ask for, the government was not going to give it. Eventually John Monks spoke to Chancellor Gordon Brown about it, and the briefings stopped.

  Their lack of influence in the corridors of power was dramatically illustrated from the start. The one big thing they wanted was something it would be easy for the Blair government to deliver. They wanted the European Social Chapter signed, and UK support for additions to it on such matters as maternity benefits and health and safety regulations. Union leaders thought that that much, at least, they would get.

  They were to be cruelly disillusioned. The Confederation of British Industry met Blair and extracted a promise from him. Though Blair had to sign the Social Chapter – it was a manifesto pledge he could not safely dishonour – he promised that he would block any additional pro-worker or pro-union amendments to it, if the CBI asked him to. The unions did not even have the chance to plead their case: the meeting with the CBI was secret, and they did not know about it. So the TUC continued to besiege the government with requests that Blair was already pledged to refuse.16 That was the measure of their place in the land under a Labour government. The movement of Ernest Bevin and Jack Jones found that hard to accept.

  CHAPTER 11

  NOT AN INDUSTRIAL DISPUTE, BUT A WAR

  In politics, you seldom get everything you want. Both sides generally come away with something. But war is all or nothing. Once both sides have thrown their armies at each other, they quickly get past the stage where they can settle for less than total victory or total defeat. That is one of many ways in which the miners’ strike was closer to a civil war than to an industrial dispute. The return to work was unconditional surrender, as unmistakable as a defeated army throwing down its weapons – or, perhaps more accurately, a besieged city opening its doors to the invaders because there is not a scrap left to eat and the alternative is to die of starvation.

  The police – better armed, better equipped, better dressed, better trained, better organized, better led, and most of all better fed – had defeated a brave and proud enemy. By the end, police were pushing pickets around at will. It was not just defeat: it was humiliation, and the men’s noses were rubbed in it every day for the last six months of the strike.

  To the victor the spoils. What did Margaret Thatcher, Ian MacGregor, Peter Walker, Norman Tebbit and their colleagues win at such a high financial and human cost?

  At the end of the strike, the government was in undisputed command of both battlegrounds: the coal industry and the field of industrial relations. The miners’ union, the unions generally, were defeated. These two victories were enduring. They have not been overturned in the twenty-five years that have elapsed.

  Were these victories worth having? Britain produces far less coal than it used to. Total domestic production has fallen steadily, following the sharp dip that coincided with the strike. In 1980, the UK produced 130.1m tonnes of coal; in 2006 that figure was 18.5m tonnes. The coal mined in Britain in 1980 produced the same amount of energy as 78.5m tonnes of oil; in 2006 that figure was 11.4m tonnes of oil.

  The number of people working with coal in one way or another, in terms both
of the headline figure and of the proportion of jobs available in the energy industry, has fallen dramatically. In 1980, around half of the 600,000 people employed in energy production in the UK were working with coal. Today, the total number of people employed in the energy industry is about a quarter of the 1980 figure, and those working with coal represent a tiny fraction of that number.

  It could be argued that the decline of the coal industry is no bad thing. Burning coal emits more CO2 per unit of energy than its competitors, oil, gas and nuclear. If coal had not been reduced in the energy mix, Britain could not have met its commitments under the Kyoto protocol. But, in a sense, that is beside the point, because a greener energy industry formed no part of Margaret Thatcher’s objectives in 1984–5. Anyway, we still burn a lot of coal. Coal-fired power stations are still common in the UK. Solid fuels accounted for 16 per cent of the UK’s energy use in 2004. The difference is that now we have to import the stuff from Norway, Russia, South Africa, Australia and Poland – even though there is hundreds of years’ worth of coal under our feet. In 1948, the Conservative opposition used to call Britain ‘an island built on coal’ and ask why Labour could not prevent the nation freezing during that year’s dreadful winter. We are still an island built on coal, but we cannot any longer get it out of the ground. We have six pits, down from 186 pits at the time of the strike. The 170,000 miners are down to fewer than 3,000. Vast coal reserves have been sterilized underground in mines that are now shut and filled in, for the government ensured that many closed pits could never be reopened, by filling them with concrete.

  Over 90 per cent of the UK’s 2004 net energy imports consisted of solid fuel, and the UK is expected to import 90 per cent of its fossil energy in 2020. Coal is no longer an asset – it simply contributes to the huge trade deficit that currently plagues the UK.

  And what we import is the least environmentally friendly coal. Dave Feickert, one of the NUM head office team in 1984–5, is now a mine safety adviser working in China and New Zealand as well as Europe. In China, he works alongside some of the former scientists and engineers from the Coal Research Establishment and the Mining Research and Development Establishment, both closed by the Thatcher government. The UK clean coal combustion programme, the most advanced in the world in 1984–5, was closed a few years after the strike. Feickert points out that China now has 80 per cent of the world’s clean coal power plants, whereas the UK does not have a single one.

  Thatcher could close the mines safe in the knowledge that the country was sitting on vast amounts of natural gas out in the North Sea. But that would not always be that case, and today Britain has used about three quarters of all known North Sea gas reserves. Harold Wilson used to say that whoever is elected when the oil money flows will be in power for a generation. It came too late to save Wilson and Callaghan’s Labour governments. Instead, it was the basis of the prosperity that helped give the Conservatives eighteen years in power, and Tony Blair another ten. But now it’s more or less finished. The gas is running out, but all the infrastructure has been put in place for the economy to be powered by gas that comes from the North Sea.

  The oil boom is also on the wane. After a spike in 2000, domestic production of petroleum in 2006 was lower than in 1980. Alongside the decline of coal, this means that Britain now produces fewer energy products domestically (in terms of millions of tonnes of oil equivalent) in 2006 than it did in 1980. We have already seen gas and petrol price hikes as Britain imports more and more, but in the long term this provokes a far more fundamental problem: we will need to buy our gas from Russia and our oil from the Middle East – not places Britain wants to be in hock to.

