The Iron Lady

by John Campbell

  But Scargill was not making an economic case at all. Behind the Luddite insistence that miners’ jobs must be guaranteed for life, his purpose was to mount a political challenge to the Government. He openly boasted of leading a socialist – more accurately a syndicalist – revolution to overthrow capitalism, asserting that after Mrs Thatcher’s 1983 landslide, extra-parliamentary action was ‘the only course open to the working class and the labour movement’.4 He had first come to prominence by leading the mass picketing of the Saltley Gate coke works, which was perceived – rightly or wrongly – as having forced the Heath Government to cave in to the miners in 1972, and from the moment he was elected to succeed Gormley in December 1981 he was thirsting to repeat that revolutionary moment. Three times in 1982–3 he called on the NUM membership in national ballots to vote for strikes: three times, by majorities rising from 55 to 61 per cent, they voted him down. After the successful strikes of the 1970s too many miners – those whose jobs were not threatened – had too much to lose by going on strike: they had good pay, cars, mortgages and an increasingly middle-class way of life. They were no longer the downtrodden proletariat of Scargill’s imagination. Moreover, the Coal Board, with Walker’s encouragement, was offering generous redundancy terms to those who did lose their jobs when pits closed. By 1984 it was plain to Scargill that he would never get his strike if he relied on the membership voting for one – certainly not by the 55 per cent majority required by the NUM constitution. So when the NCB announced on 6 March 1984 that another twenty uneconomic pits would close over the next twelve months, with the loss of 20,000 jobs, he determined to engineer a national strike without the tiresome inconvenience of a national ballot.

  He contrived it by encouraging a series of regional strikes, starting in the most directly affected and most militant areas, Yorkshire and Scotland, which would put moral pressure on the others to join in. As McGahey bluntly put it: ‘We shall not be constitutionalised out of a strike… Area by area will decide and there will be a domino effect.’5 Pickets were dispatched to less militant areas to help them to the right decision. But only Yorkshire, Scotland and the small Kent coalfield – where there were no ballots – were solid in support of the strike. Most other areas which did ballot voted against striking: the crucial moderate coalfield, Nottinghamshire, recorded a majority of nearly four to one against and most pits in the county carried on working. In South Wales only ten out of twenty-eight pits supported the strike, but the local leaders called all their members out anyway. Thus Scargill’s strategy split the union whose strength in the past had always been its unity. In fact, there were indications that, had he held a ballot in the early weeks of the strike, he might have won it – especially after he had pushed through a rule change requiring only a simple majority.6 But by refusing to hold a ballot he not only set area against area but miner against miner within each area, pit and village. By mid-April, when the strategy was approved – by a majority of only 69 – 54 – by a special delegate conference, forty-three out of 174 pits were still working. To enforce and widen the strike Scargill revived on a much bigger scale his old weapon from 1972 – the mass picketing of working pits and also of ports and depots to prevent the movement of coal. Flying pickets were organised as a quasi-military operation, with men bused from all over the country to key sites: they were given strike pay only if they were prepared to picket. But this time the police were equally organised – the Government had made its preparations on this front too – and met them in equal numbers. Soon the television news every night led with what looked like pitched battles between medieval armies, one side armed with batons and riot shields, the other with bricks, spikes, darts, ball bearings and all manner of home-made weapons.

  The public was appalled; but though there was widespread sympathy for the miners, faced with the loss of their livelihood, there was remarkably little public support for the strike, because of Scargill’s methods. By waging the dispute with such blatant contempt for democracy – by defying the rules of his own union and openly challenging the elected Government – by strutting and ranting like a tinpot demagogue, refusing to condemn the violence of the pickets (which he blamed entirely on the police) and refusing to admit the possibility of closing any pits at all, Scargill alienated not only the public at large but also those who should have been his allies, the Labour party and the other unions. Neil Kinnock, less than a year into his leadership of the party, was cruelly exposed: emotionally disposed to support the miners but aware that it would be political suicide to do so, able neither to condemn the strike nor fully support it. He did criticise the failure to hold a ballot, condemned the violence – but also the police response – and did his best to express support for the miners without endorsing Scargill’s more extreme objectives. But the more uncomfortably he wriggled, the more contemptuously Mrs Thatcher was able to pillory him as a weaselly apologist for the enemies of democracy.

  Likewise the rest of the union movement gave the miners verbal but little practical support. The steel unions above all were desperate to keep what was left of their industry working, and defied the NUM pickets designed to stop coal getting to the steel plants. But the electricians, the power workers and even the railwaymen also turned a deaf ear to Scargill’s truculent demand for ‘the total mobilisation of the trade union and labour movement’.7 Passionately as Scargill appealed to working-class solidarity, he was asking others to risk their jobs when thousands of his own members were still working. By flouting the NUM’s own rulebook Scargill had thrown away the public sympathy which was the miners’ greatest asset.

