We agreed that the miners’ strike was the key battle ground on which a spectacular victory could turn the tide of public opinion in favour of the government. The Lady must not give in on this. Unpopular though she is at the moment, she could not be loathed as much as Arthur Scargill.
Alan Clark (1981)
Both the right and the left share the same awe at the thought of the miners on the move – they bring down governments, they are the labour movement’s prizefighters, our local heroes.
Beatrix Campbell, Wigan Pier Revisited (1984)
We refuse to abandon the weapon of chaos.
Derek Hatton (1985)
The fact that both Thatcherism and the new left were largely seen by outsiders as having a southern bias was indicative of the division between north and south in Britain that had long existed, but was now becoming ever more exaggerated and ever more remarked upon. ‘Mrs Thatcher has special compasses made with the north taken off,’ joked Alexei Sayle, while Susie Blake’s caricature of a television continuity announcer, in the sketch series Victoria Wood – As Seen on TV, put the other point of view: ‘We’d like to apologize to viewers in the north,’ she said in a cut-glass accent. ‘It must be awful for them.’
Inevitably this was a somewhat crude division that didn’t acknowledge the substantial variations within regions, but the concept of a newly prosperous south drifting further away from the ravaged industries of the north was a powerful image that took firm root in the culture of the times. And, it was alleged, it was not simply neglect that was leading to a two-speed Britain; there was also a government prejudice against the Labour heartlands, exemplified by the way that the defence procurement programme – one of the most valuable parts of government spending, accounting for half of the aerospace industry – was directed, with 56 per cent of the budget spent in the south-east. It was an impression not helped by Margaret Thatcher’s 1985 visit to Wallsend in Tyne and Wear, when a local journalist suggested to her that, in some people’s opinion, ‘you don’t care about us, indeed you have forgotten about us.’ She replied that what was needed was to accentuate the positive, to celebrate the fact that there was 80 per cent employment and good work being done: ‘Don’t you think that’s the way to persuade more companies to come to this region and get more jobs for the people who are unemployed – not always standing there as Moaning Minnies?’ The unexpected use of the Second World War slang expression for an air-raid siren, Moaning Minnie, ensured that the comments received wide, and not very favourable, coverage.
If there was one issue that symbolized the split between the new Thatcherite vision of where the country should be heading and the neglected north, it was the role of trades unions. Thatcher had been elected at the end of a decade when union power was generally felt, including by many union members themselves, to have become too great, and a large part of her appeal was her insistence that steps would be taken to curtail it. Progress, however, was initially slow, partly because Jim Prior as employment secretary didn’t share Thatcher’s instinctive dislike of unions, and partly because of a determination not to repeat the mistakes of Edward Heath’s government, which had created a block of legislation restricting the activities of unions and then found it useless in the face of concerted resistance. This time, there was to be a gradual approach, spread over several years and several Employment Acts, whittling away the rights that had been gained by unions.
By the middle of the 1980s, with further contributions having been made by Prior’s successor, Norman Tebbit, most of the legislation associated with the Thatcher government was in place: unions no longer enjoyed legal immunity from being sued for damages, secondary picketing of businesses beyond the strikers’ employers had been outlawed, the practice of the closed shop had been phased out, and secret ballots had been made compulsory for strike action to have any legal standing, for the election of union leaders and for the authorization of a political fund (on which the Labour Party largely depended for its finance). Crucially, there was to be no room for martyrs, since the penalty for infringement of the new laws was not imprisonment, as under the Heath legislation, but court-imposed fines, non-payment of which would lead to the seizing of union funds, a process known as sequestration. ‘If necessary I will surround every prison in this country with police – and if needs be the army,’ Tebbit told his civil servants. ‘Under no circumstance will I allow any trades union activist, however hard he tries, to get himself into prison under my legislation.’
It wasn’t simply employment law that was deployed to attack unions. Clause 6 of the 1980 Social Security Act changed the rules so that benefits payable to the dependants of someone who was on strike would have a deduction made to allow for strike pay, whether this was actually paid or not. Patrick Jenkin, secretary of state for social services, explained that this measure ‘will save public money to a modest extent, but that is not its main concern. The government was elected, amongst other things, to restore a fairer bargaining balance between employers and trade unions. Clause 6 represents one of the steps taken to that end.’ The intention, Jenkin added, was ‘to fix responsibility for the support of strikers’ families where it rightly belongs, namely, upon the unions.’
