by David Hencke
The scars in mining communities have not healed. Pit villages became lawless and dangerous places after the strike: in some in Yorkshire you could buy heroin cheaper than in Leeds. Now they have call centres and distribution centres. Isn’t that good? No, say the people from the villages whom we speak to. ‘It’s all crap jobs, and what will happen when they go to Asia?’ was a typical comment.
Photographer Peter Arkell, who took thousands of pictures of the great strike, was commissioned a few years later to take pictures of the protests against the M3 extension near Winchester, and was saddened to see former miners, whom he had last seen on the picket line fighting the police, working as security guards, wearing uniforms and attacking anti-motorway protesters. Later, in 2005, he went back to Yorkshire pit villages and found they had not forgotten: ‘They still don’t speak to scabs.’
Perhaps the most hopeful initiative is happening on Arthur Scargill’s doorstep, in Grimethorpe, Yorkshire – and his daughter is at the centre of it. The closure of the Grimethorpe pit near Barnsley in 1993 was iconic: it was the base of the famous Grimethorpe brass band, and the inspiration for the 1996 film Brassed Off with Ewan McGregor, Tara Fitzgerald and Pete Postlethwaite. After the closure Grimethorpe became, quite quickly, the poorest village in the EU and the second sickest town in Britain. Drug abuse and the crime that fuels it became major problems. The police struggled to regain authority after the strike, but they were not trusted; anyway, before the strike the tight communities had done a good job of policing themselves. Unemployment was far beyond the official figures and a whole generation of youngsters was lost to drugs and despair. Those who had never worked were affected worse than those who had been made redundant.
In recent years, local GP Dr Margaret Scargill has been behind a remarkable experiment, the Oaks Park primary care centre, built at a cost of £3m, the brainchild of her husband Jim Logan, a former colliery manager who has made a study of the Cuban health system. Logan believes the Cubans do one-stop-shop healthcare better than anyone else in the world and, now that the British government is trying to provide bigger units for better-resourced primary care, the Cuban example is one it ought to follow. The idea is to improve public health by offering a range of primary care treatments locally, rather than sending people to hospital.
The centre brings together a range of NHS services and also caters for wider social needs, such as housing and benefits. Its GPs are familiar with the health problems of a former mining community, such as respiratory diseases and heart problems. The centre also provides chiropody, dental services, ophthalmology, pharmacy, dietetics, midwives, community psychiatric services and physiotherapy. Dr Scargill advised on the centre’s design as one of its six resident GPs.
Did it have to be like this? There was going to be at least some contraction in the mining industry, but did it have to turn into a civil war whose consequences we are still living with? Journalist Seumas Milne says the strike was entirely unavoidable from a miner’s standpoint, and so was the course it took. He thinks the rundown of the pits would not have been more humane without the strike, and that is demonstrated by the way the UDM was treated. An orderly retreat would not have worked.
Milne has a point about the UDM. Once it had served its purpose, that of undermining the strike, it was cynically abandoned, and its representations on behalf of doomed pits were ignored. In 2002 the union that had been formed to break the strike was itself forced to call a strike to combat widespread compulsory redundancies planned by the now privately owned UK Coal. The NUM’s General Secretary in Nottingham, Keith Stanley, said current workplace laws meant non-UDM miners had no right to strike because they had not been balloted, and the NUM did not instruct its members to observe the UDM’s picket lines. The NUM did not ballot on strike action because it was still in talks with UK Coal.
But on the wider issue Milne is wrong. Even given the positions of both sides at the start – the government’s view that a rapid rundown was essential, the NUM’s determination to defend jobs – there is a great deal that could have been done to prevent the prolonged tragedy we have described in this book.
From the government side, this was admitted to us by the most unlikely figure: Norman Tebbit, who during the strike was the hardline Trade and Industry Secretary, regarded as one of Thatcher’s ‘bovver boys’ with an uncompromising attitude towards the Left. He now feels remorse. Perhaps mellowed by age (he’s seventy-seven), he regrets the damage that was done after the miners’ strike to working-class communities through the huge programme of pit closures.
He still blames Scargill for the strike, but admits that the closure programme went too far, though he says ministers had little choice in many cases, with pits flooded or unusable in the wake of the strike. ‘Those mining communities had good working-class values and a sense of family values,’ he says. ‘The men did real men’s heavy work going down the pit. There were also very close-knit communities which were able to deal with the few troublesome kids. If they had any problems they would take the kid round the back and give them a good clip round the ear and that would be the end of it.
‘Many of these communities were completely devastated, with people out of work, turning to drugs, and no real man’s work because all the jobs had gone. There is no doubt that this led to a breakdown in these communities, with families breaking up and youths going out of control. The scale of the closures went too far. The damage done to those communities was enormous as a result of the strike.’
This happened partly because the Prime Minister thought she was on a crusade against an Antichrist. After vanquishing the Argentinians, she was going to vanquish ‘the enemy within’ – the name she gave to thousands of British citizens who wanted, whether misguidedly or not, to be allowed to go on earning their living in the hard, dangerous but productive way that their fathers and grandfathers had done.
