The Iron Lady

So the Government held all the cards. And yet the year-long strike still represented a major crisis for Mrs Thatcher. The longer it dragged on the more it highlighted the division of the country which she seemed to embody. Its defeat was vital to her political survival, yet she could not afford to appear too directly involved and above all must not appear vindictive. It was no secret that she loathed the coal industry – the archetypal union- dominated, loss-making nationalised industry which, she wrote in her memoirs, ‘had come to symbolise everything that was wrong with Britain’.⁸ It was dirty, too; the future, she believed, lay with clean, modern nuclear energy. Yet she was bound to keep saying warm words about coal and what a bright future it could have once production was concentrated on the profitable pits, in order to counter Scargill’s repeated allegation that the Government was intent on destroying it.

At the same time she had to pretend to treat the strike as an ordinary industrial dispute and leave the handling of negotiations with the NUM to the Coal Board. In the Commons Kinnock continually accused her of abdicating the Government’s responsibility to bring the two sides together. But Government interference to impose a solution, she insisted, would be tantamount to surrender. ‘The Government will leave the National Coal Board to deal with the matter as it thinks fit.’⁹

The Government’s only role was to uphold the liberty of those miners – and others – who wanted to work. It was the job of the police to protect the freedom to work, and the job of the Government to support the police. The most serious confrontation took place at the Orgreave coke depot near Sheffield, just down the road from Scargill’s headquarters, where 5,000 pickets gathered on 29 May to try to stop the movement of coal. They were beaten back by even greater numbers of mounted and heavily armoured police, but the battle was renewed daily for three weeks, with incidents of appalling violence on both sides: on the first day alone 104 police officers and twenty-eight pickets were injured, and by the end several hundred – including Scargill himself – had been arrested. The issue here was no longer the future of the coal industry but the maintenance of law and order, and on that subject Mrs Thatcher could not be neutral. ‘What we have got,’ she said on 30 May,‘is an attempt to substitute the rule of the mob for the rule of law, and it must not succeed… The rule of law must prevail over the rule of the mob.’¹⁰ After three weeks it did. The battle of Orgreave was a decisive defeat for Scargill’s storm troops.

The police operation, too, was centrally controlled. As soon as the strike began the Home Secretary, Leon Brittan, set up a National Reporting Centre in New Scotland Yard to coordinate intelligence between the forty-three independent police forces in England and Wales and ensure that adequate manpower and equipment was available to the chief constables wherever it was needed. The Home Office had learned a lot from the 1981 riots: as a result of that experience the police were far better equipped and trained to deal with mass violence than ever before. Coordination between local forces, it was alleged, was a sinister step in the direction of a national police force under the control of the Government, and ultimately a police state. But Brittan, strongly supported by Mrs Thatcher, insisted that the police had always had the power to prevent a breach of the peace wherever they anticipated one and were quite right to do so.¹¹ In due course the High Court agreed. Undoubtedly there were disturbing implications in the level of policing needed to contain the strike. But at least it was contained by the police. When MacGregor told Mrs Thatcher that in America they would have brought in the National Guard with tanks and armoured cars, she was quite shocked. ‘Oh my goodness,’ she exclaimed, ‘we can’t do that. That would be political suicide in this country.’¹² Most of the public recognised that centralised policing was needed to prevent centralised intimidation. If they did not like it they blamed Scargill more than the Government.

Thus Scargill’s bully-boy tactics played into the Government’s hands. No Prime Minister could have failed to denounce them, and Mrs Thatcher did not restrain her condemnation of his calculated assault on freedom, democracy and the rule of law. But once or twice she went too far with overtly military talk of ‘victory’ or ‘surrender’. It was in an end-of-session speech to Conservative MPs on 19 July that she was reported to have described the striking miners as ‘the enemy within’.¹³

Like most such phrases, this one was not original: the Daily Express had already applied it jointly to Scargill and Livingstone in a front-page headline the previous year.¹⁴ But it sparked a furious reaction. Mrs Thatcher was forced to explain that she had meant only the militant minority, not the miners in general. But she never retracted the expression. In October she repeated and explained it in an interview with the Sunday Mirror: ‘The “Enemy Within” are those people who turn to violence and intimidation to compel people to do what they can’t persuade them to do.’¹⁵