Little of this legislation was new, but was rather a return to the programme outlined by Stanley Baldwin’s government in the aftermath of the 1926 general strike, and summarized by The Times: ‘(1) No strike shall be legal unless it is authorized by a majority of the members of the trade union concerned voting by secret ballot. (2) Peaceful picketing to be restricted and controlled, and forbidden altogether at a man’s private residence. (3) Benefit funds to be separated from the fighting funds of a union, and the latter to be liable to an action for damages arising out of an illegal strike. (4) Members of a trade union to intimate in writing their desire to subscribe to the political fund of the union.’ Much of that was enacted (though not the secret ballots) and was subsequently repealed by Clement Attlee’s government in the late-1940s. Now it was all back on the agenda and, in due course, on the statute books. It began to seem as though trade unions were considered as being on a par with prostitutes: in the same way that prostitution was officially legal, but virtually every activity that might promote or facilitate its practice was outlawed, so the right to strike remained, but the right to strike successfully had become almost impossible. And, just as Thatcher would never have countenanced meeting the women who flooded into London from the midlands and north on British Rail awayday tickets to ply their trade, so too did the trade union leaders wait in vain for an invite to Number Ten.
Behind the legislation was the reality that the union movement was in rapid decline. Having grown steadily since the war, membership reached a peak of twelve million in 1979, and then began to fall more quickly than it had risen, so that by the 1983 election a tenth of that number had gone. Unemployment was largely responsible for the fall, and fear of unemployment largely responsible for a simultaneous decline in levels of militancy. ‘What has happened in shop floor behaviour through fear and anxiety,’ noted Douglass Wass, permanent secretary to the treasury, ‘is much greater than I think could have been achieved by more cooperative methods.’
There was one other legacy from the Heath years that haunted the Conservative Party: the sense that there was unfinished business with the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), whose two strikes in the early 1970s had ended in total victory, the second largely credited with bringing down the government in the general election of February 1974. Two members of Heath’s cabinet had argued against his decision to call that election: Margaret Thatcher and Keith Joseph; now they were the leading lights in a new administration and conflict with the miners was widely expected. While still in opposition, Thatcher had asked her fellow ideologue Nicholas Ridley to prepare a strategic analysis of how a Conservative government might respond to politically motivated trade unionism. His paper, which was leaked to The Economist, suggested that ‘the eventual battle’ should not be with gas or electricity workers, and that the miners would be the most likely opposition. It therefore recommended ‘a Thatcher government to: a) build up maximum coal-stocks, particularly in the power stations; b) make contingency plans for the import of coal; c) encourage the recruitment of non-union lorry drivers by haulage companies to help move coal where necessary; d) introduce dual coal/oil-firing in all power stations as quickly as possible’. It went on to suggest that it would be advisable ‘to cut off the money supply to the strikers, and make the union finance them’, and to provide ‘a large, mobile squad of police equipped and prepared to uphold the law against violent picketing’. This, Ridley later insisted, was merely ‘a list of sensible precautions’, showing that Thatcher ‘knew, even as far back as 1978, that she would face a pitched battle mounted by Arthur Scargill’, and that she further knew ‘it would be a political assault designed to overthrow her government’.
Scargill, the anticipated enemy, was second only to Thatcher herself as the most divisive figure of the decade. Like Peter Mandelson, he was a former member of the Young Communist League, but while neither man had progressed to become adult members of the Communist Party of Great Britain, choosing instead to join the Labour Party, Scargill never moved to the right as did Mandelson. Indeed some suspected that the CPGB was too gradualist in its approach for him, too content to build its strength slowly in the upper echelons of the trade unions, not sufficiently committed to the grand public gesture. Rather there was in Scargill’s approach something akin to syndicalism – the belief that trade unions themselves were sufficient to overthrow capitalism without recourse to political parties – combined with a love of the limelight. He was by a long way the most articulate union leader of his generation, an electrifying platform speaker, with a voice loud enough to ride any wave of cheering, while also being capable of disconcertingly calm, reasonable, unflustered performances in television studios.
He had been elected leader of the Yorkshire miners in 1973 and, during those earlier strikes against the Heath government, had been the man widely credited with developing the tactic of the flying picket that had done so much to ensure their success. Disinclined to follow any path that might smack of compromise, he had built a strong following as a leader prepared to fight at all times for the interests of his members, and in December 1981 he was elected president of the NUM. By that stage, one confrontation with the government had already appeared and receded. In early 1981 the National Coal Board (NCB) had produced proposals to close 23 pits and make 13,000 miners redundant, to which the NUM, under the leadership of Joe Gormley, had responded with a threat of a national strike. Aware that the preparations outlined by Ridley had not yet been completed, and that the miners would attract widespread support from other sectors, the government backed down. ‘I do not deny for one moment the acute embarrassment this means for the government,’ admitted cabinet minister John Biffen, before pointing out that he didn’t ‘come into politics to be a kamikaze pilot’.
