10.07.2002

End of an era

Dave Douglass of Yorkshire NUM looks back at the reign of Arthur Scargill, who has recently retired as union president

Arthur Scargill's last National Union of Mineworkers conference was held in Blackpool at the end of May, and I confess to a certain ambivalence. I am both angry and sad. I wish he had finished in the late 80s when the sun still shone out of his backside and he passed his time walking on water. He would have gone with an intact reputation and a union in which most of its officials and the bulk of its members still held him as a friend and comrade. Instead to the end we were riven by controversy and bureaucratic manoeuvres. The scandalous wheeling out of the 'limited member' votes to outvote the working miners. The brass-neck argument that we had somehow extended 'rights' to our retired members to vote in the affairs of the union. In truth the retired member does not know 'his' so-called vote is being cast, does not know the question and has not been given the chance to express an opinion. Some bloke in an office will cast his vote, and tens of thousands of others, in any direction he feels suits the purposes of his office, like some rich gambler moving stacks of chips at a roulette game. The retired member does not have a vote at all: the bureaucrat has them all, despite the wishes of the member. The Derbyshire area, with no mines, outvoted the working coalfields and areas of Scotland, Wales, North East and Cosa (the white collar section) put together. The impact of Scargill's last revision of the rule book was still rebounding round the conference and fundamental questions of democracy and rank and file control of the union were as unresolved as ever. For some the fight was abandoned long ago, having had the stuffing kicked out them. 'What's the point?' has taken over from any idea of ever winning back the union to democratic control of any kind, never mind control by the rank and file. Yet I confess to a certain feeling of regret that this was his last conference, despite the fact that he remains on as 'honorary' president, and president of the Saga holiday club for bureaucrats, and of the International Energy and Miners Organisation; or the fact that his surrogates are now in place and ready to rule on his vicarious direction. I am still sad at the passing of this epoch. He has been after all part of my life in one form or another for these last 35 years or so, as a comrade and fellow miner, as a fellow fighter against the system, a fellow picket and revolutionary. Also, though, in latter years as a demagogic opponent and entrenched bureaucrat - determined, it seemed, to knock himself off the esteemed perch on which I and many others has placed him. Still I too stood in standing ovation as he closed his final conference. It would have been too mean and given too inaccurate an impression not to have done so. His life and contribution cannot be characterised or diminished by these last 10 years of egocentric Stalinist degeneration. The union continues to be steadily strangled by Scargill, who refuses to let go his grip. This despite the fact that a further 50% of the remaining coalfields could be closed by Christmas, with UK Coal's stampede to close the Selby coalfield, the winding up of the Prince of Wales colliery, and the death of the last deep mine in Scotland at Longannet. Despite courageous resolutions calling for action on parity of wages, and a host of other terms and conditions, nothing is seriously being offered that will halt the ever downward spiral, as the last of the coalfields bleed to death. The recent energy debate in the Commons foretells a nuclear future - something we had long predicted. Since the imposition of the Scargill rule changes, manipulation and refracted interpretation of what was already a hand-built, custom-made 'leaders' rule book is continuing. Appeals to the NEC are pending from the last elected Yorkshire area agent, Jeff Stubbs - not a Scargill follower. Despite his election by ballot vote of the membership he finds himself ruled in, ruled out, isolated and even banned from speaking unless the chair (Mr Scargill) invites him to. Meantime the certification officer is due to rule on a host of issues arising from Arthur's total redraft of the rule book. Just prior to conference The Guardian ran a most bizarre features article. In banner headlines Roy Greenslade, former editor of the Daily Mirror who had published scurrilous allegations used to slur NUM leaders during the 1984-85 strike, proclaimed, "Sorry, Arthur". The article was accompanied by photos of Scargill and Rodger Windsor, the NUM executive officer and Mirror informant, and other key players. The article promised to be a revelation. Now, I have successfully proposed (the NEC has agreed) that every miner in Britain be sent a copy of this article by the union. After all, the allegations themselves were screamed from TV screens and tabloids for days and weeks. If someone is now saying they got it all wrong, the miners and the folk of the pit communities need to be informed. However, despite the big apology, careful reading of the article leaves us thinking - what exactly is being revealed or revised here? The piece, it seems, was prompted by the French high court ruling that Rodger Windsor had to repay the £29,500 owed to the NUM (he owes an