11.03.2004

Good pictures, wrong conclusions

David Douglass, Doncaster NUM panel picket coordinator and area executive member during the Great Strike, reviews Socialist Worker's special issue, 'The miners' strike 1984-85'

In among the excellent photos from the epochal struggle and well chosen interviews with the activists of that great movement, Socialist Worker attempts to take stock of the 1984-85 strike.

What was the role of the press, the Tory government, the law, the courts, the unions in general, the Labour Party, the Labour and TUC leadership, and the NUM itself? Time for reflection upon everyone’s failings - except, it seems, those of the Socialist Workers Party. How about reassessing its own assumptions of the time and seeing if they had ever been correct? Well, not in this paper. The wrong conclusions drawn during the strike come back again, this time as well established ‘facts’ - at least in the collective mind of the SWP.

The major problem for the organisation was that the National Union of Mineworkers had wrong-footed them, because it didn’t behave in the predictable way ‘the unions’ were supposed to. Despite SWP posters in the first week of the strike declaring “No sell-out”, there had never been any prospect of a sell-out. Despite this they continued to predict that the NUM - actually the area leaders of the NUM - were hell-bent on selling the strike short. This assumption never had fitted the facts. The Yorkshire area leadership, for example, which the SWP had pilloried from day one, stood fast by the strike, and never once advocated a return to work, even while its offices were sequestrated and stood in readiness of the bailiffs, even in the last two weeks of the strike.

True, there were strong tensions within the bureaucracy - between those who wanted to let the strike and the pickets rip, and those charged with guarding its funds and apparatus - and this caused at times furious rows over the numbers of pickets in the field and how long the funds would last before total collapse. Attempts by the financial secretary to impose some limits on numbers being deployed was a short-sighted bureaucratic response to what seemed like a severed financial artery, but it was never a deliberate calculation to derail the strike: indeed it was argued at the time that it was necessary to preserve funds to maintain our operation for a longer period. This did not stop me threatening to surround his office with Doncaster pickets, as Cromwell had done with parliament, or him threatening to take a big ashtray to my skull.

Notts

When the strike broke in Yorkshire, elaborate planning centres were already being established for nationwide picketing. There was, however, a spontaneous rush over the border into Nottingham which had not at that time decided on whether to strike or not. It was an excited and well-meaning, but premature act of indiscipline. The pro-strikers in Nottingham had asked that we did not picket that county until they had had time to win the area over to a pro-strike position. The Notts leadership was in favour of the strike, as were some members of its executive committee and some branch officials.

The request had been made to win their members to our side. It did not result from some anti-picketing instruction handed down from Barnsley - picketing was always a question of when and where, not if. The Notts pro-strikers argued that Yorkshire had had a ballot on whether to strike or not, and we could hardly argue in that case that they should not be allowed one too. It had also been an age-long custom that you ensured your own county was solid before you came over and picketed anyone else’s. Yorkshire, so far as Cosa (the white collar section), the rescue men, and some north Yorkshire branches were concerned, was far from secure in the first days of the strike and rendering them solid was the first objective the branches and the panels had set.

As it turned out, Nottingham voted to work and the Yorkshire pickets were deployed to call on them not to. Socialist Worker claims that the first sortie over the border had turned would-be working miners around, but that the ensuing gap had now caused them to go to work - without the temporary suspension of picketing the men in Nottingham would have joined the strike. Ironically, the scabs tell it the other way round. They say if it had not been for having a gun placed to their heads and having been intimidated in the first flush of the Yorkshire strike, they would have voted to strike, but now, ‘Fuck ’em: we’re working’. Both are excuses and anyway inaccurate.

To start with, when the pickets were officially deployed, they met little sign of men having the stomach to force their way to work. By and large the bulk of Notts men refused to cross the picket lines - only now we were picketing every pit in Nottingham and not just the two which had been hit unofficially. Being met by unofficial pickets from Doncaster might indeed have influenced a number of the Notts men to vote to fuck ’em and work, but that temper would not last beyond a few days, and certainly would not drive you every day to cross picket lines, especially as pickets were being jailed and brutalised and killed.

Neither version will wash. Without the massive police operation in Nottingham and the throwing down of the gauntlet that it was the Notts miners’ duty to work and break picket lines, we would probably have more or less closed down that coalfield. Sinister forces were at work - organising the scab operation, disrupting the pickets, bribing scabs, turning them into heroes: remarkably they were said to be struggling for the right to work! None of this was the fault of a few days down time between the start of the Yorkshire strike and the announcement of the ballot - it was far bigger than that. Blaming the Yorkshire executive decision is also a way of excusing the scabs: as if they were not responsible for their own sordid and cowardly actions. As if you cannot see what side you are on from behind 20,000 police shields.

Continuing this theme, Socialist Worker says the Welsh miners had a ballot to vote to work, but respected picket lines and joined the strike. I do not know what reception the paper will get in the valleys at the suggestion that the Welsh miners were picketed out! But it ain’t true. The Welsh area, like the Lancashire area executive, voted “in the interests of unity” to join the strike despite their area ballots having decided not to. These decisions were popularly adhered to by the Welsh and to a lesser extent the Lancashire miners, because of their culture and class consciousness, not because unofficial pickets had brought them out; certainly not in spite of their area leaders, but with their area leaders. The difference in Nottingham was entirely the result of their specific culture and lack of class consciousness, not because the Yorkshire executive had pulled out the unofficial pickets for a day or two.

