There is No Alternative

by Claire Berlinski

  “And if they knew that, why didn’t they turn on him?”

  “Because of loyalty. Because they were isolated, under attack, and they weren’t gonna break ranks and turn on their own leadership—”

  “So their loyalty was to the union?”

  “No, the loyalty was to their own communities and their own comrades. That being said—”

  “But what kind of loyalty is it to march together like lemmings off a cliff?”

  “That’s how wars are fought, luv. If generals couldn’t get men to line abreast against machine guns, there wouldn’t be any wars.”

  “Yeah, I understand your point, but I’m still surprised by this—”

  “No, this is the thing. Other than people who know the mining communities and miners very well, people will receive what I say, and they’ll think, ‘Well, he doesn’t have any interest in bullshitting us about this, and maybe there’s some truth in it, but it can’t really be true.’ Nobody who comes from a coal-mining community says that. You just say, ‘Yeah, that’s right. That’s what it’s like.’ And that is what it’s like. To some extent it’s to do with the physical sociology of coal mining. You depend on all the other guys. Including the ones you don’t like. All rivalries die the moment you go down the colliery. As far as you’re concerned, whether you like someone or not, they’re lookin’ out for you, and you’re lookin’ out for them.”

  Bernard Ingham, of course, sees it a bit differently. The miners “were paralyzed. Because they were in the hands of a military junta, in effect. And the discipline that they exercised, the brutality of their message, was really quite remarkable. I mean, this wasn’t a democratic institution, this was a menacing institution. I don’t think people really understood the depths to which the British trade union movement sank during Scargill’s time. He had a private army! The purpose of these flying pickets was to impose his will upon his union, and of course upon the police and the nation. And these flying pickets went far and wide, and I think I’m right in saying they were the only people the union paid during the strike. Those who formed his private army and fought the battle at Orgreave, against the police. Now, that is the nature of the man.”

  Kinnock’s loyalties were utterly conflicted. He loathed Scargill and knew he would bring the miners to ruin. But he represented the Labour Party—whose origins are in the trade union movement—and came from a mining town himself. He could not bring himself publicly to condemn Scargill’s failure to ballot the union membership.

  Walker implored Kinnock to call for a ballot. He persuaded two Labour parliamentarians—“I can’t name names, for obvious reasons”—to go to Kinnock with a message: Look, Kinnock. Obviously I can’t ask you to support a Tory government in a miners’ strike. All I ask you to do is say, “The miners have always had a ballot. This terrible dispute doesn’t have the support of a ballot. I ask you as leader of the Labour Party to now quickly hold a ballot on this strike.” It’s in your interest: If they ballot in favor of the strike, you’ll be supported by the miners, not by Scargill. If they ballot against it, you will be praised for having settled the strike. As party leader, you have nothing to lose. The envoys did their best to persuade them. “But he said no, he couldn’t be seen, you know, bullying the miners’ union.”

  Kinnock told me that he tried, repeatedly, to talk sense into Scargill behind the scenes. Given how much the men loathed each other, I wondered about the tenor of those conversations. Were they acrimonious, I ask? “Did he speak to you disrespectfully, or—?”

  “No, no, no, no, no, no. No, no. Nothing like that. I mean, the only time that Scargill would ever have a go at me was when he was surrounded by a couple o’ thousand people. I mean, he’d never do it to my face.”

  “So what was he saying to justify his actions?”

  “Well, he just kept dodging around, you know, and moving the goalposts. I’d say something like, ‘It’s going to be very difficult for you to get any kind of picketing support, ’cause you have no ballot. Sympathetic action is very difficult,’ and he’d say, ‘Ah, but the coal stocks, there’s only a fortnight left!’”

  “But that’s nuts! I mean, he knew it was nuts!”

  “Of course it’s nuts! Of course it’s nuts!”

  “So why weren’t you insisting on a ballot?” I asked.

  “Well, if I’d said at that stage, ‘Either have a ballot, or go back to work,’ then two things would have happened. First of all, I would have been kicking the miners in the face. Secondly, of course, Scargill could always have blamed me for the failure of the strike. So I wasn’t going to allow either of those things to happen. So that was the reason.”

  “In retrospect do you regret that you made that decision?”

  “Oh yeah. It was the worst decision I ever made in my life.”

  “Really? You think that was the worst decision you ever made?”

  “Oh, Christ, yeah. Yeah, yeah.”

  When I ask Nigel Lawson about Kinnock’s odd passivity during the miners’ strike, he snorts derisively. “He was a very weak man. He was and is a very weak man.”

  I don’t agree. Kinnock was in fact courageous; it was Kinnock, after all, who after this debacle purged his party of its hard-left wing, paving the way for the rise of New Labour. But I suspect that until the very last, Kinnock, like Scargill, thought the miners would win. After all, Kinnock comes from a mining town; he is a miner’s son. He hated Scargill, and he hated Thatcher, but he loved the miners. So he bet on the wrong horse.

