04.08.2004

Miners' long road to defeat

Ken Smith A civil war without guns - 20 years on, Socialist Publications, illustrated by Alan Hardman, pp120, £5

I have never been politically a great fan of ‘the Militant’, so I confess to being pleasantly surprised at this book. It seems Ken Smith has quite independently come to conclusions on the development and progress of the 1984-85 strike identical to my own views. I confess to not being used to agreeing with books and articles on the strike, and was not expecting to from this particular source. Despite that, I think this is probably the best book so far written on the events of 1984-85. It covers the strategies, the mistakes, the highs, the lows.

The book sets the scale of the action as “the longest lasting, most bitter industrial dispute in the second half of the 20th century in Britain and was undoubtedly the most widespread in its effects on society generally” (all quotes from A civil war without guns - 20 years on). I would go a little further and say it is probably true of the whole century - certainly in terms of violence and mass resistance 84-85 exceeds 1926.

Ken is at pains to challenge the idea that the strike was lost from the beginning - in fact we came close to victory on a number of occasions. By October 1984, six months into the strike, the future of Thatcher’s government hung in the balance - there was less than six weeks’ coal stocks left. Frank Ledger, the Central Electricity Generating Board director of operations, revealed that they had only planned for the strike to last six months, and power supply by this time was “catastrophic.”

Former chair of the CEGB Sir Walter Marshall spelt out what this meant: “Our predictions showed on paper that Scargill would win certainly by Christmas. Margaret Thatcher got very worried about that ... I felt she was wobbly.” National Coal Board chair Ian MacGregor was summoned to Downing Street and recalls Thatcher’s comments in his memoirs: “I’m very worried about it. You have to realise that the fate of this government is in your hands, Mr MacGregor. You have got to solve this problem.”

The proposed strike by the supervisors union Nacods threatened to close down all working pits. Nacods to their credit had voted in a nationwide individual secret ballot with 82.5% in favour of strike action. Thatcher describes how provocations on behalf of the NCB against Nacods almost led to her downfall: “We had to make it quite clear that if it was not cured immediately then the actual management of the Coal Board could indeed have brought down the government.” This surely demonstrates that Thatcher was well aware how delicately balanced the strike was - an intervention by Nacods, as their members had clearly wished and voted for, would have swung the defeat into a massive unparalleled victory.

Ken Smith does not tell us, and this book does not explore, just what was done to get Nacods leaders to break the movement away from crushing victory to crushing defeat. Certainly it was not a deal to save their jobs, since Nacods was killed off with the pits, and the deputies and overmen now sit on the scrap-heap, along with the miners, in the same socially deprived former pit communities.
Ken was right to identify that the leadership “were still reliant on the tactics of 1972 and 1974 to win their next strike. It was not that the tactic of flying pickets and mass picketing were wrong or inappropriate. However, because of a number of fundamental differences they could not be the sole means of winning victory in an all-out bitter political dispute that 1984-1985 was to become.”

One of the burdens we faced in the 84-85 strike which we had not in the earlier successful strikes of the 70s was the presence of large numbers of non-striking miners. Their existence was no accident: they had been carefully created. In the case of Nottingham, given the legacy of Spenserism, perhaps re-created. The key element of this was to break the identification of the miners nationwide that came with national conciliation and pay bargaining. The effect of the 1965 national power loading agreement (NPLA) had been to usher in a national wage scale which would include miners all over the island on a single nationally negotiated pay scale and a single set of terms and conditions. This meant that miners would identify with national negotiations, and miners’ interests nationally would supersede those of local bargaining and local pay schemes.

The imposition of the incentive bonus schemes, based upon area negotiations, came around in 1978. It was a plan probably drawn up and elaborated by Labour’s backroom academics as a means to disarm the miners during their turn at running the country. The plan had been bitterly opposed by the miners and when put to a national ballot was rejected by 55%. National Union of Mineworkers president Joe Gormley, who we now know was in the pay of state security forces, turned heaven and hell to get the scheme in place. It was clear he had a good idea what a crucial piece of strategy it was in derailing any future miners’ action.

Firstly he defied a national conference decision to reject the schemes, by going to the high court to demand a national ballot of the membership, over the heads of the national conference delegates. When the ballot was held, and it went against Gormley and the scheme, the NEC then decided that the scheme should go ahead anyway. The progressive areas then went back to court, pointing out that all the decision-making bodies of the union were being ignored. Mr Justice Watkins ruled: “The result of a ballot nationally conducted is not binding upon the national executive committee.”

The schemes were then steamrollered through and set about undoing the effects of the NPLA, creating divisions in wages and terms and making fish of one and flesh of another. Miners in prosperous, moderate areas with harmonious relations with the employers would start to see an easy life and collaboration as an alternative to national demands and actions. This was just what the plan was intended to create. Yet, as the clock moved on into the 84 struggle, those same areas started to demand a national ballot. The militant response of ‘Bollocks to the ballot’ was drawn from that earlier experience of democracy and hypocrisy.

If the national incentive scheme was Labour’s method of disarming the miners, the Tories had been for some time working on their own plans. First off was Myron (whom Ken seems to have overlooked), a Midlands NCB chief who drew up a whole plan for defeating the NUM, breaking the membership from it and privatising coal-mining largely as a non-union, emasculated industry. More famous was the Ridley report. This was first leaked to The Economist in 1978. At the time he was just plain Nicholas Ridley, but his worth was later recognised in the wholesale adoption of his plan, his promotion to the Tory cabinet and subsequent entry into the House of Lords as a peer of the realm. His plan:

- Build up stocks of coal, including at power stations, to outlast any miners’ strike.
- Switch coal and fuel transport any from unionised rail and onto individual, non-union, private lorry drivers.
-l Ensure oil as well as coal burning facilities at power stations.
- Build up police powers and equipment, combined with anti-union and anti-picket legislation.