accumulation of £200,000 apparently and is now bankrupt financially as well as politically). Fine, but that only begs another question. Windsor's story was that £70,000 had been donated for the miners on strike, but that Arthur had divvied it up between himself and Peter Heathfield, the then general secretary, to pay off home loans. Now here we have a French court confirming that Windsor himself got a loan from the NUM. Windsor does not deny this of course: he says it was to allow him to move from London to Sheffield because of the change in HQ arrangements. Arthur insists this was a bridging loan given before the start of the strike and never repaid. The thing about Windsor's tale was that the £70,000 had come from donations made by Libyans, through a sympathetic Doncaster businessman, Altaf Abassi. The Mirror and Cook report made big news out of this: Gaddafi's gold, treason and terrorism. But frankly we didn't give a bugger if money was coming to support us from Libya. The British state was taking unprecedented aid from Arab regimes and far eastern regimes of all descriptions in the form of extra oil shipments and coal imports to win the strike. The issue for us was whether any official was getting money intended for the strikers, not where it had come from. The Lightman enquiry, set up by the union in 1990 to investigate all such allegations, could find "no clear evidence that any money had come from Libya", but concluded remarkably: "If it had, it had been used for the purposes to which it was intended." Presumably this meant that there was no evidence any money had been donated into the NUM strike funds, but if it had it would be unidentifiable and simply recycled to the women's support groups, or strikers and pickets, along with all the other international donations, of which there were millions. On the face of it the hapless Mr Abassi, who was very public and vociferous in his support for the miners, had nothing to gain by lying, but is now left in a very invidious position. At no point have we ever been bothered about setting up false accounts, cash moving about in great wads, or setting up bogus schemes to ensure the money we were raising from our comrades abroad avoided the sequestrator and got to fund the continuation of the strike. We would expect that it was done and many of us at all levels of the union engaged in it. Money from the Soviet Union or Libya was welcome. The issue was making sure it went to its intended source. It is hard to see from the very wordy feature article how Greenslade's big apology adds anything to the heart of the matter, other than, yes, they flogged it for every word it was worth, to discredit the union and Scargill. This was political and this was reactionary, but after defending our right to take money from where we want, and throw dust in the eyes of the state and its laws, is anything else left to be said? Lightman had found that the story of Scargill and Heathfield using strikers' money to pay off their mortgages was entirely untrue, and we were happy with that - it proved that the state had manufactured the story to discredit a militant and sow despondency among the miners and the communities who had fought so hard. It was an attempt to make us look dupes and rob us of those proud pages of class struggle. Our leaders were vindicated. But when the dust settled the question of money, control of money, knowledge about where money had come from and who now controlled it still remained. Greenslade's apology does not begin to address these awkward questions. It cannot be left just like that, because the revelations did open up wide differences in approach between the bulk of the NUM and Arthur. He has never accepted that the money sent from the Russian miners was for the striking British miners. He has always asserted it was sent "for international purposes" - one of which just happened to be the NUM strike in Britain - but it was always to be at the discretion of the International Miners Organisation, precursor of the IMEO. It is a hard square to circle. Clearly the money was raised by Soviet miners for striking British miners. True, the Soviet leadership had promised Thatcher they would not send money to the British miners. True, you cannot trade roubles and they have to be exchanged for more acceptable western currencies. True, you could not send the money straight here in any form because the state through the sequestrator would just take it, or it would be tied up with injunctions, etc. All of this demanded subterfuge, false bank accounts, international connections, etc. Nothing wrong with any of that - it was necessary to sustain the strike and the miners' families. But at the end of that period, at the end of the sequestration in June 1986, the union should have been informed and the NUM deposited the money which had been raised for it, or rather for the miners and their families. Arthur has candidly said that, were it not for the revelations, he would never have told the NEC or the conference of the funds, because they were not ours! It is something we shall perhaps never agree about, although certainly he had no say whatever in where the money was sent to, or in what form, or for what purpose - that was entirely at the discretion of Mikhail Srebny, the Soviet miners' leader in charge of raising the money and dispatching it. It was never ever sent to the NUM as such. Outwith this process, Heathfield and Scargill lived in houses owned by the NUM, or about to be owned by the NUM, as did all former national officials. In Scargill's case he paid off his own mortgage before it was bought by the union. Peter Heathfield lived in a house which was the property of the Derbyshire area of the NUM - the national union would purchase it from that body. In neither case did the national officials have mortgages during the strike. The houses were being bought for the NUM - albeit for the national officials to live in as per age-long practice, but the houses were not their property. This of course knocks the middle stump out of the allegation, but Arthur inadvertently handed over another bucket of mud with which to further cloud the waters. For some obscure reason I have never fathomed out he has a penchant for big cars and wanted to likewise buy a big house. Jack Common, the revolutionary Geordie writer, wrote in 1935: "Communism is not merely a social remedy; it is a question troubling our conduct. We must have done with leaders who understand the historic necessity of communism, but who never let it be a personal question: of those whose fantastic preaching of class warfare is only silenced by a villa in Twickenham and a smart car." Arthur's "villa" was a £100,000-plus mini-mansion in Barnsley called Treelands (at that time the selling price for the former pit houses most miners lived in was around £15,000). Now, it has been said of me that I should be quite happy living in a wigwam, and that is probably true. It is also true that for a national trade union leader on a top notch salary (which conference determines through the rules and at that time was more than £64,000 pa) - who has worked without a break from being a teenager, whose wife has likewise worked most of her life and whose offspring had grown up and left - £100,000 was not in that context a fantastically high mortgage. Doubtless it is also true that, had it been any other trade union leader in Britain, nobody would have said a word. The problem was twofold: Arthur had not been paid at the time when he wanted to buy the house. Indeed because of sequestration he was not paid until November 1986, but this was only five months following the end of the strike, with hundreds sacked, widespread desperate debts, people being evicted and mortgages being surrendered for want of money. To go forward and purchase such a visible sign of affluence displayed in my mind a major lack of tact, to say the least. What was worse was that Arthur borrowed £91,000 from the Miners International Research Education and Support Fund, which had been raised by eastern block miners, either (according to your point of view) "for international purposes" or for striking British miners and others. The fact that 50% of this was repaid with interest within five months, and the rest with interest by January 1989 (the Lightman investigating QC agreed that all the debts, which had then been transferred to the IMO, had been repaid) almost does not matter. But, as a lack of judgement, leaving himself and the union open to attack, it was monumental. In straight cash terms, the fund did well from the deal, but that was never the issue to the membership. Most officials have perks and can borrow from their unions, but this money none of the members or executive knew about and, given the way it was raised - from impoverished east European and Russian miners, to assist their fellow miners in struggle - the lack of discretion was breathtaking and leaves us all, not least Arthur, open to constant abuse and attack despite the Greenslade public apology. Arthur will no longer directly preside over what are now biannual NUM conferences. His talents will be directed to the IEMO, a body in which he will have no problems with democratic accountability, factions, rule books or any other restraints. Having been built in his image and likeness, the IEMO has dispensed with all such flippancies and irrelevancies. Arthur's last conference was graced by Alain Simone, French CGT miners' leader who was also a co-founder of the IEMO. It was likewise regaled by area leaders from Northumberland and Yorkshire, who had been on IEMO conferences dealing with the Middle East and Cuba. The French miners' support for the 84-85 strike is not in question. Neither is our solidarity with the Palestinian cause or struggle for independence and justice by the Cuban people. These are not, however, as was implied by such speakers, dependant upon the existence of the IEMO or our affiliation and funding of it. This is not and never has been a workers' organisation: it is a bureaucrat's club. The membership of affiliated bodies have not the slightest control over its actions, its statements, its finance or its political direction. That people enjoy trips around the world and have a canny crack over otherwise important issues is not the point. One thing this conference had in superabundance, like the special one before it, was such red herrings. The conference wound up a day early so delegates could watch the final game in the World Cup. For us, however, the ball had long ago been dispensed with in order to get on with the game. 118th Durham Miners Gala Saturday July 13. Assemble Red Hill from 9am. March through the city to the Racecourse