  . . . When a miner is hurt it is of course impossible to attend to him immediately. He lies crushed under several hundredweight of stone in some dreadful cranny underground, and even after he has been extricated it is necessary to drag his body a mile or more, perhaps, through galleries where nobody can stand upright. They are liable to rheumatism and a man with defective lungs does not last long in that dust-impregnated air, but the most characteristic industrial disease is nystagmus. This is a disease of the eyes which makes the eyeballs oscillate in a strange manner when they come near a light. It is due presumably to working in half-darkness, and sometimes results in total blindness . . . 180

  I do not understand the miners’ determination to keep the pits open. I understand their rage—a life in the pits would madden anyone, I reckon—but I don’t understand its object. Why were they demanding the right to mine coal? Why were they not demanding the very opposite—that the government do something, anything, to shut every last one of those hellishly cruel pits down? The miners chanted, “Coal, not dole.” But a lifetime on the dole, it seems to me, would have been preferable to going down the mines. And the dole was the worst alternative in 1984. Unemployment would not have meant starvation, as it might have a century prior.

  Peter Walker nods when I say something to this effect. “I used to go down in the valleys, and knock door-to-door on all the rather humble houses. And it was a terrible experience, because nearly always a widow would come to the door. Her husband had either died of mining illnesses, or mining accidents. Or alternatively, she’d come to the door, and you’d hear in the background an elderly man coughing . . . ”

  The waiter refills Walker’s wine glass. “Was there ever a moment when you doubted that the government would win?” I ask him.

  “Never. No.”

  “You were always completely confident? Why was that?”

  “If he had found a way of closing all the pits, I would have imported coal. I mean, there’s plenty of coal to be imported. And I would have put the army in charge of protecting the lorries. And I knew that in whatever I wanted to do, I was absolutely confident that if I said, ‘Look, we’ve got to import coal, you know, we’ve got to have the army monitoring the delivery of coal,’ I would have had the support of the cabinet, and Margaret. But I was never anywhere near that. There was never a moment when the coal stocks went down. He tried to do other things, like stop spare parts going in to the power stations, and we found ways to smuggle them in.”

  The dessert
cart arrives. I order the lemongrass crème brûlée; Walker opts for the trio of homemade sorbets. I finish the last drop of wine in my glass.

  “I mean,” says Walker, “it was a strike you couldn’t lose. If you’d lost, it would have been a total disaster for democratic capitalism. It would have been unbelievable.”

  The miners, increasingly desperate and increasingly humiliated, grew more violent. Working miners were assaulted, their families terrorized. A taxi driver carrying a scab to work in South Wales was killed.

  Reports surfaced in the papers that Scargill had taken money from Libyan agents. Not long before, a British policewoman had been murdered by gunfire emerging from the Libyan embassy in London. Scargill did not deny the reports. He argued—characteristically—that the money came from “Libyan trade unions.”

  In December 1984 an interviewer remarked to the prime minister that people were literally being killed over coal. Was it not time, he asked her, to do something, anything, to bring the strike to an end? No, she replied. “As far as Government is concerned, never, never, never give in to violence. Never. This strike has been sustained by violence and it took a long time for certain people to condemn that violence, and that length of time should never have occurred in a democracy. This strike is sustained by violence and by a refusal to have the democratic right to a ballot. Now, if anyone is suggesting that I appease those: No.”181 The words echoed, as they were intended to do, Churchill’s: “Never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.” By December, it was perfectly clear to the nation that no matter the cost, no matter who died, Thatcher would not break. In her rhetoric, the striking miners had now been elevated, by analogy, to Nazis. At the height of this crisis, on October 12, the Brighton Hotel was bombed. As she makes clear in her memoirs, Thatcher held the bombers and Arthur Scargill to be morally indistinguishable.182

  The miners, desperate to feed themselves and their families, began trickling back to work. By late February, more than half the miners had returned.

  On March 3, nearly a year after the announcement of the strike, the delegates of the miners’ union at last defied Scargill. They voted—narrowly—to abandon the cause.

  They had lost.

  “It was a pivotal event,” says Charles Powell of the strike. “The Falklands were pivotal in restoring Britain’s national self-confidence, and that was an important part of it, because the country again felt invigorated, proud, capable of seeing people off, capable of achieving things. That provided a very good psychological environment for subsequent battles on the domestic front. But the miners’ strike, which brought us to the very brink of civil war—”

  “Do you really mean that? A civil war?”

  “Yes, I do, yeah, I do. I really mean that. It was close to a civil war situation, and you’ve got tens of thousands of police battling miners, huge confrontations, the whole trade union movement on the edge, sort of ready to go. It was a very, very fraught and tense time. And it was almost like fighting a war. If you’d been there on Downing Street at the heart of that you’d have felt that, you know, bulletins from the front, and war councils taking place late at night and all those sorts of things. It was a real crisis atmosphere.”