  So the Government held all the cards. And yet the year-long strike still represented a major crisis for Mrs Thatcher. The longer it dragged on the more it highlighted the division of the country which she seemed to embody. Its defeat was vital to her political survival, yet she could not afford to appear too directly involved and above all must not appear vindictive. It was no secret that she loathed the coal industry – the archetypal union-dominated, loss-making nationalised industry which, she wrote in her memoirs, ‘had come to symbolise everything that was wrong with Britain’.8 It was dirty, too; the future, she believed, lay with clean, modern nuclear energy. Yet she was bound to keep saying warm words about coal and what a bright future it could have once production was concentrated on the profitable pits, in order to counter Scargill’s repeated allegation that the Government was intent on destroying it.

  At the same time she had to pretend to treat the strike as an ordinary industrial dispute and leave the handling of negotiations with the NUM to the Coal Board. In the Commons Kinnock continually accused her of abdicating the Government’s responsibility to bring the two sides together. But Government interference to impose a solution, she insisted, would be tantamount to surrender. ‘The Government will leave the National Coal Board to deal with the matter as it thinks fit.’9

  The Government’s only role was to uphold the liberty of those miners – and others – who wanted to work. It was the job of the police to protect the freedom to work, and the job of the Government to support the police. The most serious confrontation took place at the Orgreave coke depot near Sheffield, just down the road from Scargill’s headquarters, where 5,000 pickets gathered on 29 May to try to stop the movement of coal. They were beaten back by even greater numbers of mounted and heavily armoured police, but the battle was renewed daily for three weeks, with incidents of appalling violence on both sides: on the first day alone 104 police officers and twenty-eight pickets were injured, and by the end several hundred – including Scargill himself – had been arrested. The issue here was no longer the future of the coal industry but the maintenance of law and order, and on that subject Mrs Thatcher could not be neutral. ‘What we have got,’ she said on 30 May,‘is an attempt to substitute the rule of the mob for the rule of law, and it must not succeed… The rule of law must prevail over the rule of the mob.’10 After three weeks it did. The battle of Orgreave was a decisive defeat for Scargill’s storm troops.
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  The police operation, too, was centrally controlled. As soon as the strike began the Home Secretary, Leon Brittan, set up a National Reporting Centre in New Scotland Yard to coordinate intelligence between the forty-three independent police forces in England and Wales and ensure that adequate manpower and equipment was available to the chief constables wherever it was needed. The Home Office had learned a lot from the 1981 riots: as a result of that experience the police were far better equipped and trained to deal with mass violence than ever before. Coordination between local forces, it was alleged, was a sinister step in the direction of a national police force under the control of the Government, and ultimately a police state. But Brittan, strongly supported by Mrs Thatcher, insisted that the police had always had the power to prevent a breach of the peace wherever they anticipated one and were quite right to do so.11 In due course the High Court agreed. Undoubtedly there were disturbing implications in the level of policing needed to contain the strike. But at least it was contained by the police. When MacGregor told Mrs Thatcher that in America they would have brought in the National Guard with tanks and armoured cars, she was quite shocked. ‘Oh my goodness,’ she exclaimed, ‘we can’t do that. That would be political suicide in this country.’12 Most of the public recognised that centralised policing was needed to prevent centralised intimidation. If they did not like it they blamed Scargill more than the Government.

  Thus Scargill’s bully-boy tactics played into the Government’s hands. No Prime Minister could have failed to denounce them, and Mrs Thatcher did not restrain her condemnation of his calculated assault on freedom, democracy and the rule of law. But once or twice she went too far with overtly military talk of ‘victory’ or ‘surrender’. It was in an end-of-session speech to Conservative MPs on 19 July that she was reported to have described the striking miners as ‘the enemy within’.13

  Like most such phrases, this one was not original: the Daily Express had already applied it jointly to Scargill and Livingstone in a front-page headline the previous year.14 But it sparked a furious reaction. Mrs Thatcher was forced to explain that she had meant only the militant minority, not the miners in general. But she never retracted the expression. In October she repeated and explained it in an interview with the Sunday Mirror: ‘The “Enemy Within” are those people who turn to violence and intimidation to compel people to do what they can’t persuade them to do.’15

  Three weeks later the Sunday Times revealed that the NUM had sent a representative to Tripoli to seek money – successfully – from the Libyan President Colonel Gaddafi, who also made no secret of funding the IRA. Coming just a few weeks after Libyan agents had shot dead a young policewoman from the diplomatic sanctuary of their London embassy, this was Scargill’s most spectacular blunder, condemned as strongly by Kinnock and the TUC as it was by Mrs Thatcher. But it allowed her to widen her attack still further. In a third speech, delivered at the Carlton Club in November, she equated the striking miners – and the hard left in general – with Libyan and Palestinian terrorists.

