anomaly that GCHQ was different. But the abrupt way in which the Government proposed to end the anomaly seemed high-handed and unreasonable. The right to union membership, she told the Commons, was a ‘privilege’ which did not extend to security personnel.1 To the unions this was tantamount to accusing their members of treason. The left claimed that the Government was removing a basic civil right and won a temporary victory when the High Court declared the ban illegal on the ground that the lack of consultation was ‘contrary to natural justice’. This judgement was later overturned in the Court of Appeal, but the case of the handful of GCHQ workers who chose to be sacked rather than give up their membership remained a live grievance for the rest of the Thatcher years.
Scargill and the miners
The skirmish over GCHQ was no more than a curtain raiser to the real battle which overshadowed the whole of 1984: the Government’s life-or-death showdown with the NUM. Mrs Thatcher had always known that she would have to face a miners’ strike sooner or later. In February 1981, she accepted temporary humiliation by postponing a confrontation she was not yet ready to win. Since then, however, the Government had been quietly making its dispositions. An
Then, in February 1983, Nigel Lawson signalled that the Government was ready by appointing Ian MacGregor from British Steel to become chairman of the National Coal Board. Fresh from turning round the steel industry, with the loss of almost half the workforce, MacGregor was plainly being sent to do the same for coal: his track record in the United States included the defeat of a two-year strike by the United Mineworkers. Finally, in her post-election reshuffle Mrs Thatcher persuaded Peter Walker to take on the Department of Energy with the explicit expectation that he would face a challenge from Scargill.
The economic case for shrinking the coal industry was incontestable. The rundown had been going on under governments of both parties since the 1960s. The moderate President of the NUM from 1971 to 1982, Joe Gormley, had broadly accepted it. But the industry was still overproducing coal that could not be sold. When MacGregor took over, the NCB was heading for a loss of ?250 million in 1983–4. If the Government’s policy towards nationalised industries was to mean anything this had to be stopped. But to achieve economic viability the NCB would have to close loss-making pits in traditional mining areas in Yorkshire, Scotland and South Wales and concentrate production in profitable modern pits. Coal mines, however, cannot be closed as easily as factories; whole communities with a proud and deeply rooted way of life depend on them. The new NUM leaders, Arthur Scargill and his saturnine Vice-President Mick McGahey, were not only militant left-wingers looking to break another Tory Government: they also came from Yorkshire and Scotland respectively. They took their stand on the view that the union could not allow the closure of any pit at all except on grounds of safety or geological exhaustion: they did not accept the concept of an uneconomic pit. This was the economics of the madhouse.
But Scargill was not making an economic case at all. Behind the Luddite insistence that miners’ jobs must be guaranteed for life, his purpose was to mount a political challenge to the Government. He openly boasted of leading a socialist – more accurately a syndicalist – revolution to overthrow capitalism, asserting that after Mrs Thatcher’s 1983 landslide, extra-parliamentary action was ‘the only course open to the working class and the labour movement’.4 He had first come to prominence by leading the mass picketing of the Saltley Gate coke works, which was perceived – rightly or wrongly – as having forced the Heath Government to cave in to the miners in 1972, and from the moment he was elected to succeed Gormley in December 1981 he was thirsting to repeat that revolutionary moment. Three times in 1982–3 he called on the NUM membership in national ballots to vote for strikes: three times, by majorities rising from 55 to 61 per cent, they voted him down. After the successful strikes of the 1970s too many miners – those whose jobs were not threatened – had too much to lose by going on strike: they had good pay, cars, mortgages and an increasingly middle-class way of life. They were no longer the downtrodden proletariat of Scargill’s imagination. Moreover, the Coal Board, with Walker’s encouragement, was offering generous redundancy terms to those who did lose their jobs when pits closed. By 1984 it was plain to Scargill that he would never get his strike if he relied on the membership voting for one – certainly not by the 55 per cent majority required by the NUM constitution. So when the NCB announced on 6 March 1984 that another twenty uneconomic pits would close over the next twelve months, with the loss of 20,000 jobs, he determined to engineer a national strike without the tiresome inconvenience of a national ballot.
He contrived it by encouraging a series of regional strikes, starting in the most directly affected and most militant areas, Yorkshire and Scotland, which would put moral pressure on the others to join in. As McGahey bluntly put it: ‘We shall not be constitutionalised out of a strike… Area by area will decide and there will be a domino effect.’5 Pickets were dispatched to less militant areas to help them to the right decision. But only Yorkshire, Scotland and the small Kent coalfield – where there were no ballots – were solid in support of the strike. Most other areas which did ballot voted against striking: the crucial moderate coalfield, Nottinghamshire, recorded a majority of nearly four to one against and most pits in the county carried on working. In South Wales only ten out of twenty-eight pits supported the strike, but the local leaders called all their members out anyway. Thus Scargill’s strategy split the union whose strength in the past had always been its unity. In fact, there were indications that, had he held a ballot in the early weeks of the strike, he might have won it – especially after he had pushed through a rule change requiring only a simple majority.6 But by refusing to hold a ballot he not only set area against area but miner against miner within each area, pit and village. By mid-April, when the strategy was approved – by a majority of only 69 – 54 – by a special delegate conference, forty-three out of 174 pits were still working. To enforce and widen the strike Scargill revived on a much bigger scale his old weapon from 1972 – the mass picketing of working pits and also of ports and depots to prevent the movement of coal. Flying pickets were organised as a quasi-military operation, with men bused from all over the country to key sites: they were given strike pay only if they were prepared to picket. But this time the police were equally organised – the Government had made its preparations on this front too – and met them in equal numbers. Soon the television news every night led with what looked like pitched battles between medieval armies, one side armed with batons and riot shields, the other with bricks, spikes, darts, ball bearings and all manner of home-made weapons.
The public was appalled; but though there was widespread sympathy for the miners, faced with the loss of their livelihood, there was remarkably little public support for the strike, because of Scargill’s methods. By waging the dispute with such blatant contempt for democracy – by defying the rules of his own union and openly challenging the elected Government – by strutting and ranting like a tinpot demagogue, refusing to condemn the violence of the pickets (which he blamed entirely on the police) and refusing to admit the possibility of closing any pits at all, Scargill alienated not only the public at large but also those who should have been his allies, the Labour party and the other unions. Neil Kinnock, less than a year into his leadership of the party, was cruelly exposed: emotionally disposed to support the miners but aware that it would be political suicide to do so, able neither to condemn the strike nor fully support it. He did criticise the failure to hold a ballot, condemned the violence – but also the police response – and did his best to express support for the miners without endorsing Scargill’s more extreme objectives. But the more uncomfortably he wriggled, the more contemptuously Mrs Thatcher was able to pillory him as a weaselly apologist for the enemies of democracy.
Likewise the rest of the union movement gave the miners verbal but little practical support. The steel unions above all were desperate to keep what was left of their industry working, and defied the NUM pickets designed to stop coal getting to the steel plants. But the electricians, the power workers and even the railwaymen also turned a deaf ear to Scargill’s truculent demand for ‘the total mobilisation of the trade union and labour movement’.7 Passionately as Scargill appealed to working-class solidarity, he was asking others to risk their jobs when thousands of his own members were still working. By flouting the NUM’s own rulebook Scargill had thrown away the public sympathy which was the miners’ greatest asset.
