The Miners' Strike, 1984–5

Loss Without Limit

Martin Adeney, John Lloyd

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000424201
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book, first published in 1986, examines the miners' strike of 1984-5 – an event that formed the decisive break with a forty-year-old British tradition of political and industrial compromise. The stakes for the main parties were so high that the price each was willing to pay, the loss each was willing to sustain, exceeded anything seen in an industrial dispute in half a century. This book examines and assesses the strike's full implications, and puts it into its historical and political context.

1
The choice

The job of this book is not to give a chronological account of the mineworkers’ strike of March 1984 to March 1985: others have done that.¹ It is rather to understand it.

The strike, constantly dramatic in itself, appeared to fade quickly from view as the waters of British civil society gratefully closed over it. The government sank in the polls - from a September 1984 figure of 42 per cent to a February 1986 figure of 34 per cent: rather the kind of figure which might be expected of a government midway through a second term. The tremors still were felt along the fibres of the TUC and the Labour Party: Arthur Scargill, the most compelling activist-orator of his generation, could still turn in the votes at the TUC and the Labour Party Conference in 1985 for a motion committing the Labour Party to reimburse the union for its fines and reinstate sacked miners, which most of the TUC elders regarded as undesirable. But the greater issues were the unions’ attitudes to present employment law, and the shape of employment law to come, and the familiar old chestnut of incomes policy. The daily and nightly news ceased to have one constant focus, and reflected a new round of arms talks between the old US president and a new Soviet leader, the violent dying agonies of apartheid, inner city riots and inner-cabinet feuds. The miners no longer intruded into everyday life through the screen or the printed page, which was how the vast majority of citizens of this and other countries experienced them.

The strike did not produce a clear effect, as the Falklands War produced a clear electoral victory over a Labour Party in shambles. Arthur Scargill was not toppled by a union howling for the blood of the man who had led them to defeat. Peter Walker stayed at the Energy Department through cabinet changes, Ian MacGregor (knighted in June 1986 towards the end of his chairmanship of the National Coal Board) carried on his crablike advance to reconstruction as though merely retreading ground from which a mighty wave had swept him back. It had not grazed society’s skin: it had cut deeply instead. It was a measure for almost every element in British public life, and for millions of private citizens. It remains so in its aftermath.

The government was well prepared, in three senses. First, it had had to decline combat with the mineworkers in February 1981, when the NCB’s pit closure plan, necessitated by pressure from the government to cut losses, was withdrawn and instead money was pumped into the industry to mask its underlying cash crisis. Arthur Scargill, then a year away from the national presidency which had been his ambition for a decade or more, knew it for what it was: ‘the government sidestepped the issue because they realised they could not win,’ he commented a few weeks after the event. ‘It’s got to be recognised that the government merely avoided an actual confrontation.’²

It learned from that. After Nigel Lawson replaced David Howell, the sacrificial lamb, at Energy in September of that year, the stocks at the power stations were rapidly and deliberately built up, the contingency planning sharpened, a new and very ‘dry’ chairman appointed to head the Central Electricity Generating Board with the explicit brief of preparing for the eventuality of a strike (Sir Walter Marshall now Lord Marshall, one of the clutch of ‘strike honours’). The government did not lay a deep and complex plot to stimulate a miners’ strike in the early spring of 1985 with complete foreknowledge that the National Union of Mineworkers would split, the trade union movement would prove largely impotent in providing support, and the weather would turn out remarkably fine: rather it read Arthur Scargill as a man who meant what he said about the necessity of industrial action both to halt pit closures and to destabilise government, and the NUM as a union capable of and willing to follow such a remarkably strong and clear lead.