As those preparations were put in place, however, a conflict looked increasingly inevitable, and the rhetoric was gradually ramped up, as Alan Bennett noted in the wake of the Falklands War: ‘There has been a noticeable increase in the use of the military metaphor in public debate. Tebbit, the employment secretary, yesterday talked of campaigns, charges and wars of attrition. And the flag figures. The danger of such talk, of course, is that it presupposes an enemy.’ Thatcher herself was subsequently to make explicit the link she saw between the Argentine military dictatorship and the unions: ‘We had to fight an enemy without in the Falklands. We always have to be aware of the enemy within, which is more difficult to fight and more dangerous to liberty.’ That phrase, ‘the enemy within’, was to cause outrage to many, but Thatcher wasn’t the only one using such language. In his first conference speech as leader, Neil Kinnock had adopted similar terminology from an opposite standpoint: ‘Those who prate about Blimpish patriotism in the mode of Margaret Thatcher are also the ones who will take millions off the caring services of this country. I wonder they don’t choke on the very word patriotism. They are the enemy, they must be defeated.’ And the NUM in particular was regularly described by both sides in militaristic terms: ‘the party’s traditional enemy,’ as Conservative Alan Clark called them, or ‘Labour’s brigade of guards,’ as seen from the left by Eric Heffer.
In March 1984 the NCB announced a programme of pit closures that would see 20,000 men lose their jobs, and miners at Cortonwood colliery in Yorkshire, one of those pits threatened with being shut down, walked out on strike. Others joined them and within a week Scargill had announced that this was now deemed to be a national strike, as he called on all NUM members to withdraw their labour. Thus began perhaps the most famous dispute in Britain’s industrial history, a year-long struggle that changed the lives of hundreds of thousands and that became symbolic of a major shift in modern British history, ending with the death of the Labour movement as it had been known for decades. It was epic in scale, often heroic in its conduct, and seemingly destined for defeat from the outset.
It was not, however, a strike that was universally observed. The Nottinghamshire pits, in particular, continued to work, with very few miners heeding the call to withdraw their labour, a pattern repeated in the Midlands, South Derbyshire and Leicestershire, and much attention centred on the refusal of the union to hold a national ballot on strike action. This was not yet a legal requirement and, although the NUM had in the past normally balloted its members, the action taken this time was perfectly constitutional; it just wasn’t very astute politically. Peter Heathfield, the union’s general secretary, argued that ‘it cannot be right for one man to vote another man out of a job’, and that, since the proposed job losses were not spread across the country (Nottinghamshire, for example, was not going to be affected), a national ballot would have been inappropriate. Tony Benn was later to add that it would also have been pointless. In the 1970s a national ballot had rejected a proposed incentive scheme, but the Nottinghamshire miners had gone to court and secured a ruling that they could have their own separate vote; when they did, they decided to accept the scheme. In these circumstances, Benn said, ‘The issue of a national ballot was really irrelevant because had it occurred – and the NUM nationally had come out in favour of a strike – Nottinghamshire area would have won permission for its own ballot and remained at work; and if it had gone the other way the Yorkshire area would have come out and other areas would have had to decide whether to give support.’ Whatever the logic of these claims, the failure to ballot the members handed the NUM’s opponents a potent propaganda weapon, and even within the Labour movement there were many who agreed with Roy Hattersley’s argument that ‘it was Arthur Scargill’s duty to either convert or outvote those of his members who thought only of themselves’.
The drifting away of Nottinghamshire from the mainstream of the mining industry had been apparent in the 1983 general election, when the Conservative candidate Andy Stewart had won the newly created constituency of Sherwood, despite the fact that it included twelve pits and an unusually high concentration of mineworkers. Now, in the face of the county’s non-participation, Scargill returned to the tactic of the mass picket, sending large numbers of striking miners into the Nottinghamshire coalfields to dissuade those still working from continuing so to do. And in response the police, having learnt from the 1970s, adopted similar tactics; the area was flooded with thousands of officers from around the country to ensure that those who wished to go to work might do so, an approach that some feared was the start of a de facto national police force. More controversial still was the setting up of roadblocks to prevent the passage of anyone suspected of being a picket: in the first six months of the dispute, estimated the chief constable of Nottinghamshire, there were nearly 165,000 cases of people stopped from entering the county.
Striking miners naturally saw this as an infringement of their right to free movement about the country. Their opponents saw it as a reasonable attempt to prevent the mass physical intimidation of individuals seeking to go about their lawful business and attend their place of employment. Appropriating one of the most venerated slogans of the left, the government now proclaimed the importance of the ‘right to work’, infuriating all those who regarded Thatcherism as being synonymous with unemployment. This right, it was argued, was now being threatened by the mass pickets, ‘the bully boys of Arthur’s army’ as they were called by Ian MacGregor, the man appointed chairman of the NCB in 1983.
