14.03.1996

Not so simple

Dave Douglass, vice-chair of South Yorkshire NUM panel responds to a Weekly Worker article on the miners’ Great Strike of 1984-5 (February 29)

Jack Conrad’s feature, ‘Thatcherism versus Scargillism’, was not bad in an overall view of the strike and the forces involved. I feel it would have carried a little more depth and insight if Jack had utilised my latest work, Pit sense versus the state. This deals first hand with struggles between elements of the rank and file and the leadership, as well as those within both the rank and file and the leadership, over strategy and tactics.

It was a struggle which went on from top to bottom and was never, as some have tried to portray it, militant rank and file miners against moderate union bureaucrats - would that it had been that simple.

There are a number of mistakes which could have been avoided with reference to the book.

The partial exemption and the release of some coal stocks to the steel mills like Scunthorpe was never granted because of “coal’s national interest”. The text ascribes this view to area leaders like Jack Taylor, but the footnote credits various pundits of the Morning Star, etc. Jack Taylor never argued or agreed to partial exemption on those grounds and I doubt that the others did either.

We were approached by a joint delegation of trade unions from the plants who persuaded us that without the giant ovens being kept ticking over and warm the expensive linings inside the furnace walls would cool, crack and the plant would never reopen.

Steel mills were a sizeable chunk of coal’s market and destroying them (rather than temporarily closing them down) seemed to ride right against a strike against job losses, especially our own. The steelworkers and their leaders promised that no steel for sale would be produced and only non-saleable steel blocks would be produced and stored for the duration of the strike - in return for allowing just enough coal through to keep the plants ticking over. We agreed and were allowed to have weekly inspections of the plants to prove that no more coal than was minimally necessary was coming in and no steel was going out.

It seemed to offer us an important grip over an arterial pressure point. This is the truth of the exemption - nothing whatever to do with national interest; though of course that sort of ‘national asset’, ‘national resource against our foreign competitors’ PR rubbish was used as a soft alternative to straight working class solidarity calls by a number of people ostensibly on our side in that dispute. But those general views had nothing to do with the specific exemption.

Of course this isn’t the end of the story and the plot was thickening.

Having got the steel works under our belts - we thought - we directed our energies at closing down scab operations in Nottingham and elsewhere, something we had been very successful at, as the book shows.

Kinnock and the Labour traitors and the key coterie of TUC general council members and Labour NEC members working for an MI5-funded state, acting as its forum, were furious at the scale and impact of the strike.

Former Coal board chairman Ian MacGregor tells us, in his frank book on the strike, he needed to open up a second front. At that time steelworkers’ chief Bill Sirs demanded unlimited supplies of coal for steel mills. Simultaneously a well-oiled picket busting operation and a giant column of scab trucks, protected by a veritable army of police vehicles, hit the road for Orgreave.

Your description of Scargill’s Saltley Gates vision of Orgreave is correct, blindly supported by the Socialist Workers Party and Workers Power, who saw Orgreave as a kind of Lourdes. Fixed on massive scabbing in the heart of South Yorkshire coalfield, the pickets, ignoring all of the tactics and instructions for counter-strategy, fell back en masse for the plant. It was an ambush in more ways than one.

We were later to discover British Steel were landing shiploads of iron ore and all the coke they wanted at the BS private wharf in Scunthorpe and running it the mile or two into the plant. To what extent that whole operation at Orgreave was a total set-up is unclear. It was a risky strategy. As soon as Scunthorpe became a major target, Hatfield miners picketed the railway line from the wharf to the steel works and blocked the entire traffic for the full 12 months.

As coal started to build up on the wharf and we picketed the dockers, non-dock labour started to picket the coal and that sparked the national dock strike and presented us with an opportunity which brought the miners’ strike to within a day of winning (according to Thatcher herself, one more day of the national dock strike and she was caving in).

There was selfless picketing by dockers unconnected with the coal strike, like fish porters who came down from Aberdeen to picket the coal wharf at Immingham where dockers had started to unload scab fuel to scab lorries. Dockers were crystal clear as to the importance of holding their end of the coal blockade tight and did understand the politics of the situation.

As you say, it was firstly the leadership who shit a brick, as irate drivers threatened to burn the Dover port, and then ordinary dockers at Immingham, who lost their bottle and scabbed, that stemmed a serious hole in the government’s dyke.

Of course the flaw in the Orgreave strategy takes nothing away from the heroism of those lads who fought bare-gloved with everything they could get their hands on against the psychos in blue.

One thing which is pure fiction and cannot pass is the tale that “Scargill had to call off his own army in return for TUC statements of support in September 1984,” Really? You don’t say when or why or where such a notion should come from. Nobody told the army and we certainly didn’t leave the field, unless you are simply talking about the solidarity demonstration outside the hall - in which case you might be right. But remember many of our lads had no intention of lobbying our ‘brothers’ in a fraternal sense and were quite prepared to kick most of the other delegates first and ask them where they stood second.

Scargill was never able to control the uncontrollable fury of many of our pickets, who many times let loose against whoever was nearest - a sort of ‘kill ‘em all, let god sort them out’ response. Scargill may have reasoned that having the TUC conference hall burnt down and the delegates put to the sword might not be the best way of winning solidarity action.

Finally I must say I hate the way you use the word ‘syndicalism’ in its narrow French meaning rather than in its political anarcho-syndicalist roots. Scargill is not a syndicalist. He was at that time a Stalinist-Marxist member of the Labour Party who believed in the democratic process and parliamentary reform, backed up by militant trade union action. The use of industrial action to bring around social change does not make one a syndicalist. Such a usage denies the political doctrine of the real syndicalist tradition and ideology.