  “Do you think that level of conflict could have been avoided with a more delicate policy, while still achieving the same ends—”

  “No. Certainly not.”

  “So you place the blame for the extremity of the dispute entirely on Scargill?”

  “She knew there had to be a major confrontation. Scargill had to be defeated in battle. It was almost medieval, you know, this idea, a challenge, a joust, whatever it was. She knew he could only win by deploying all these miners, as many as he could, taking her on, taking on the state . . . I think it really was an exceptional situation, it needed to be. The symbolism was so important, namely, you had to establish this dominance over the trade unions. Finally. You can’t really imagine what it was like, for people of my generation, we used to switch on the television at night, in the 1960s and ’70s, and there were the trade union leaders, coming out of Number 10 Downing Street, night after night, having told the government what to do, what they could do, what they’d put up with and not put up with, and they’d got their way, time after time.”

  “You say I can’t imagine what it was like. But try to explain it to me.”

  “It was demoralizing. Seeing this band of men, holding the whole country to ransom. Looking after the interests of their members at the expense of everything and everyone else. They had no broader view of the national interest, or anything of that sort at all, they were intent only on their narrow interest.”

  “Were there any moments in the dispute when you thought, ‘We’re not on the right track here, we’re not going to win this’?”

  “I don’t recall thinking we’d ever lose. There were setbacks, there were things we got wrong, you know, there was all this business about the mine supervisors—but no, no, those were tactical errors. I think the strategy, because it had been so carefully prepared, was always bound to succeed. Now, many people will tell you that they were responsible for it as much as she was. Peter Walker, I think, would certainly argue that he was the man who won the miners’ strike—”

  “I spoke to him, and yes, he does argue that.”

  “Yes, and there are sort of politics in that—”

  “Of course, of course—”

  “Well, he did have a very important role, absolutely. But the ultimate willpower was really hers. She became a Boudicea-like figure at the forefront of the battle. That’s how it seemed to people in the country, I think. I mean, it was all the Iron Lady and Battling Maggie stuff. I mean, that’s how she proceeded.”

  In 1985, a triumphant Thatcher addressed the Conservative Party conference:We were told you’ll never stand a major industrial strike, let alone a coal strike . . . But we did just that—and won. It was a strike conducted with violence and intimidation on the picket line and in the villages. Yet Labour supported that strike to the bitter end . . . What do you think would have happened if Mr. Scargill had won? I think the whole country knows the answer. Neil would have knelt.183

  Linger for a moment on that last line. Consider all of its emasculating, sadistic, and sexual implications. Kinnock says he didn’t think it chivalrous to hit a girl. That hardly stopped Thatcher from kicking him between the legs—even when he was already on the ground. That too is how she proceeded.

  “Was Scargill a megalomaniac, or was he desperate?” I ask Bernard Ingham.

  “Megalomaniac, in my view. I mean, it was a gamble, no doubt about it, a bad gamble, but he believed that they were invincible. I mean, no government that he’d come across would stand up to him, and of course he was astounded when Mrs. Thatcher did! I think he felt he was invincible, and that is fair! After all, it was a pretty close-run thing!”

  “Was it?”

  “Oh, yeah, it was closer than people imagined. I mean, without her resolution, they would have caved in a long time earlier.”

  “Well it’s interesting that you say that, because just yesterday, speaking to Lord Walker, I asked, ‘Was there ever a moment when you were in doubt that you would win?’ and he said, ‘Never.’”

  “That’s not true.”

  “At what point was there a doubt?”

  “I mean, if power supplies had faltered, then they would have been in real trouble. And fortunately, they had Walter Marshall, at the seams, who coaxed every bolt that he could find from anything, you know, and kept us going. And also, it wasn’t an excessively cold winter. Of course, if he’d have called a ballot, and won that ballot—”

  “Would there have been any chance of him winning?”

  “Oh, yes, I think he would, because he wouldn’t have split the union. And the very act of splitting the union meant that the government had coal production movin
g.”

  “But my understanding was that the reason he didn’t call a ballot was because he knew he wouldn’t win.”

  “Well, that’s what people say. But you never know. You never know when there’s a ballot called. I honestly don’t know, and I don’t think anyone who’s honest does know whether he’d have won . . . But I can’t agree with Peter Walker that everything was plain sailing. It wasn’t.”

  “He didn’t say ‘plain sailing.’ He said he never had a doubt that there would be victory in the end. He never believed for a second that there was a chance that Mrs. Thatcher would fail.”

  “Oh, I see. Well, I never believed for a second that Mrs. Thatcher would give in. That’s different.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, she could have been stolid to the end, but if the lights went out . . . if British industry were crippled, what do you do then?”

  As the men trooped dejectedly back into the pits, their wives distributed carnations—the symbol of heroism—at the gates. At many mines, they marched back to the sound of brass bands. But everyone knew this was no victory.