Three weeks later the Sunday Times revealed that the NUM had sent a representative to Tripoli to seek money – successfully – from the Libyan President Colonel Gaddafi, who also made no secret of funding the IRA. Coming just a few weeks after Libyan agents had shot dead a young policewoman from the diplomatic sanctuary of their London embassy, this was Scargill’s most spectacular blunder, condemned as strongly by Kinnock and the TUC as it was by Mrs Thatcher. But it allowed her to widen her attack still further. In a third speech, delivered at the Carlton Club in November, she equated the striking miners – and the hard left in general – with Libyan and Palestinian terrorists.

By such speeches Mrs Thatcher deliberately raised the stakes. By defining the coal strike as part of the global struggle against Communism and terrorism she nailed her authority to the outcome of a contest which the Government could not afford to lose and on which she repeatedly declared there could be no compromise. Contrary to her public denials, she took the closest interest in every aspect of the dispute. She not only chaired a large ministerial committee, MISC 101, consisting of nearly half the Cabinet, which met once a week throughout the strike, but more importantly she met both Peter Walker and Leon Brittan nearly every day to keep an eye on developments, and constantly had to be restrained from ringing chief constables with her views on detailed aspects of policing.¹⁶

In September the High Court ruled that the union had indeed breached its own constitution by calling a strike without a ballot. Scargill was fined ?1,000 (which was paid by an anonymous donor) and the union ?200,000. When it refused to pay, its assets were ordered to be sequestrated. It turned out that they had already been transferred abroad, out of reach of the court. But the judgement further deterred other unions from any thought of risking their own funds.

By far the most serious alarm of the whole dispute, however, arose from the possibility that the pit deputies’ union NACODS, representing the men responsible for the maintenance and safety of the pits, might join the strike, which would have closed all the mines immediately and caused irreparable damage. Up until the summer enough deputies had kept working to keep the pits in good repair: local managers had turned a blind eye to those who stayed away. But in August the NCB suddenly announced that it would stop paying those who refused to cross NUM pickets. NACODS promptly voted by a majority of 82 per cent to strike from the end of October – principally over their own grievance but also in support of the miners’ campaign against pit closures. Mrs Thatcher was furious at MacGregor’s clumsiness. ‘We were in danger of losing everything because of a silly mistake,’ she recalled on television in 1993.¹⁷ MacGregor was told in no uncertain terms that the deputies must be bought off; and after anxious talks under the auspices of the arbitration service ACAS, they were.

For the Government the key to victory lay with the 50,000 miners in Nottinghamshire and other ‘moderate’ coalfields who had continued working in the face of verbal and physical pressure to join the strike. To Mrs Thatcher they were heroes of democracy. ‘“Scabs” their former workmates call them,’ she told the Tory Party Conference. ‘Scabs? They are lions.’¹⁸ There is no question that it took courage to defy the bullies. Her praise, however, did them no favours in their own communities, where being lauded by the Prime Minister made them look like the stooges of a hated Tory Government – as to an extent they were.

Eventually the strikers started to go back. By the end of October the realisation that they were going to get no significant support from other unions, and the evident fact that the CEGB had enough coal to sit out the winter, led all but the most militant to conclude that the cause was hopeless. The NCB bribed them with deferred bonuses – puffed in newspaper advertisements as ‘the best package ever offered to any group of workers’¹⁹ – and in the middle fortnight of November some 11,000 took the bait. By the end of the year 70,000 out of 180,000 miners were working (Scargill, of course, disputed the figure) and MacGregor announced that as soon as the number reached 51 per cent the strike would be over. Yet still it lasted for another two months, partly because a new TUC initiative raised hopes of a face-saving compromise. Again Mrs Thatcher was alarmed. She wanted nothing short of outright victory but was afraid that MacGregor was weakening. Now she intervened to insist that the NCB should require not just an assurance but a written guarantee that it alone