As we know, these plans were implemented to the full, together with the expansion and retention of the nuclear option, regardless of cost.

To what extent the whole thing was a set-up has been the subject to speculation. The Tories needed little excuse to engage the miners in battle - they had been persistent and belligerent class opponents over the preceding two and a half centuries. The miners represented a social block to everything Thatcherism stood for. Her economic and social programme - centrally the control of labour - could not proceed unhindered while the miners remained undefeated. “The enemy within” was a correct description in terms of class conflict. Certainly she had aspired to lop off what was seen as marginal capacity in the industry which stood in the way of superprofits and a more privatisable coal industry. This was unlikely to be achieved without a defeat of the NUM.

For these reasons, the host of economic facts suggesting that there were actually few, if any, unprofitable pits in macro-economic terms did not matter. It was not really an argument about profitability - a closed pit producing nothing, with an unemployed workforce earning and spending nothing, was far more uneconomic than one fluctuating between individual profit and loss. This fight, among other things, was about slimming down the coal industry for privatisation, at the same time stamping the right to manage on the workforce - and that meant taking them on.

Ken rightly illustrates the stop-go attempts to generate industrial action over closures. Miners were proving very reluctant to take up the fight for areas outside of their own. This was illustrated in the stalled battle of Lewis Merthyr, which encountered little enthusiasm for solidarity action outside Wales. When it came to Cortonwood in Yorkshire, the Welsh miners returned the compliment and were highly hesitant to come out for the Yorkshire miners. It took days of argument to convince miners nationwide that the fight was on, and it was for all of them.

The book is mistaken in its description of the way in which the Yorkshire strike started: “At Cortonwood ... the miners came out by themselves and forced the area executive to endorse their strike.” It was the area council meeting, consisting of all the pits in Yorkshire, which, after mass meetings at pitheads and welfare halls, voted to join the strike at Cortonwood against pit closures, implementing an earlier area ballot decision to strike against compulsory pit closures. Smith’s description of the Northumberland area as “a traditionally militant area” is also wide of the mark - Northumberland had become a moderate area following its red, raging days in the 1920s. The area was to become re-politicised and re-radicalised in the course of the strike.

He is also mistaken in assuming that Scunthorpe steelworks - the reason for the Orgreave target - was landlocked. Not true: Immingham terminal stands cheek by jowl to the steelworks, in addition to which Scunthorpe had its own wharf and its own railway line from the wharf to the plant. It is precisely for this reason that we were suspicious when British Steel ran coke from 40 miles away through strike-solid Yorkshire pit villages - we always felt Orgreave was a rat trap and distraction. It was not mass picketing that was the wrong strategy, though: it was mass picketing in the same place every day - with the full knowledge of the police and under the glare of the media - which was the failure.

We never had enough pickets to slog it out day by day with a stronger force and equipped with a licence to kill if necessary. We were best as guerrillas, using hit and run tactics and mass surprise pickets around the country. Orgreave tied us down. We always suspected groups like the Socialist Workers Party liked the tactic because they could get us all in one place to try and sell us papers.
The author comes to the same view as myself: that, whatever the reasons for not having a ballot initially, and there are many sound ones, as the strike progressed, it may have been opportune to call one. All the pundits and opinion polls suggest we would have won something like a 70%-75% ‘yes’ vote nationwide - and even a 42% ‘yes’ in Nottingham. Smith tells us of the union process in moving towards such a ballot: the special conference of April 1984 and the changing of the rule to lower the threshold from 55% to 51% for a successful ‘yes’ vote. But the ballot “never came”.

Ken does not tell us why. He assumes “the NUM leaders [would] not be bounced into a ballot by the Tories, the reactionary pressure by their allies in the Labour and trade union movement.” But it was the rank and file, at meetings in welfare halls and mass assemblies all over the country, which made that decision, not the leaders. In truth the rank and file suspected “the leaders” were trying to sell them out with such a call. Perhaps they were looking for a ballot defeat in order to call off the strike. Whatever one thinks of Arthur Scargill’s role during the strike - and I think it was overwhelmingly favourable - it was not Arthur who denied the ballot: he was chair of the conference and did not express a view, let alone cast a vote.

As I have said, this book is the best summary of the strike I have yet read. It lacks what may be a key chapter and, in saying this, I suppose we have a reversal of roles. What was the process which snatched the leadership of the Labour Party away from Tony Benn and gave it to Neil Kinnock? What were the backroom shenanigans which would ensure his own constituency would disappear and he was given a no-hope solid Tory seat to run for, and thus deprive him of a voice on the NEC and the leadership of the Labour Party throughout that strike? As an anarcho-syndicalist I would not normally be interested in the role of the Labour Party - except in this case one can clearly see pawns, and even some knights, being moved around the chessboard in anticipation of that great forthcoming clash.

We know now what a knife’s edge between victory and defeat that strike rested on. The presence of Neil Kinnock in the Labour leadership, with all that means in terms of anti-strike propaganda and oceans of cold water, could not but help tip the balance the other way. It seems it would be leaving too much to coincidence for this merely to have been an accident of time and place. We also know how much else was manipulated during that strike - the law, the courts, DSS regulations, union leaders, the TUC, possibly the armed forces, MI6, special branch. The political assassination of Tony Benn at such a strategic point may just have been another one of them.

Whatever one’s views of the Labour Party, the rise of Kinnock and Blair is integrally linked to the dumping of Benn in the process of helping to defeat the miners.