04.02.1999

Devoted to his class

Obituary: Mick McGahey 1925-1999

Michael McGahey died on January 30 1999, aged 73. His death marks the passing of an indomitable class warrior, an accomplished trade union leader, activist and agitator, and an authentic tribune of the working class.

Comrade McGahey joined the old Communist Party of Great Britain in his teens and remained a member for some 50 years, until the Euro’s liquidation. He took pride in describing himself as a “devout communist”. Devotion, expressed in dogged loyalty to the CPGB and to the National Union of Mineworkers, was the defining characteristic of McGahey’s political life. It represented both his great strength and, in certain respects, his weakness.

Comrade McGahey’s communist convictions, rooted in a profoundly humanist Marxist ethic, were formed under the influence of his father, James, a founder member of the CPGB and a leading activist in the Scottish NUM during the General Strike of 1926. As McGahey himself said, “I learned from my father a bitter resentment at the conditions and exploitation of ordinary working people.” This resentment, focused by diligent self-teaching and honed by a communist education into a political weapon, was transformed into a passionate commitment not only to the miners, but to the working class as a whole. As a formidable orator, as a tactician in the major battles and minor skirmishes of the class war, in whatever capacity the cause required him to exercise, McGahey remained faithful to his communist vision.

Sadly, his fidelity was bestowed on a Party leadership that, by the time he reached maturity, had already forsaken the revolutionary principles of 1920. The CPGB to which McGahey devoted his unswerving loyalty had degenerated into a Party of reform, a Party whose programme, enshrined in The British Road to Socialism, had little to offer the working class but fine words and the vain hope that socialism could be achieved through bourgeois democracy and the agency of the Labour Party.

Whatever his private thoughts - a man with his intelligence must surely have had his doubts - comrade McGahey faithfully imparted the CPGB line that industrial action, by bringing in a Labour government, really could set us on the parliamentary road to socialism. In 1973, 12 months after a devastatingly successful strike against the Ted Heath government in which McGahey played a leading role as tactician, he chose the occasion of his election as vice-president of the NUM to rouse the union with the assurance that

“We shall speed the day when not only will we establish decent wages and a decent standard of living. We will end this Tory government and create conditions for a rapid advance towards socialism in this country.”

McGahey’s masterminding of the 1974 coal strike did end the Tory government. To be vilified by the bourgeois press, denounced in a House of Commons motion signed by representatives of all parties and personally singled out by Heath as the “leader of a small group of unelected communists who wanted to run the country” - these things must have gladdened him no end.

But the victory of 1974 soon turned to ashes. True, the incoming Labour administration repealed the Tories’ Industrial Relations Act and abandoned legal sanctions on pay bargaining. Yet scarcely more than a year later they introduced their own incomes policy and suddenly the ‘consensus’ of ‘moderate’ trade unionists around Jack Jones, leader of the TGWU and the architect of the ‘social contract’, left McGahey and his comrades on the left exposed. The Scottish NUM’s policy of total opposition to any form of wage restraint, a position it had successfully defended for years, was voted down in the Scottish TUC, and the worthlessness of Labour’s promises (and those of its friends in the TUC bossocracy) became apparent to all.

The pitiful end of the Wilson-Callaghan administration of 1974-9 mercilessly exposed Labour’s ideological bankruptcy. When Thatcher appointed Ian MacGregor as chairman of the Coal Board, McGahey predicted that this move indicated the prime minister’s resolve “to destroy trade unionism not only in mining but in Britain”. He was right. The Tories deliberately provoked a confrontation for which they had made lengthy and careful preparation. In retrospect, the eventual defeat of the ensuing miners’ Great Strike of 1984-5 may seem to have been inevitable. Throughout the dispute, as vice-president of the NUM, McGahey was tirelessly engaged. Our most vivid memories of him are drawn from those desperate months of struggle. The strike threw into relief all that was best and worst in the British working class movement. Heroism and grim determination on the part of the miners and their leaders; craven cowardice and treachery on the part of the Labour and TUC leadership - rats who deserted the ship at the first sign of choppy waters.

In the aftermath of McGahey’s death, the story put about in the broadsheet obituaries - on the basis of what evidence remains unclear - is that McGahey would have given in much earlier than Scargill and that, if he had merely given the signal, the left wing of the miners would have followed him in abject capitulation. Whatever the truth, if any, behind such stories, the fact is that comrade McGahey remained staunch to the end. Then, as now, bourgeois commentators (and many ‘socialists’ too) contended that the strike should never have gone ahead without a full ballot of the NUM membership. McGahey’s position on this question was unequivocal: “People must remember that the miners had no choice but to fight. MacGregor, without a ballot or consultation, decided ... to close pits and throw thousands of men out of work at whatever cost ... it was a challenge that could not be ducked, and the men had a moral and constitutional right to ask their colleagues in the movement for help.” As we know, help was not forthcoming.

In the aftermath of the strike and in the atmosphere of unavoidable rancour that followed such a major defeat, McGahey’s relations with Scargill are said to have worsened. Notably, McGahey declined to write his memoirs because to do so would have meant “having to be factual about men still alive ... like Arthur Scargill ... they are human beings and they have wives and families.” The implications are clear enough.

After his retirement from the NUM, McGahey remained active in politics. In time, his fiercely patriotic Scots heart got the better of his communist head. When the Eurocommu-nists finally liquidated themselves into the Democratic Left in 1991, he refused to follow them and rejected the Communist Party of Britain just as forcefully. Unable to draw revolutionary conclusions like the Leninists of the CPGB, he turned to the left nationalist Communist Party of Scotland.

At times like this, it is customary to say ‘We shall not see his like again’. But that is not the case. New McGaheys will come forward from the labour movement, fired with the same ardour, but hopefully unburdened by his reformist illusions.

Michael Malkin