Steel works

The agreements which allowed steel works limited shipments of union-approved coal into the steel ovens was in retrospect a mistake. But it was not some area bureaucrat’s strategy to derail the strike. The agreements had been fashioned with Mick McGahey for Scotland, Sammy Thompson for Yorkshire and Emlyn Williams for Wales. Is Socialist Worker seriously telling us that such men were opposed to the strike or wanted to see it fail?

We had allowed essential safety work at pits, otherwise they might flood, explode or cave in, then we would have been responsible for shutting them. We were fighting against pit closures. Likewise we were told, unless a certain throughput of fuel and iron ore went through the ovens, the casings on them would cool and crack and that would be the end of the steel works, so a major part of our coal markets would be lost, and again we would have shut our own pits. We were promised no steel would be commercially produced and any by-product of the tick-over process would be stored.

We were conned. Indeed steel and the steel union leadership under Bill Sirs seem to have been up to their armpits in counter-strategies against the miners’ action. But clearly the agreement had held the line at the steel works, whether it was technically necessary or not: no scab fuel was coming in and no steel was coming out. The ISTC unions and the steel companies simply ended the agreements and started to ship in scab fuel and break the strike. It was this action which was central to the Orgreave operation and more importantly the confrontation on the rail lines and docks. The agreements were, in retrospect, foolish but it was actually the breaching of those agreements which opened the major fronts in the state’s strategy against the miners. It was essential for the state to break the solidarity action of the railway men and/or the dockers. Had the latter held as strong as the former, we would have blocked their key plans and won. It seems the agreements Sirs reached with Thatcher took precedence over the one he reached with the NUM.

Mass pickets

When it comes to picketing tactics, the SWP spectacularly misses the point. They never understood what it was all about in 1984 and they obviously still do not. Orgreave was a disaster as a tactic. I covered this in great depth in the English civil war TV reconstruction (part 2), but, to be brief, we only had one mass body of pickets. We had several targets. We could split them up and target all the pins on our strategy board; or we could mass-picket one or other of the targets according to their strategic position; or we could use a combination of both, switching fluidly from one plan to the other without prior notice. This was still a strategy for mass pickets: it was not a soft option. But it stopped the police massing their numbers. We could always outwit them because they could not change tactics as quickly as us.

At least until Arthur Scargill’s plan for Orgreave came along. Then we were called upon to go there every day and picket till we dropped. The cops would always know we were coming, could always assemble more bodies and equipment than us, could always lay out the field in preparation - and they always knew where we would go because they told us and escorted us there. Yes, comrades, we did at times breach their ranks, at great physical cost. That is not the point: while we were at Orgreave, we were not in Nottingham. Strange: suddenly picketing out the Nottingham working miners and meeting miners “face to face”, as advocated by Socialist Worker a few paragraphs earlier, drops out of sight. From a restricted coal-cutting day shift only, the Notts coalfield went onto two-shift production after the declaration of Orgreave as a fixed target.

Of course, we tried to deploy pickets to other targets: yes, we tried to move from Orgreave, where the cops were waiting for us, and hit other, more important centres, where they were not. This was not an act of betrayal by the area leaders, as described by Socialist Worker, but an attempt to deploy some kind of strategy. Orgreave was not Lourdes, though some of our comrades thought it might be. Ironically, although the paper cites the picketing and solidarity blacking action by dockers as crucial to the central core of winning the strike, they do not seem to realise the docks were just such ‘other targets’ which Orgreave called us away from. Mass pickets at the wharfs, which we had planned in secret for weeks, were sunk by diversions to Orgreave. The solidarity action on the docks, initiated by Doncaster pickets, should have been the major target, along with Notts itself. Orgreave should have been an occasional hit-and-run target. As it was, Coal Board boss Ian MacGregor called Orgreave his second front.

Preconceived

The strike of 1984-85 was, more than any other, a strike of the rank and file. Where they could not control official strategies, they went out and implemented their own: hit squads, scab watches, petrol bombs and catapults. Mass demonstrations, mass kitchens, mass food and clothes distribution. Collections in the four corners of the world. Logging, fuel gathering the length and breadth of the country and free fuel distribution throughout the communities. A challenge to the state’s elaborate forces, cobbled together through networks that were official, unofficial, ad-hoc, and all points in between. 1974, although victorious, had seen nothing like this. Remarkably the conclusion of Socialist Worker is the reverse: “The miners lost in 1984 despite incomparably better national leadership, because those rank and file networks [of the 70s] had withered away.” Well, it just goes to show: it depends how you choose to tell the tale.

The SWP should be congratulated for bringing out this special - it went down a bomb at the Hatfield pickets’ reunion, not least because some of them are in the photos. It is destined to be a bestseller at miners’ rallies and socials all over the country right through this 20th anniversary year. The commentary however, is just plain wrong. Mainly this is because SWP, like many other groups on the left, set off with a preconceived plan of how things work, and then try to fit reality into it, even if it just will not fit.

It is far easier, comrades, to draw your conclusion after the actual events, having observed how things occur and people act, rather than the way you have determined they will turn out (but do not). But that, of course, would mean you were not the leadership, and that will not do, will it?