could decide when pits must be closed, and went on television on 25 January 1985 to make her involvement perfectly clear.
She finally got her victory on 3 March – almost exactly a year after the strike had begun. With men now going back at the rate of 9,000 a week, a delegate conference voted to preserve what remained of the union’s authority by ordering an orderly return to work the following Monday, even though nothing at all had been achieved. There was no agreement over pit closures; no pay rise until the overtime ban was lifted; and no promise of an amnesty for convicted pickets. Scargill still wanted to fight on, while simultaneously claiming a famous victory. But the majority of his members, and almost the whole of the rest of the country, could see that in a battle of two stubborn wills, Mrs Thatcher’s had proved the stronger.
Yet it was not a popular victory. Mrs Thatcher expressed ‘overwhelming relief’ and tried not to crow.20 Most of the public accepted that the NUM’s position had been untenable. But there was no public celebration. Despite Scargill’s tactics there was real sympathy for the miners and particularly for their wives, seen as long-suffering heroines of their communities’ doomed struggle. Mrs Thatcher reaped no political credit for having defeated them. On the contrary, she was felt to have been as inflexible and divisive a class warrior as Scargill himself. Instead of getting a lift in the polls, as ministers expected, the Government soon found itself trailing in third place behind both Labour and the Alliance.
The economic costs of the dispute were high. In his 1985 budget Nigel Lawson reckoned the direct cost to the Government in public expenditure at ?2.75 billion. The highest price, however, was paid by the coal industry itself. Scargill had always claimed that the Government’s purpose was to destroy the industry. Over the next ten years the rate of pit closures accelerated, so that by 1994 there were only nineteen left in operation, employing just 25,000 miners. The bright future repeatedly promised by MacGregor and the Government throughout 1984 never materialised, mainly because the privatisation of electricity supply ended the protected market for overpriced coal. Thus Scargill could claim to have been vindicated. But in truth, until his determination to stage a political confrontation, the Thatcher Government had been no more ruthless than its Labour predecessors in trying to manage the inevitable rundown as generously as possible.
Nevertheless the strike left a lasting legacy of anger, bitterness and social division. At a time when unemployment was still rising ineluctably, it dramatised the human suffering in those parts of the country which felt themselves thrown on the scrap heap while London and the south of England boomed. Challenged politically by what she called ‘Mr Scargill’s insurrection’, Mrs Thatcher did not seem to care, but concentrated all her attention on defeating the ‘enemy within’, who in turn became a focus of admiration for all other deprived and alienated groups who loathed her Government. In the long run the defeat of the NUM marked her decisive victory not just over the miners but over the unions and the left as a whole. When all is said it was a necessary victory; but it was a flawed and bitterly contested one, which highlighted the negative side of Thatcherism as vividly as the positive.
Livingstone and local government
Scargill’s counterpart in local government was Ken Livingstone – the provocatively left-wing thirty-six-year- old leader of the Greater London Council. Livingstone was the figurehead for a number of local council leaders around the country determined to defy the Tory Government. But the Government’s protracted showdown with Livingstone was in some respects the mirror image of its confrontation with Scargill. ‘Red Ken’, too, was defeated in the end. But whereas Scargill’s blatant contempt for democracy dissipated public sympathy for the miners’ cause, Livingstone by skilful public relations contrived to make corrupt and extravagant municipal socialism appear a great deal more popular than it really was and successfully cast Mrs Thatcher as the enemy of democracy for abolishing it. The GLC and six other metropolitan councils outside London were finally wound up in 1986, removing another focus of opposition to the Government’s centralising hegemony. But the abolition of London-wide local government was another messy operation which left a sour taste in the mouth and an uneasy democratic void which was not filled for fifteen years. When London government was eventually restored by Tony Blair the voters promptly showed what they thought by twice electing Livingstone as Mayor. The fact that Lady Thatcher barely mentioned the abolition of the GLC in her memoirs suggests that she felt in retrospect not very proud of it herself.
Scrapping the metropolitan councils, however, was just one part of a wider assault on local government which ran all through Mrs Thatcher’s three administrations, starting with Michael Heseltine’s efforts to control local spending in her first term and ending with the fiasco of the poll tax in her third. The second term began with the new Environment Secretary introducing legislation to place a statutory ceiling on the amounts that local authorities could raise from the rates. This, though targeted at allegedly spendthrift Labour councils, seriously infringed what had hitherto been a hallowed Conservative principle, the autonomy of local government, and was vehemently opposed by a phalanx of senior party figures in both the Commons and the Lords. Whatever the case for each of these measures, the determination with which Mrs Thatcher pursued them suggests an extraordinary degree of hostility to local government.
Margaret Thatcher grew up in local government. She always claimed that she ‘owed everything’ to her father; and Alfred Roberts’ whole life was local politics. Whatever was the case in her father’s day, however, she believed by the 1970s that local government had become inefficient, extravagant and unrepresentative. As successive governments piled more and more functions and responsibilities on to them, she thought that local authorities had become both too big and intrinsically socialistic, providing all sorts of previously undreamed-of services and bleeding the ratepayers – not usually the same people as the recipients – to pay for them. Increasingly, as Prime Minister, she saw local authorities (of whatever colour) as obstacles blocking the implementation of Thatcherite policies of privatisation, deregulation and consumer choice. Hence the thrust of her Government’s policies across the whole range of service provision was to take responsibility away from local authorities to give it instead to other agencies, private enterprise or central government. It has been calculated that more than fifty separate Acts of Parliament between 1979 and 1989 directly reduced the powers of local government; and the process continued after 1990.21
In this way, by an accumulation of
In diminishing the autonomy of local government she damaged many of the values which Conservatives – herself included – had always stood for: local pride, local responsibility, dispersed power, and a tradition of active local government. Mrs Thatcher often seemed to proceed on the assumption that there would never be another Labour Government. But it was not only shire Tories who were alarmed that their Government was destroying something precious: Tory radicals who were the strongest supporters of free-market economic policies were even more suspicious of the state gathering to itself ever greater power. If Mrs Thatcher thought she was serving democracy by weakening local government, she should have been reminded of Friedrich Hayek’s warning in
