The NUM and British Politics

Volume 1: 1944-1968

Andrew Taylor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351963671
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

From its formation in 1944, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) was one of the most powerful and important players on the British political and industrial stage. Whilst the nation relied upon coal for its electricity production, domestic heating and railway transportation, the miners and their unions would always play a central role in national politics with the ability to cause massive disruption to the nation, should they decide to strike, as they did in 1972 and 1974. However, as the country began to move towards other forms of energy, such as oil and gas, the power of the mineworkers correspondingly decreased, leaving the once mighty union to come to terms with a very different world by the early eighties. The NUM and British Politics makes use of union material and party and government archives as well as oral testimony, much of it highly confidential, to present the first overall account of the evolving nature of the tripartite relationship between the miners, the NUM and the state.

Chapter 1
Creating the New Order

Introduction

This chapter examines the creation of the National Union of Mineworkers in 1944 and the constitution under which it was to operate in the post-war period. It then examines the various schemes for the industry’s future put forward during the Second World War, all of which recognised the inevitability of state reorganisation of the coal industry. Whether or not the industry remained in private hands depended on the result of the general election held in 1945.

Reorganisation: The National Union of Mineworkers

The NUM and its predecessor, the Mineworkers’ Federation of Great Britain (MFGB), were federal unions and the NUM displayed many of the strengths and weaknesses associated with a federal political system, such as the need to promote unity, aggregate diverse interests, and manage centre-periphery relations. The study of internal union politics has tended to concentrate on factional struggle and the role of the union ‘boss’ to the exclusion of the union’s rule book. The rulebook is analogous to a codified constitution, providing the ground rules and framework for the exercise of power and authority, as well the boundaries to the exercise of power and authority. However, a political system cannot be understood solely by reference to the constitution whose operation is conditioned by history, myth, political culture, the attitudes of those who make the system work, and the wider environment.

The MFGB’s national bureaucracy was limited (only in 1919 was the general secretary’s post made full-time), the Executive was made up of members drawn from the largest coalfields with a rota from the smaller ones, and its members owed their primary loyalty to the district unions. The supreme policy making body was the annual Conference made up of district delegations composed of full time and lay officers as well as ordinary members in proportion to district membership. Special conferences could be called to deal with specific issues or immediate crises, or to pronounce on national matters such as industrial action. The district unions were the powerhouses of the MFGB:

The consequence was that the Federation often seemed more a collection of disparate unions than a national body. Frequently men sat on its executive or in its conference as ambassadors from coalfields rather than as participants in a collective enterprise. Coalfield chauvinisms emerged at moments of stress. Each district had its own history – usually longer than the Federation’s – its own myths and symbols, and ethos. Against these fissiparous tendencies there was the fact of Federation, an institutional acknowledgement of the desirability of national organisation and action. Such aspirations had to combat not just district identities, but diverse economic conditions and expectations. Maintenance of the MFGB’s unity was an art built around the recognition yet limitation of difference.¹

The problems of the inter-war years, especially the defeat of 1926 and its consequences, reawakened interest in organisational reform and the MFGB’s wage claim of 1935-36 demonstrated unequivocally that national unity behind a common strategy could deliver real gains. The experience of the wage claim also showed how dependent success was on the quality of the national leadership of the MFGB and the ability of the General Secretary and President to win and retain the confidence and support of the district unions. The internal politics of the MFGB and the quest for unity was further complicated by the secession of George Spencer and a majority of the Nottinghamshire miners in 1926. Although the MFGB and the Spencer union were united in 1937, this was achieved on the basis of mutual agreement and Spencer remained personally hostile to the creation of one union.²

Proposals for re-organising the Federation dated back to The Miners’ Next Step (1912) and beyond but the MFGB’s revival in the late 1930s led directly to the creation of a Reorganisation Sub-Committee (1937). However, the districts were not prepared to grasp the nettle of reorganisation and a Special Conference to discuss reorganisation was postponed twice. The difficulty was that a lack of unanimous agreement might have meant some districts being outside the reformed MFGB. Yet, by 1940 reform was back firmly on the agenda and a climate supportive of reorganisation was encouraged by the difficulties of mobilising the industry for war. So the NUM was in part a product of the war-time production crisis which increased the importance of the national level in the politics of the MFGB. The centralisation of production policy and collective bargaining entailed the centralisation of problem-solving and conflict resolution but this contrasted with the historical and cultural legacy of the MFGB.³

The 1944 Rulebook

The process which was to produce the NUM in 1944 began with Resolution 11 at the 1942 MFGB Conference sponsored by the Executive. In moving the Resolution, James Bowman, the Vice President, rejected ‘splendid district isolation’ declaring unity to be essential as the Federation’s current organisation was incapable of responding to the industry’s growing industrial and political centralisation.⁴ In June 1942 the Executive had determined that reorganisation would be based on the centralisation of industrial and bargaining activity coupled with the minimum interference with the districts’ internal practices. Some districts (for example, Yorkshire) favoured a speedy transition to a national industrial union by sweeping away the MFGB and replacing it with a more rational structure. This rationalism had permeated much of the left’s thinking on reorganisation from 1912 onwards but the political impossibility of such a fundamental restructuring of the MFGB reinforced the Executive’s conviction that one union could emerge only on the basis of district consent which depended on the preservation of district autonomy. A further difficulty with the rational solution was that it was identified (unfairly) with the Communists in the union; hence the political symbolism of Arthur Homer (a Communist from South Wales) and Sam Watson (a key Labour Party figure in the MFGB from Durham) working together on the reorganisation. The process of creating a consensus behind the new union required careful lobbying by the MFGB’s National Officials and their supporters in the districts. Their argument was that the NUM’s structure was both a recognition and reflection of the changes brought about by the war and an extension of the natural evolution of the MFGB’s national role, which had been revitalised with the 1935-36 wage claim and the formation of the Joint Standing Consultative Committee (JSCC), and with the unification campaign at Haworth in 1937.