Feeling this, she also felt that there was no point in testing the water and finding out whether a more gradual rundown of the industry might be acceptable, or whether alternative work might be found. Her job as she saw it was to make preparations with military precision, fight the fight with military ruthlessness, and take every ounce of the spoils of victory; and that is what she did.
I was so disappointed when they called that strike off. We were within striking distance, if you’ll forgive the pun, of bashing them into the ground.’ That was Arthur Scargill, twenty-four years on and just after his seventieth birthday, on 12 January 2008, talking to ITV Yorkshire. His rather supine ITV interviewer did not ask him why, in that case, he had not prevented the strike being called off, as he had the power to do simply by using his casting vote as President. Nor did he ask for any evidence that the NUM was winning. Scargill avoids talking to journalists who might be inclined to ask such questions.
In November 1984, with the strike clearly going nowhere and the drift back to work well under way, he told cheering miners in Porthcawl, in one of the very last of those great, rousing, barnstorming speeches which still have the power to thrill when you hear them played: ‘Can you say to your son or daughter: in 1984 I took part in the greatest struggle in trade union history. I fought to save your pit. I fought to save the jobs. I fought to save this community. And in doing so I preserved my dignity as a human being and as a member of the finest trade union in the world. I’m proud to lead you. The miners united will never be defeated.’ As he said the words, the miners, who were not united, were on the verge of being defeated. If Scargill knew it – and how could he not have known it? – he should have been looking for a way out, as his hero A.J. Cook would have done.
Cook’s words to a union conference as the 1926 strike was failing, which we quoted in Chapter 1, serve as a rebuke to Scargill: ‘It is not cowardice to face the facts of a situation, and I say that a leader who leads men blindly when he knows different is not only a traitor to himself and his own conscience, but he is betraying the men he is leading.’
When Scargill’s loyal members – and he had
oceans of loyalty in the NUM to call upon – heard him speak as he did in Porthcawl, with that utter confidence, they thought he must have a strategy. He let them go on thinking it. But it wasn’t true. He had no strategy at all. Instead, he delivered the then powerful trade union movement, bound and gagged, into the hands of its enemies. Never has anyone done so much harm to his own side.
His own union was destroyed. It was big, united and powerful before the strike, and small, divided and weak after it. The jibe of his enemies has force: that he went into the strike with a big union and a small house, and came out of it with a small union and a big house. Mick McGahey knew, and could admit to himself, how much damage had been done. The result of the strike, he said years later, was ‘to destroy trade unionism not only in mining but in Britain.’2 Privately he blamed Scargill, but he kept that for secret conversations with the likes of Bill Keys and Neil Kinnock. Talking to one of the authors shortly before he died, he refused to mention Scargill, only saying: ‘I believe, and I accept my responsibility in this, that we underestimated the Conservative government’s determination to use the state machine against us. In order to dismember the welfare state they had to break the trade union movement, and they needed to break the miners first.’
Scargill himself tends to wander off into accusations of betrayal by other trade unions who failed to come to his support. His faithful former PA and press officer Nell Myers says: ‘He hasn’t changed his mind about anything because he has been proved right all along – look at what has happened to the mining communities.’ She means that this has happened because other unions did not support Scargill; not that this has happened partly as a result of Scargill.
Perhaps the most sophisticated defence of Scargill’s handling of the strike comes from his friend and supporter in the NUM Ken Capstick, and it is only fair to quote it at some length:
I believe we were right and I think history has proven that . . . We are importing something like fifty million tonnes of coal into Britain and if we stop burning coal today, the lights would be out in the morning . . . If you’ve got a lad in a school playground who’s going to be attacked by a bully and instead of just taking his beating, he decides he is going to fight back – he may still lose because the bully might be bigger than him, but his victory is in the fact that he fought back. That’s his victory and I believe the victory for us, as Arthur often puts it, was in the struggle itself. The only thing Arthur could depend upon were his leadership abilities. I would say that keeping us on strike for twelve months showed he had enormous leadership abilities. What were Thatcher’s leadership abilities?. . . She could stop your wages, she could threaten to close your industry down. She could cause mayhem in your communities and your families, she could use every piece of state apparatus to drive you back to work, like police on horseback charging through your village, charging into your house on horseback.
The victory was in the struggle itself. Scargill believes this because he represented something genuine in the trade union movement of the time: the belief that unions were a force for revolutionary change in society, and trade unionists had a duty to struggle for it permanently. So a union leader who believed in compromising with the class enemy was not just mistaken: he was a traitor to the cause. It is summed up in the title of Seumas Milne’s book The Enemy Within. The title refers, of course, to Thatcher’s famous words about the miners, but it has another meaning. Scargill was an authentic product of the feverish self-absorption of the left in the trade unions in the late seventies and early eighties. They too thought that the real enemy was the enemy within – the right wing of their own movement.
