01.09.2010
They weren't all scabs
David Douglass reviews Keith Stanley's 'Nottingham miners do strike' Nottingham Area NUM, pp124, £7
Anyone who has ever attended a football match at which Nottingham Forest played any of the Yorkshire or northern teams will have heard the non-Nottingham terraces ring with the mass accusation: “Scab! Scab! Scab!” If you are very lucky you might hear the lone voice from the Nottingham terraces of a small man in the stands shouting, ‘Not me!’ It will be Keith Stanley, who will never let go the accusation that all Nottingham miners have been scabs since the 1984-85 Great Strike. This book sets out the demonstrate why.
It is something of a complementary work to the earlier Leicester miners’ Dirty thirty book on the smallest minority of strikers in the country found in that county. Although the striking Nottingham miners were never so weak as those in Leicester, something of a similar picture emerges. Here the communities were overwhelmingly dominated by scab miners - not just quietly going about their dirty business, but proclaiming loudly their ‘right to work’. Lauded in the press and TV as heroes and drenched in money the National Coal Board was throwing at them, they reviled in their defiance. The strikers were the ‘scabs’ here, but there is no question in my mind who the true heroes of this scene were.
For us in the solid coalfields, the picket against the tiny minority of strike-breakers was a daily event, but soon over. Even protracted struggles at the gates and through the villages in most cases were time-limited. For the Nottingham men this was not the case: the struggle was on 24 hours a day; the strikers had to walk from the picket lines through villages full of scabs, shop in businesses full of scabs, be served by the wives and families of scabs, and go home to streets full of scabs. Try and go about the normal business of getting kids to school, bringing them up, while living in a community entirely hostile to your very being. The graffiti, the catcalls, the violence, the threats, the intimidation of families - it was all anti-strike. The strikers carried the can for everything the pickets did across the country, every militant demo and picket would later be avenged by victimising the exposed minority in Notts.
Keith Stanley is somewhat of an exception for a former area and national official of the National Union of Mineworkers (he was until his recent retirement general secretary of Notts NUM and national vice-president), being quiet, unassuming and modest. This book is stamped by his character, and it tells its tale without any fanfares or overstatements. For miners from the strike-solid coalfields it is totally illuminating. Here is revealed what happened at branch and area council meetings, at which the scabs dominated, at which the strikers were an isolated minority. Union meetings conducted by and on behalf of men breaking every fundamental tenet of trade unionism - it seems to outside eyes farcical. The area executive opposed the action and ran a parallel anti-strike offensive throughout.
Afterwards there was a short period of ‘dual power’, where the striking minority fought for the agenda of the NUM, while the area rapidly readied itself for the transfer of authority to itself, finally taking over all the NUM apparatus in Nottingham and declaring itself an independent ‘democratic’ miners’ union outside of and against the NUM. For the 7,000-odd strikers who had stuck it out to the end, and now fought a rearguard action to defend their union against the double-headed enemy of NCB management and yellow-dog unionism, the situation back at work was scarcely less fraught and bitter than it had been during those 12 months on strike.
This is a little book written very much from recollection. It does not bother with footnotes and references, and essentially is a personal reflection - although I would not for one moment doubt the accuracy of the dates, numbers and events discussed here. This history, if not hard written in diaries, is embossed on the mental log for all time.
Keith takes us through his own trajectory from coal-face chargeman - an ordinary rank and filer sticking it out from the word go - through to NUM stalwart and eventually stepping into the very wide breach left by the departure of the Union of Democratic Mineworkers, to become first of all a branch official, then area and national officer.
Keith has some insightful suggestions as to just why the majority of the Nottingham miners should have been so out of step with the rest of the country (with the possible exception of the tiny Leicestershire coalfield which, as I say, was even worse). He chronicles the solid support during the great offensives of 1972 and 74, contrasted to the collapse of militancy 10 years later. He reasons that the Nottingham miners of those earlier periods were real bred and born pitmen, that the victories of 72 and 74 put the miners on top of the wages and conditions hierarchy for blue-collar (even many white-collar) workers. That the assurances given of a secure place for the mining industry in the developing economy stopped the flow of mining labour from the old coalfields and green labour was now massively recruited.
This green labour, he reasons, was not made up of pitmen - they had no sense of trade unionism or how the good wages and conditions had been achieved. These were not men who had learned from the knee the sanctity of the picket line, class and solidarity: “Workers from all walks of life swelled the manpower figures. It was easy now to afford certain things at home that had been difficult in the past ... complacency appeared to step in ... we had high numbers of men joining the industry who had never been in a trade union before and I do not believe that the union took this fully on board” (p37).
These particular chickens were to come home to roost early on in the sparring around the strength of possible resistance to a mass closure programme. From its echo in the wings the NUM NEC had warned that the union would resist any imposition of a costs-based closure programme. It threatened a national ballot on the closure of Teversal colliery. However, on February 26 1979 the Nottingham area council (of NUM branch delegates) pre-empted this decision by calling an area ballot. Teversal itself was prepared to fight - it had called for and received the tacit support of the NEC. One would have expected the delegates to endorse the recommendation and canvass for industrial action for a fellow Nottingham mine in danger. Not so, and the writing was on the wall when 72% of Nottingham miners voted not to take action to save a threatened Notts colliery. Out of 33 branches across the area, only Teversal itself voted ‘yes’ to industrial action. Any notion of Nottingham taking action to support a colliery in some far-off distant coalfield when it had said ‘Sod you, Jack’ to one in its backyard seemed unlikely from that point on (see pp38-41).
However, I am not sure of the completeness of this theory. If we go back much earlier than 1972 - to 1926 - we find almost identical processes at work as those that emerged in 1984. At that time an influx of non-mining labour could not be blamed. Clearly the miners in the Nottingham coalfield were genuine bred and born mining stock, the same as other coalfields. But there was a qualitative difference in their response to class organisation and class-consciousness. In January 1926 Miners Federation membership was (actually more than) 100% in the Durham coalfield (non-working miners were still paying their dues). In Yorkshire it was 88.8%, but in Nottingham only 69.2%. During the lock-out the number of men breaking the stand-out and working was, by October 1926, 4.2% of the Durham coalfield, 13.8% of Yorkshire, and 64.8% in Nottingham. By November 15 the percentage had gone up to 5.7% in Durham and 19.6% in Yorkshire, but it was now 80.3% in Nottingham (home office figures).
A similar catastrophic collapse of support for the union took place in 1984-85, with not more than 7,000 miners staying in the NUM and opting not to join the scab breakaway, out of a total of around 22,000 in Nottingham. A very similar proportion to the Miners Federation loyalists against the Spencer ‘non-political industrial union’ in 1926. Clearly there is something in the culture and political perspective of the Nottingham miners which is out of step with the rest of the coalfields.
1972 and 74 proved to be turning points in the traditions of that coalfield - hard built on over years of patient work by communist and leftwing militants in the pits. That momentum was lost, Keith suggests, through an influx of self-interested lumpen elements from non-mining backgrounds. Although doubtless this was a factor in the process, it cannot be the chief one in my view. The loss of the union power within that coalfield continued and, while the rest of the country was still on strike with the tide clearly turning against us, the scabbing miners in Notts then vote by 20 branches to 11 to lift the overtime ban too. So it is not enough to break the strike five days a week, eight hours a day: they vote to do it seven days a week for unlimited hours, while the rest of us are freezing on the picket lines, as our bills mount ever higher.
The book goes on to describe the post-strike situation and the desperate struggle of the NUM strikers to stay on their feet in circumstances where they have lost all recognition and all union rights, and now face two anti-working class forces in the shape, firstly, of NCB/British Coal and, then, the UDM. The situation never really improved through privatisation and then Major’s closure programme cut a swathe through the Nottingham coalfield regardless of its services rendered. Today only one Notts pit remains (while three survive in Yorkshire), and the UDM still dominates that one pit, along with Daw Mill in the Midlands.
But time has moved on and, while we will never forgive or forget the back-stabbing bastards who organised with the Tories and Labour notables to create the UDM and break the strike, many current UDM members were still at school during those events. It is time to think of reuniting the miners into a single miners’ union. There is no place for Roy Lynk, David Prendergast or any of the architects of the anti-union treachery, but we will welcome back ordinary miners into a united miners union, as we have done in other split coalfields. It is time to move on from the past and deal with the current situation - one which requires a reorganisation of the remaining miners unions, NUM and Nacods, and some olive branch to the rank and file and branch officials of UDM. We have a task to undertake and our tradition demands we bite the bullet and take it on.
Incidentally, while we are on the subject of our current tasks, let me just correct the false trail laid by Radio Sheffield and then picked up on by the rest of the media (although Radio Sheffield corrected it a little later in an interview with general secretary Chris Kitchen, who put matters straight): Arthur Scargill has not been expelled from the NUM. He remains honorary president in fact. The NUM is changing its rules to suit its modern (minuscule) self. We cannot have ex-miners, former officials and god knows who else in full membership with the potential of outvoting and vetting the decisions of the men actually working at pits. It would have been okay left to trust and common sense, but sadly certain forces, including Arthur himself, started to demand ‘rights’ for folk no longer in the industry, which could have skewed all decision-making away from actual mineworkers.
Then we had a rush of court and commissioners cases going against the union and conference decided to take control of the situation, prompted by all this hostile legal activity and internal manoeuvrings. Nobody has been ‘expelled’ - it is just categories for full membership that have been tightened up, as recommended by the Commissioner of Trade Unions following one of Arthur’s appeals against (his own) rules.
This is good book; it comes without the name of a printer or publisher and seems to have been financed from union and individual donations. It is priced at £7 and doubtless is available from the Nottingham area of the NUM: 42 St John Street, Mansfield, Notts, NG18 1QJ.