  By such speeches Mrs Thatcher deliberately raised the stakes. By defining the coal strike as part of the global struggle against Communism and terrorism she nailed her authority to the outcome of a contest which the Government could not afford to lose and on which she repeatedly declared there could be no compromise. Contrary to her public denials, she took the closest interest in every aspect of the dispute. She not only chaired a large ministerial committee, MISC 101, consisting of nearly half the Cabinet, which met once a week throughout the strike, but more importantly she met both Peter Walker and Leon Brittan nearly every day to keep an eye on developments, and constantly had to be restrained from ringing chief constables with her views on detailed aspects of policing.16

  In September the High Court ruled that the union had indeed breached its own constitution by calling a strike without a ballot. Scargill was fined £1,000 (which was paid by an anonymous donor) and the union £200,000. When it refused to pay, its assets were ordered to be sequestrated. It turned out that they had already been transferred abroad, out of reach of the court. But the judgement further deterred other unions from any thought of risking their own funds.

  By far the most serious alarm of the whole dispute, however, arose from the possibility that the pit deputies’ union NACODS, representing the men responsible for the maintenance and safety of the pits, might join the strike, which would have closed all the mines immediately and caused irreparable damage. Up until the summer enough deputies had kept working to keep the pits in good repair: local managers had turned a blind eye to those who stayed away. But in August the NCB suddenly announced that it would stop paying those who refused to cross NUM pickets. NACODS promptly voted by a majority of 82 per cent to strike from the end of October – principally over their own grievance but also in support of the miners’ campaign against pit closures. Mrs Thatcher was furious at MacGregor’s clumsiness. ‘We were in danger of losing everything because of a silly mistake,’ she recalled on television in 1993.17 MacGregor was told in no uncertain terms that the deputies must be bought off; and after anxious talks under the auspices of the arbitration service ACAS, they were.

  For the Government the key to victory lay with the 50,000 miners in Nottinghamshire and other ‘moderate’ coalfields who had continued working in the face of verbal and physical pressure to join the strike. To Mrs Thatcher they were heroes of democracy. ‘“Scabs” their former workmates call them,’ she told the Tory Party Conference. ‘Scabs? They are lions.’18 There is no question that it took courage to defy the bullies. Her praise, however, did them no favours in their own communities, where being lauded by the Prime Minister made them look like the stooges of a hated Tory Government – as to an extent they were.

  Eventually the strikers started to go back. By the end of October the realisation that they were going to get no significant support from other unions, and the evident fact that the CEGB had enough coal to sit out the winter, led all but the most militant to conclude that the cause was hopeless. The NCB bribed them with deferred bonuses – puffed in newspaper advertisements as ‘the best package ever offered to any group of workers’19 – and in the middle fortnight of November some 11,000 took the bait. By the end of the year 70,000 out of 180,000 miners were working (Scargill, of course, disputed the figure) and MacGregor announced that as soon as the number reached 51 per cent the strike would be over. Yet still it lasted for another two months, partly because a new TUC initiative raised hopes of a face-saving compromise. Again Mrs Thatcher was alarmed. She wanted nothing short of outright victory but was afraid that MacGregor was weakening. Now she intervened to insist that the NCB should require not just an assurance but a written guarantee that it alone could decide when pits must be closed, and went on television on 25 January 1985 to make her involvement perfectly clear.

  She finally got her victory on 3 March – almost exactly a year after the strike had begun. With men now going back at the rate of 9,000 a week, a delegate conference voted to preserve what remained of the union’s authority by ordering an orderly return to work the following Monday, even though nothing at all had been achieved. There was no agreement over pit closures; no pay rise until the overtime ban was lifted; and no promise of an amnesty for convicted pickets. Scargill still wanted to fight on, while simultaneously claiming a famous victory. But the majority of his members, and almost the whole of the rest of the country, could see that in a battle of two stubborn wills, Mrs Thatcher’s had proved the stronger.

  Yet it was not a popular victory. Mrs Thatcher expressed ‘overwhelming relief’ and tried not to crow.20 Most of the public accepted that the NUM’s position had been untenable. But there was no public celebration. Despite Scargill’s tactics there was real sympathy for the miners and particularly for their wives, seen as long-suffering heroines of their communities’ doomed struggle. Mrs Thatcher reaped no political credit for having defeated them. On the contrary, she was felt to have been as inflexible and divisive a class w
arrior as Scargill himself. Instead of getting a lift in the polls, as ministers expected, the Government soon found itself trailing in third place behind both Labour and the Alliance.

  The economic costs of the dispute were high. In his 1985 budget Nigel Lawson reckoned the direct cost to the Government in public expenditure at £2.75 billion. The highest price, however, was paid by the coal industry itself. Scargill had always claimed that the Government’s purpose was to destroy the industry. Over the next ten years the rate of pit closures accelerated, so that by 1994 there were only nineteen left in operation, employing just 25,000 miners. The bright future repeatedly promised by MacGregor and the Government throughout 1984 never materialised, mainly because the privatisation of electricity supply ended the protected market for overpriced coal. Thus Scargill could claim to have been vindicated. But in truth, until his determination to stage a political confrontation, the Thatcher Government had been no more ruthless than its Labour predecessors in trying to manage the inevitable rundown as generously as possible.