So Scargill thought his real enemies were men like Neil Kinnock and Norman Willis, and that, having defeated the right wing in his own union, there was little else to defeat. All that was necessary now was for the true believers to claim the inheritance that had so long been denied them by the likes of his right-wing predecessor, Joe Gormley. He described those who opposed the candidature of Tony Benn for Labour deputy leader as traitors and saboteurs. He can be measured and humorous about Margaret Thatcher, but not about Neil Kinnock.
Dave Feickert puts it like this: ‘Arthur was a unique version of the typical British trade union militant of the time. These no longer exist. I had been one of them, too, but the difference between him and McGahey, Heathfield and all the others and me, is that we believed in making alliances to win, even if they were not with people with whom we agreed about the number of angels on the pin-head.’ One of the distinguishing marks of such people was an almost morbid fear of being outflanked on the left, of meeting someone who could claim to be more left-wing than they were. They played slightly childish games of lefter-than-thou.
For such a leader, it was vital to have astute, powerful, competent people around them who could challenge them. Scargill surrounded himself with Nell Myers, a press officer who loathed journalists, hero-worshipped Scargill and doubled as his PA; and Roger Windsor, who had never been much more than a bookkeeper for a small organization. The two other national officials, Mick McGahey and Peter Heathfield, both had to put up with being consulted less than Myers and Windsor.
The shame of it, says the TUC’s John Monks, is that there were some good, experienced trade union officials in the NUM head office, upon whose advice Scargill could have relied. Monks cites Dave Feickert, Mick Clapham and Steve Hudson. Windsor, says Monks, was not as good as any of them, but he enjoyed the importance Scargill thrust upon him. Monks thinks Windsor made it harder for Bill Keys and Norman Willis to sell a compromise deal to Scargill. ‘He made things worse all the time, echoing Scargill and winding him up, saying things like “We can’t have that, can we?”’ says Monks. Feickert calls Windsor ‘Arthur’s dirty tricks man’.
Our researcher Dan Johnson, who grew up in Scargill’s village of Worsborough and has studied the strike and Scargill’s personality, believes Worsborough is key to the man. Scargill, he says, has a natural suspicion of anything and anyone from further away than Sheffield. ‘I should think he couldn’t wait to move the headquarters of the union up north when he became President and I wouldn’t be surprised if he had to be talked out of locating it in Barnsley,’ says Johnson. Today, what is left of the NUM does have its headquarters in Barnsley.
This helps explain the misjudgement that caused Scargill to concentrate all his forces on Orgreave. He was sure that the trade unionists of the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire would come out in strength and help him win the strike. Johnson adds that Scargill, despite appearances, is insecure, and may have known at some level that he was getting it wrong.
In twenty-five years he has never once owned up to having lost the strike. The fact that he can talk today of having been on the brink of victory makes him a figure of fun. John Lyons, then leader of the Engineers and Managers Association, called Scargill ‘vain to the point of incoherence’. John Monks, more instinctively kind, calls him ‘a force of nature – we had not seen his like before. His school was not a negotiating school. He never compromised. He said, “I only compromised once and I regretted it.”’
All of which perhaps makes him sound like a fool, and he was not a fool. His speeches were polished, certain, strong and inspiring. He had all the bureaucratic skills, says John Monks, who had the opportunity to see him at work. Give him a complex paper and he could grasp all the main points very quickly. This put him at an advantage over Peter Heathfield and Mick McGahey, who struggled to keep up with him.
Since he has never admitted that the strike was lost, it is not surprising that in the quarter century that has elapsed he seems, like the Bourbon kings in 1815, to have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Hence the sad, almost farcical business of the money, where what he thought was his cleverness resulted time after time in his looking ever grubbier, and where a little professional advice from lawyers and accountants might have saved him no end of trouble. (We are making the assumption that he is innocent of wrongdoing, which we think he probably is, but his convolu
ted method of running his, the NUM’s and the IMO’s affairs has left him unable to demonstrate it.)
He is no more intelligent than he used to be about the media, which is a shame because he has natural talent as a broadcaster. In 1993 he gave an interview to Hunter Davies for the Independent. Quite why he agreed to see Davies is unclear, since he was obviously resentful of the journalist throughout their meeting, sullenly refusing to sit on the sofa instead of his chair for the photographer, avoiding questions when there was no point in doing so, needlessly insulting his guest, and ensuring a hostile article.
‘It was like dealing with a child, an only child, used to getting his own way,’ wrote Davies. ‘Several times he trotted out 10-minute speeches, such as on the harassment he had to put up with in 1990 when the Daily Mirror had a campaign against him, all unfair, all unproved, but all well known. When I tried to get him off the subject, he said I’d brought it up. I said I didn’t. Thus we wasted another 10 minutes.’
He saw Hunter Davies, but about the same time turned down an interview with his old left-wing chum Paul Routledge, who was working on a biography. They had once been close, and now were not on speaking terms. He sent Routledge an extraordinary letter, which is worth quoting in full, partly because it illustrates the strange habit he has of referring to himself in the third person:
