The NUM and British Politics

Volume 2: 1969–1995

Andrew Taylor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351963701
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

This book is the second of two volumes examining the place of the National Union of Mineworkers in post-war British politics. Covering the years 1969 to 1995, it charts reactions to the pit closures programme of the late 1950s and 1960s and the development of the NUM's reputation as the union that could topple governments. This reputation influenced profoundly the relationship between the NUM and successive Labour and Conservative administrations, underpinning changes in the state's approach to industrial disputes, so vividly manifested in the strike of 1984-85. Following the same intellectual path as volume one, this book concentrates on 'high' politics and the relationship between the NUM, the government and the National Coal Board. It highlights many of the same the key themes of the first volume, particularly the internal political process whereby the mineworkers' tendency to fragmentation was managed, and which was to eventually lead to the breakdown of this internal political process and the fragmentation of the NUM. Volume two explores how these fractures impacted upon such key issues as the formation of the 'Broad Left', the election of Joe Gormley as NUM President in 1971 and the strikes of 1972 and 1974 and relations with the Wilson and Heath governments. It then examines the election of Arthur Scargill in 1981 and the subsequent shifting of the union's political centre of gravity, together with the Conservative government's determination to use the power of the state to destroy the power of the NUM. The myths and legends surrounding the NUM and its power to bring down governments is still strong today, yet this book challenges many of the notions surrounding its strength, militancy and cohesiveness. Instead what emerges is a more complex picture as the union struggled to translate local loyalties into national solidarity. Whilst nationalisation initially helped this process, growing frustration exploded at the end of the 1960s, ushering in a period of

Chapter 1

Acquiescence to Activism

Introduction

Between 1968 and 1971 the post-nationalisation pattern of NUM politics based on the Cold War divisions of the 1940s broke up as a result of the formation of the Broad Left in 1967, the election of Lawrence Daly as NUM General Secretary in 1968, the unofficial strikes of 1960 and 1970 and the election of Joe Gormley as President in 1971. These changes led to the 1972 and 1974 strikes. This period is therefore pivotal for both the NUM and British politics but in 1968 the mineworkers and their union were regarded as relics of a by-gone age who had lost both the will and power to defend themselves. The chapter explores the reasons for the mineworkers’ passivity and why this changed by focussing on the effect of the National Power Loading Agreement (NPLA), the 1969 and 1970 strikes, and the emergence of a new leadership stratum. The result was a shift away from a ‘political’ to a ‘syndicalist’ strategy.

Consciousness, Fatalism and Inaction

Allen cites four explanations as to why the mineworkers’ response to the industry’s decline was muted. The first reason was the constant pressure for consensus in the industry which was intended to neutralise the NUM. From 1940, Government ministers, politicians from all parties, members of the NCB and NUM officials ‘were eager to convince miners why they should not use their apparently enormous collective strength, why they should not push their achievements to the limits the market could bear, why they should not make up for all the ruthless damage which had been done to them in the inter-war years.’ The second factor is the absence of any counter-propaganda from the NUM which did not even publish a national journal until 1968. Thus, ‘Miners were confronted with a continuous flow of information and argument, justifying, rationalizing and legitimizing the decisions of the NCB. When there was resistance, seniorofficials of the NCB and the NUM made forages into the coalfields.’ Thirdly, one of the main justifications for nationalisation was that it would end the anarchy of the free market and permit the planned modernisation of the whole industry. Mineworkers accepted modernisation and rationalisation but, at the same time, this clashed with their personal experiences in a contracting, but still vital, industry. Reconciling these two levels of experience in a context where the mineworkers were constantly told ‘there was no alternative’ and that ‘they had to accept the economic facts of life’, produced acquiescence. This leads directly to Allen’s fourth factor, fatalism. The inevitability of the industry’s decline in the face of a changing energy market was so self-evidently obvious to all but the most purblind that nothing could be done other than to mitigate the effects of decline. Nationalisation had enmeshed the NUM in a pattern of industrial and political relationships and procedures which were designed to canalise and neutralise the industry’s legendary propensity for industrial action and thereby place the miners and their industry at the service of the national interest as defined by government.¹ Up to 1957 when the demand for coal began to decline, the national interest required cheap, plentiful supplies of coal to fuel the post-war economic recovery but after 1957 the national interest required the creation of an ‘economic’ coal industry, both depended on quiescence in the pits. The concept of ‘national service’ was endorsed by the majority of the NUM’s leadership and was expressed by nationalisation in 1947 which had been portrayed as heralding a new era of cooperation. Securing these objectives were eased by the 1944 Rulebook which increased the NEC’s ability to manage the NUM’s internal politics.

Allen’s analysis is based on two assumptions. The first is that mineworkers were a relatively undifferentiated segment of the working class and that there existed a latent class consciousness amongst mineworkers which could have been mobilised by effective leadership from the NUM. It cannot be argued that mineworkers were unfamiliar with industrial action. Mineworkers had the highest propensity to strike of any group of workers but the wider impact of this industrial action was restricted by the nature of that conflict and the consciousness it represented. The weakness of this conflict consciousness was that it was economistic and largely, but not exclusively, confined to highly localised disputes over wages and allowances, it was geographically concentrated (particularly in Scotland, South Wales, and Yorkshire) and highly episodic. The ‘miniaturization’ of industrial conflict in mining was highly divisive, reflecting the differentiation of the workforce and so exacerbating the ever present tendency to fragmentation. One miner commented, “‘There used tobe a lot of disunity. You’d get the rippers all coming out one day, but the colliers would carry on working. The next day the colliers might come out, but the rippers would remain at work.’”² The characteristic features of mineworker consciousness were sectionalism and fragmentation, not solidarity.