Second, and perhaps as important, was a sea-change in government will and philosophy since Edward Heath ‘lost’ to the mineworkers in 1974. ‘By 1972 Heath reckoned he had given the policies a chance, and they did not work . . . when in 1981 and 1982 Margaret Thatcher seemed to face a similar difficulty ... she held on.’³

Holding on, a dominant virtue of the Thatcher governments, meant in political terms conceding very little indeed to the objections of those with whom the government found itself in conflict - as Heath did most vividly in his ‘U turn’ period, when he rapidly constructed a centralised, social democratic polity which the unions rejected on purely party political grounds. Thatcher accepted sharp division and rode out the consequences because the ideological and philosophical debate which had effected a change in the upper echelons of the Tory Party over the 1974-84 decade prepared her and her colleagues to do so.

The touchstone of their position is freedom, defined in this context as freedom of the individual to develop his or her capacities as far as possible under the law. The objections of the left, that such freedom may be a necessary but is certainly an insufficient condition for an advanced democracy in which government policy deliberately widened the distribution of wealth, was hardly heeded. Instead, such arguments were conjured away by concentration on opponents’ weaknesses - ambiguity over violence, say, or over the seriousness of the challenge to the state. In sum, it was an ideological weapon forged for conflict, best when tested, most effective when its blade caught the reflection of foes’ confusion, equivocation and internal struggles. In that sense, the miners’ strike, though not sought, provided a field in which the Thatcher government could deploy its best divisions.

Third, it had ‘restored management’s right to manage’. Most managers, while increasingly critical of the restrictive economic stance and particularly of the persistently high rates of interest, still conceded to government a large part of the creation of a climate in which being the boss counted for something. It was an explicit point at issue during the strike: the fact that it was won, in the end, strengthened the concept and the practice, especially in the state sector, or in those corporations recently in the state sector. Within six months of the ending of the miners’ strike, management in the railways - that other great state monolith - faced down a strike threat by 11,000 guards over the introduction of driver-only-operated trains, and saw the men affected vote against strike action, albeit by a slim margin.

Even before the strike, the common experience of union officials was that their efforts to encourage militancy - leaving aside such protected areas as Labour-controlled town halls, Fleet Street printing rooms or ITV studios - very largely failed. After all, the trade union movement’s adumbration of the strategy of ‘new realism’ (to the disgust of the NUM president) was an all but explicit admission that the old levers were not responding to the old pulls where it mattered - at the base. Though there is some evidence for the general proposition that British management and unions tacitly colluded to take the ‘easy’ way out of the recession - that is, to declare, and acquiesce in, large-scale redundancies rather than attempt to keep more people in work at lower wages - the result of these big lay-off programmes was to instil a respect among many workers for the fact of retaining a job.

The National Coal Board emerged from the far end of the strike in apparently terrible shape. It had no piece of paper which allowed it to close uneconomic pits by agreement, ostensibly its goal throughout the dispute. Its pits were often in ruins, its workforce surly and internally at war, its markets eaten by imports of coal, its management at top level at each other’s throats, its chairman and its political master openly feuding. By October 1985, 11 months before MacGregor was due to retire, Walker appointed Sir Robert Haslam, chairman of the British Steel Corporation, to replace him, effectively reducing his last year to the status of caretaking for the advent of a man for whom the NCB chairman had no great regard. Sales did pick up, and productivity, spurred by the need of striking miners to earn high bonuses to get out of debt, reached unheard-of levels - over 3 tonnes per manshift by the end of 1985, up from a pre-strike average of around 2.4 tms: but NCB executives knew well enough that much of the extra sales were restocking power plants, a one-off boost which appeared unsustainable. By the spring of 1985, with oil prices tumbling, the NCB faced yet another challenge: a new era of relatively cheap oil, which reduced its productivity improvements greatly in importance. The Economist (3 May 1986) said that without the productivity rise - of 24 per cent between 1983/84 and the last quarters of 1985/86 - ‘the fall in the world oil price would have been an appalling disaster for the industry. As it is, it is merely a disaster.’

But the core issue - the board’s right to manage - had been settled, unequivocally in its favour. MacGregor had succeeded in one thing above all others: in burying forever the Morrisonian-socialist ideology which permeated the board, and which encouraged a progressive advance of the unions, especially the NUM, into a position of joint authority over the industry. The greatest of the state monoliths, and the one over which more passion and emotion was spent in bringing it into public ownership than any other, the board retained the marks of its origins most of all in the place accorded to the unions in management’s scheme of things. A tacit bargain underlay it: unions were brought progressively deeper into the board’s procedures on condition they retained an attachment to the over-all aims of the industry. But in practice that gave officials at every level substantial power of veto and in the 1970s and early 1980s increasingly - so management thought - constrained executive freedom to manoeuvre. MacGregor cleaved through all that. He did not like unions, but he recognised a place for them: it was firmly below that of management, and that is where they now, unmistakably, are.

The NUM is unlikely to recover - not because of the fissures which have opened up all through it during and since the strike; not because it lost so badly; not because of its leadership - though all of these were and are issues with which it, and the labour movement more widely, has had to deal. It is unlikely to recover because it has forfeited national trust in its ability to deliver coal regularly. For all the sentiment and reverence (mawkish, much of it) which surrounds the miners’ place in society, at bottom there is the expectation that coal miners dig coal, which produces power. A union which is so constituted and so led as to put that equation in constant doubt except where matters are arranged in its terms cannot hope again to command pride of place in the labour movement. By being treated as a special case under the Heath government of 1970-74, the miners had struck a tacit bargain with the remainder of society: they got a better deal than most men who depend on muscle and nerve, but they got it for producing. Arthur Scargill’s huge ambition was to extend, infinitely it seemed, that bargain - to ensure that miners were so well rewarded, so secure in their jobs, in such a well planned collectivist-utopian society - that it could never be concluded. There was at times an almost fearful symmetry between the two sides during the strike, and between the two main characters, Scargill and MacGregor. But for MacGregor, for much of the strike at least, a settlement was there: for Scargill (not the NUM, for Scargill) it would have meant a shameful bargain, a settling for a finite quantity when the demands were really infinite.

The scale of the ambitions of both sides dictated a conflict fought on a large field: it was the police and the law which attempted to hem it in to ‘decent’ proportions, aided by such forces of law and order as the bishops, the TUC, the media, the political parties - all or most of whom attempted to make it what it was only in part, a conventional industrial dispute. The police were deployed in larger numbers than had ever before been seen, deployed with growing efficiency by the National Reporting Centre in London, camped for weeks on end in Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and Yorkshire. The riot control techniques which had been in ever more frequent use during riots in inner cities, football grounds and in such industrial conflicts as the 1980 steel strike were employed with skill against pickets who were, though numerous, never properly organised as a fighting force: the contest was unequal. By the later part of 1984, as the struggles on the picket lines during the surges back to work became increasingly bitter, both sides were brutalised: the police banged truncheons on riot shields as if auditioning for Zulu; the pickets strewed the roads with bunches of nails welded together to lame the police horses which charged them. Worse: as ‘scabs’ were identified, some were brutally beaten, their families terrorised; as police gave chase discipline sometimes gave way to brutality.

When Mrs Shirley Williams, addressing the Social Democrats’ conference in Torquay early in September 1985, heard of the Handsworth riots, she instinctively blamed the miners’ pickets for providing a model for the rioters. The similarity was certainly seductive: in both cases, groups who had come to believe themselves under attack rounded on their most obvious attackers, the police. It could be pressed further: though the urban riots of 1981 and 1985, the football-ground gladiatorials of 1983, 84 and 85, the pitched industrial battles outside steel plants, the Stockport Messenger, and most famously outside pits were all discrete, individual, and united most obviously by looking much the same under the lurid glare of the TV lights - still the questions which attended on them all were: would these young men be doing this if the society were more secure for young workers? Had the breaking of the assumption that schooling gave way to working lifted inhibitions, not just from the unemployed - perhaps not mainly the unemployed - but from a whole layer of youth?