Critical to the stability and viability of the new union was the attitude of George Spencer and Nottinghamshire. Spencer was verging on retirement and after reunification in 1937 a new generation of district officials was emerging who were less concerned with the battles of the past but Spencer remained a powerful voice in favour of district autonomy and his arguments evoked a sympathetic response in many coalfields. Spencer recognised he was fighting a losing battle but, nevertheless, he described the Executive’s proposals as ‘a hybrid conglomeration of nonsense … You are leaving under the present circumstances a variety of organisations which are different in their functions, different in their intentions, different in the amounts that they are receiving, different in the amount of benefits they are going to pay. Can anyone say that that is one organisation? No; it is the negation of one organisation.’⁵ The Executive’s pragmatic response to these forceful criticisms was that they had to work with what existed. Autonomy would be chipped away as districts grew accustomed to working within the new union especially after the Model Rules had been approved and in any event, national rules would take precedence over district rules. The centre-piece was a National Executive Committee (NBC) responsible for the Union as a whole, and ‘the activities of area representatives must be subject to the overriding authority of the national organisation.’⁶ These principles were circulated to the districts and approved by the 1943 Conference, after which a draft scheme and rulebook were prepared and sent out for extensive consultation. The National Officials held meetings in every district and were painstaking in their preparations for the Special Conference called to approve the new constitution. The agenda was sent to the districts in February 1944 and, with obvious symbolism, the Conference was held in Nottingham in August.

The first serious controversy at the Special Conference came over the payment of capitation fees by the districts (£1 per member) which meant a substantial transfer of resources (some £600,000) to the National Union. These resources signalled a power shift and the reduction of district autonomy. Bowman and the Executive regarded the capitation fees as the ‘acid test’ because the NUM could not begin to function without its own funds; ‘Either we believe in one Mine workers’ Union or we do not’, Bowman said.⁷ Bill Allen from Northumberland spoke for the majority of delegates when he argued that unless the capitation fee was paid ‘we have been indulging in farce’, and warned that unless the MFGB adapted the mineworkers would find themselves at a disadvantage in the post-war world.⁸ An amendment sponsored by South Wales to postpone payment was lost by 204 to 405, ironically South Wales’ main supporter was George Spencer.

The main business of the Conference was to approve a set of rules by which the NUM was to be conducted. These became the 1944 Rulebook which was based on four principles. First, the changing nature of the industry and the inevitability of a major post-war reconstruction underscored the need for a more centralised union but one which took into full account district interests and sensibilities.⁹ The consequent accommodation under Rule 6 of district interests (especially, Nottinghamshire’s) led to criticism. Yorkshire, for example, proposed the amendment of Rule 6 to create nine new geographical areas rather than preserve the historic structure. Bowman conceded that the retention of the historic coalfield structure was a weakness, but argued that the rules allowed the structure to evolve, and that precipitate action would undermine the union; thus the Executive were ‘seeking at this early stage to prevent any rupture in the formation of the [NUM] …’.¹⁰ He was obviously hoping to placate sentiments such as those of Lancashire, which proposed a decentralising amendment to Rule 7 which would have made amalgamations possible only on the basis of full agreement between the Areas affected; this would have limited the power to promote amalgamations which Bowman argued was a key aspect of the Executive’s authority. The Lancashire amendment was supported by Spencer and Nottinghamshire on the grounds that ‘the more you narrow responsibility and freedom, the more you undermine in the long run the permanency of the structure and the power.’ The amendment was, however, defeated in a card vote by 243 to 266.¹¹

Second, the National Union could only work effectively if its policy embraced and expressed district interests which were moulded by a national Conference into a national policy. Conference would remain the supreme policy making body, with policy flowing up from the districts to Conference to be aggregated, before being prioritised and implemented by the National Executive. This created tension between Conference and NEC. Amendments to the rule relating to calling a Special Conference, for example, show how the Executive strove to balance national and district interests whilst avoiding the dominance of the union by one interest or group of interests. Thus, when Cumberland proposed that any Area with 50,000+ members (in 1944 South Wales, Yorkshire, Scotland, and Durham) could call a Special Conference in an effort to promote rank-and-file control over the National Executive, Bowman rejected this. He feared that it would prevent the Executive from acting in the interests of the whole union and would transfer too much power back to the Areas via the Special Conference.

Third, in the interests of national unity and organisational coherence the union could not be run by simple majorities. Conference delegations were determined by the size of the area membership but they were subj...