Differing regional industrial traditions and political cultures were expressed in the structure and ethos of the 1944 Rulebook which had been consciously designed to reflect, contain and manage diversity. This was fundamental to the NUM’s politics. Solidarity was not automatic. It was true that ‘many factors lent mining communities a remarkable capacity to act with initiative and resilience. On the other hand, the strong links that developed between mine and community underpinned a certain insularity which ensured that individual communities acquired their own particular traditions and culture.’³ This insularity and identification with a locality underpinned a powerful reluctance to move even short distances to a new workplace which testifies to the uneasy coexistence of solidarity and sectionalism. In moderate coalfields, such as Durham or Nottinghamshire, pools of militancy existed and in militant coalfields, for example, South Wales and Scotland, moderate pits and localities coexisted. So not even single coalfields could be guaranteed to behave in a predictable way. This ‘diverse-insularity’ underlay the mineworkers’ reaction to the rationalisation programme, a programme which embraced both contraction and mechanisation. The most obvious regional manifestation was the distinction between ‘core’ and periphery’ coalfields, with the former, with their thicker seams, being the easiest to mechanise. These attracted higher levels of capital investment than the ‘periphery’ coalfields which, the Area NUMs were convinced, was a deliberate NCB ploy to force coalfields which did not conform to their vision of the industry’s future into a spiral of decline. In 1961, for example, the Scottish Area protested to the NEC about the proposed closure of 17 pits, including Glenrothes in which millions had been invested, claiming that the NCB was deliberately seeking to concentrate production on the Midlands coalfields. The Scottish and South Wales NUMs were convinced that closures were disproportionately concentrated on militant pits.⁴ In terms of the percentage increase in productivity the Scottish Area actually performed best, with Yorkshire third and the East Midlands sixth, but in terms of increased share of NCB total tonnage mined the East Midlands and Yorkshire emerge top of the eight NCB Areas with South Wales at the bottom of the national productivity league, a position which reflected its difficult geology. The room for dramatic productivity increases in Yorkshire andthe East Midlands were limited as these were already the most productive coalfields and the increase in the amount of coal mined was the consequence of power loading.

The regional impact of restructuring militated against a unified workforce response even if the NUM’s leadership had been capable or willing to sponsor such a response. Closures simultaneously reinforced diversity and localism and ‘exacerbated divisions at an intra-area level, between those communities whose local pits closed and those who survived.’⁵ In his evidence to the 1972 Wilberforce Inquiry, Lawrence Daly, the NUM’s General Secretary, described this effect,

Those who remained in areas of fairly secure employment were naturally uncertain about the future of the industry and consequently inhibited in their approach on matters relating to pay and conditions. Therefore, approaches to the [NCB] on pay questions were coloured by the anxiety of the Union and its members about future prospects and the need to preserve the maximum number of jobs in the industry.⁶

Both ‘close knit’ pits (those which retained a powerful local identity) and ‘cosmopolitan’ pits (where the workforce was drawn from a wide geographical area) posed major problems in the promotion of solidarity as ‘The former retained [their] insular quality…which underpinned a strongly local type of solidarity. With the latter, any benefit derived from the erosion of insularity was circumscribed by the problems of solidarity and co-ordination associated with an increasingly fragmented workforce.’⁷ The problems of decline cut across the ideological currents in the NUM so in ‘left-wing Scotland and South Wales; right-wing Durham and Lancashire; the seemingly inexorable logic of profitability transcended political differences.’⁸ This did not create a common consciousness or solidarity and the key to understanding the impact, or non-impact, of pit closures in this period is their regionalism. Between 1957 and 1973 closures were concentrated in the periphery coalfields: Scotland lost 39 per cent of its pits, South Wales, Durham and Northumberland 30 per cent, whereas Yorkshire lost only 6 per cent.

Between 1956 and 1964 output fell in all NCB areas but some were affected more than others, so to what extent did the relative position of coalfields change? Of the eight NCB areas six suffered a relative deterioration of their share of national output. The largest fall was in Scotland, the smallest in Kent, but Northumberland and Durham and the North Western Area experienced a greater decline than the South Western Area which contained the South Wales coalfield. This reflects theconcentration of output on the most productive coalfields and the most easily mechanised mines with their easier geological conditions. Only two areas, Yorkshire and the East Midlands, increased their relative position. In 1956 they produced 42.9 per cent of national output and in 1964 this had increased to 49.8 per cent; in contrast, the combined share of the Scottish and South Western Areas fell from 21.4 per cent to 18.9 per cent. All NCB Areas shed jobs but Yorkshire and the East Midlands lost fewest. In 1956 their combined share of the national workforce was 34.2 per cent and by 1964 this had increased to 39 per cent.

These regional changes in employment created a powerful symbol for the mineworkers; that of the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Studies in Labour History General Editor’s Preface
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Acquiescence to Activism
• 2 Heath and the Miners
• 3 Plans for Coal
• 4 The Enemy Within
• 5 Endgame
• 6 Coda
• Bibliography
• Index