It was traditional common, not new employment law, which was used against the NUM and which in the end choked much of the life out of it: and it was its own members, not the state, who were the most active agents. The Coal Board, and the other state industries, were positively forbidden to use the Employment Acts when they wished to: government, having advertised them as mild, balanced, ‘step-by-step’ affairs, found when the largest test for them came that they would be too inflammatory to be unleashed. The miners who took their own union to court were far from the first union members to do so, but in doing it so publicly, and over such an issue (as it was represented) as internal union democracy, they stood as examplars for millions of workers elsewhere who could as easily resent the union as depend on it, and who took to the government’s balloting provisions the more gladly for the sober example afforded them by the ballotless mineworkers.

It was the internal struggles, the working out on the streets and the courts of divisions within the miners themselves, which so confounded the labour movement. Unity was always its favourite word. Neil Kinnock had acceded to the Labour Party leadership quoting Bevan’s fading dictum that the movement had a passionate attachment to unity. It was no rhetorical claim: rare among West European union centres, the TUC enfolded all unions which claimed independence from the employers within itself. But this was the division of its vanguard: the public unravelling of a carefully sewn together federation of mineworkers, brought together under a single employer, cossetted and flattered by the labour movement to believe in their own unique fraternity. Kinnock had no choice but to distance himself from it if he and his party were to remain as serious contenders for power. The TUC was less fortunate, more committed, and more deeply wounded. In the months that followed the miners’ strike, the unions were embroiled in enervating internal arguments over the authority of the TUC, the future political posture of unions and the nature of democracy - all exposed by the relentless grinding of the miners’ strike.

More fundamentally still, the conduct of the miners’ strike, and the aims of the union’s leadership, posed once more the choice which British labourism hated to make: the choice between revolutionary and revisionist socialism. The first had been put on the agenda, albeit in a confused and contradictory way, by the attempt to create a new model Labour Party under the guidance of Tony Benn in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The mineworkers for the first time provided the troops. Here was the opportunity, if not to overthrow the state, then to destabilise it, to prepare the ground for an overthrow later, once the working class had recovered confidence in its own power after the debilitating years of Thatcher. It was couched in those terms: no one who wished to take the message could mistake it. The British labour movement shuffled with embarrassment; tried to rehabilitate the strike into the ambit of a comprehensible dispute with objectives, tactics and a way out; failed; but at the end knew, for the most part, that it could no longer dabble in being revolutionary. Arthur Scargill, right about many things, was right that the strike would politicise the working class. It forced them to see revolutionary politics in embryo at least, and confirmed their attachment to reformism. It offered them the possibility of joining a machine being forged to overthrow a reactionary government, and pushed them to express the view, in polls and by-elections, that the government should be supported because it was for order, if nothing else. Kinnock hardly needed to be taught the lesson - he had had his turning away from the true faith marked by a shower of silver coins to mark his Judas-status when he voted against Benn for deputy-leader at the 1981 Labour conference - but it rubbed home what he knew. Labour’s left claimed the miners’ strike as a victory in forging new bonds between city activists and the miners. The split and warring Communist Party saw it for what it was: vanguardism.

As for the miners’ themselves? They had fought to preserve jobs - or some of them had - and did no such thing. By mid-1986 some 40,000 miners had left the industry, many grateful for the redundancy money and a chance to get out of a web of bitterness and demoralisation. Many said they would do it all ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• 1 The choice
• 2 The coal question
• 3 ‘There’s only one Arthur Scargill’
• 4 ‘A hoary old bastard who only wants to win’
• 5 Fear of the abyss
• 6 Here we go
• 7 ‘No request for assistance’
• 8 ‘The right to go to work’
• 9 Inside Hobart House
• 10 ‘The government is not involved’
• 11 No other industry could do it
• 12 ‘Our enemies’ front-line troops’
• 13 Enough of being spat at
• 14 ‘Your members have yet to be heard’
• Postscript
• Notes
• Index