  This does not mean, of course, that the once vast and vital coal industry could have continued as it was. The industry that maintained the country throughout the first two thirds of the last century, the one industry that had to be kept going in 1939–45 if the war was to be won, had seen its best days and needed to contract. But once jaw-jaw was decisively rejected for war-war by the generals, the industry was never going to be contracted, only devastated. And the benefits of this are not clear. It’s at least arguable that, by winning the right to do this, Thatcher simply won the right to condemn her country to long-term impoverishment.

  A negotiated settlement would have been a great deal cheaper, as well as avoiding huge human cost. The coal industry would of course have needed a subsidy, whether paid directly by the taxpayer or indirectly by the electricity consumer, and the industry would have contracted. But the cost would have been much lower than the £28.5 billion which Dave Feickert calculates the closure of the industry has cost Britain.

  Feickert says that Britain would have kept a substantial coal industry, which it needs in an age of increasing energy dependency and uncertainty. And some mining communities would have been given more time to come to terms with a radical adjustment of their way of life. Never, he once wrote, ‘has any community of working people contributed so much to their country and been so badly treated. Never has there been such a wilful destruction of so many individual communities, of such a vast amount of public capital, or of a nation’s strategic energy resource.’ Since 1850, around 100,000 miners have been killed at work, and thousands more have died of mining illnesses like bronchitis and emphysema. Now, says Feickert, ‘at the point when technology can prevent such destruction, that selfsame technology is being removed from the few remaining pits.’

  We could have been the only country in Europe that was self-sufficient in energy and a net oil exporter. Instead, according to the 2003 Energy White Paper, we are likely to be importing about three quarters of our energy needs by 2020, much of it from countries with unstable regimes.

  There was another way, insists Feickert. The NUM wanted a new technology agreement before the strike, but the NCB were not willing to discuss it. ‘A new technology agreement’, writes Feickert, ‘would have cut working hours and allowed older men to leave, to be replaced by their unemployed sons. Anywhere else in Europe it would have been seized on as a basis for settlement.’ Instead, ‘Britain suffered a needless civil war and the mining communities were destroyed . . . And now the country is about to lose one of its founding industries, just as it is on the point of being modernised.’1

  But surely at least Thatcher was right to curb the unions? Surely they were wrecking the country, calling everyone out on strike, taking us to hell in a handcart? And surely we are all better off now that the Labour Party has liberated itself from the unions? Well, not entirely. First, union power was never as great as it was cracked up to be. It suited union leaders to overestimate it, and it suited the unions’ enemies to do the same. Seven years before the strike, when they were at their most powerful, the unions, with Arthur Scargill to the fore, had tried hard to force a small employer in North London to treat its staff properly – and failed. The Grunwick affair was one of those times when things would have been a great deal better if unions had been more powerful rather than less. There are and always will be greedy and exploitative employers, and unions provide the only protection people have from them.

  As for the Labour Party, it is certainly the case that the balance of power between the Party and the unions changed after the strike, and nine years later the change was hastened by Tony Blair. The unions used to be the senior partner; now the Labour Party is, so much so that it does not mean a lot to say that Labour is the party of the unions. Old Labour’s ambition was to achieve ‘a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of wealth and power’ between rich and poor. New Labour has achieved a fundamental and perhaps irreversible shift in the balance of power between trade unions and the Labour Party.

  For the first time, Labour leaders seem almost ashamed to admit they even know union leaders. When the government does something that the unions like, union leaders are forced to avoid cheering, for fear of being heard in Middle England. In 1997, Gordon Brown’s former adviser Charlie Whelan telephoned the white-collar union leader Rodney Bickerstaffe to ask him to c
ondemn Gordon Brown’s first budget, to reassure Middle England that Brown was at loggerheads with the unions.

  Union leaders today are genuinely puzzled about why unions can never be seen to achieve anything. If they boast of an achievement, they are punished swiftly and severely. The Communication Workers Union made triumphant noises about fending off privatization, and before it could draw breath the Post Office was turned into a plc.

  Take the minimum wage. The TUC wanted £4 an hour. The government decided on £3.60 for those over twenty-one, a ‘development rate’ of £3 for eighteeen to twenty-one-year-olds, and no minimum wage at all for sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds. John Monks, the TUC General Secretary, nailed a smile to his face and said what a historic milestone it was. He admitted only to a little disappointment that the government had been even stingier – or more prudent, as it’s known in the trade – than its own Low Pay Commission recommended.

  Monks’ famous sang-froid hid bitter union resentment, especially about the treatment of young people. Unions understand where that leads. In London’s East End between the two World Wars, sweatshop owners used to employ boys between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, when they were fit and agile and would work for next to nothing. When they started to need enough money to keep a family, they were thrown back onto the streets to starve, and their employers started again with new fourteen-year-olds. That is what happens when young people’s labour can be bought cheaply and unions cannot protect them.

  To have so diminished the unions that they stay diminished twenty-five years later, even after ten years of Labour government, is certainly an achievement of sorts. How much it actually improves our quality of life or our success as a nation, and whether this achievement is worth the price the nation paid for it, is, at the very least, debatable.

  The price was paid by everyone, but especially, of course, by miners – those who struck and those who worked – and their families. Many miners might have been happy about contracting their industry, if care were taken to ensure that there was alternative employment. Instead, they suffered near-starvation, violence and, perhaps most important, the bitterest of humiliations. We have told stories in this book of miners being rescued by their wives from a severe beating from the police, but we might pause for a moment to consider what that does, psychologically, in a community where a man thinks it his duty to protect his wife, not the other way round.