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.
|
Enjoy this article?
How about showing
us your appreciation? Producing the Weekly Worker costs a
substantial amount of money. Our only source for that financial
backing comes from people like you: readers and supporters of our
newspaper. You may not agree with the CPGB on every dot and comma,
but we know that 1000s of comrades appreciate our open, critical
and democratic press.
Click
here to find out how you can donate to the Summer Offensive
2004, our annual fundraising drive.
|
|
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.
David Douglass
|