While the media and the government focused on the lack of a ballot and on incidents of violence by pickets, the NUM and its supporters saw the policing of the strike as a key issue. Stories abounded of police aggression, of unprovoked violence and of deliberate intimidation in areas where the strike was solid. ‘They were animals,’ said a woman in a mining village in South Yorkshire, after seeing police break up a picket. ‘They were hitting anyone they could find. I was once in favour of the police but there’s no way they will get any help from me now.’ This breakdown in trust was amongst the most notable effects of the strike, much of it stemming from the behaviour of officers from outside forces in what was seen as virtually an army of occupation. George Moores, the chairman of the South Yorkshire police committee talked about seeing ‘rosy-cheeked nice lads turned into Nazi storm-troopers,’ and added that it would be ‘twenty years before some policemen in South Yorkshire are forgiven for what they’ve done in the pit villages and on the picket lines.’ There were stories too of the police lines being augmented by soldiers, and of deliberate taunting by officers, waving wads of banknotes at pickets in celebration of the overtime pay they were receiving.
Little of this was aired in the news media at the time. The majority of journalists, photographers and television cameras situated themselves behind police lines, a position that suggested both the sympathies of their employers and the relative safety that was to be found there – better to face a ragged shower of sticks and stones than a cavalry charge of baton-wielding police. The consequence was that most of the media coverage depicted the hostility and violence of pickets, not of police. Nonetheless, the imagery that later passed into the collective memory of the dispute tended to show the conflict from the other side. The role of the force could be seen, most famously, in the film Billy Elliot (2000), set in a mining town in Durham during the strike, with the silent, menacing presence of the police an inextricable part of the urban setting. The issue was addressed too in Reginald Hill’s novel Under World (1988), set in a Yorkshire mining village after the strike, where Dalziel ruminates on the legacy of the strike and its implications for policing by consent in the future: ‘They brought a lot of cockneys up from the Stink, but, bloody Cossacks, them lot. All they know is rape and pillage.’ Another fictional detective working in the county, Peter Robinson’s DCI Banks, sees the effect on members of the force, as he’s told about the character of an officer murdered while policing an anti-nuclear demonstration: ‘He was handy with his truncheon, Gill was. And he enjoyed it. Every time we got requests for manpower at demos, pickets and the like, he’d be the first to sign up. Got a real taste for it during the miners’ strike, when they bussed people in from all over the place. He was the kind of bloke who’d wave a roll of fivers at the striking miners to taunt them before he clobbered them.’ The issue of overtime pay even turned up in a 1986 episode of Casualty: ‘It’s alright for you boys, innit? Every time there’s a strike, another hundred coppers start taking out mortgages,’ says an ambulance worker bitterly to a policeman. ‘If I was on your wages, maybe I could join the property-owning democracy as well.’
Amongst the few journalists trying to keep an even-handed approach was Paul Routledge, the labour editor of The Times, who wrote of picket-line violence: ‘Without equivocation it ought to be stopped. All of it, the stone throwing by miners and the baton charging by policemen who actually seem to enjoy a week away from home for a pityard punch-up. And don’t tell me they don’t because I’ve seen them at it.’ There was also Paul Foot, whose sympathies lay more squarely with the strikers; he reported in his Daily Mirror column about the excitement on Fleet Street when word arrived of a Derbyshire miner, Pete Neelan, having his car and garage set on fire and his house spray-painted with the word ‘Revenge’. Sadly, when the journalists arrived to get the full story, they discovered that he wasn’t one of the heroic working miners but merely a striker, and they all disappeared again without filing their copy.
These were isolated voices. Most of the media comment saw the strike as being a personal political crusade by Scargill and, with impressive consistency, used the imagery of the Second World War against him. SCARGILL AND THE FASCISTS OF THE LEFT ran a headline in the Daily Express, while John Junor, editor of the Sunday Express, continued the analogy: ‘Hitler used his thugs to terrorize into submission people who disagreed with him. Isn’t that precisely what is happening now at night in Nottinghamshire mining villages?’ Most notoriously, the Sun obtained a photograph of Scargill with his right arm outstretched in a gesture that coincidentally resembled a Nazi salute, and proposed to run it with the headline MINE FUHRER. The paper’s print workers refused to print the article and instead the paper appeared with a virtually blank front page, containing just a brief statement from the management: ‘Members of all the Sun production chapels refused to handle the Arthur Scargill picture and major headline on our lead story. The Sun has decided, reluctantly, to print the paper without either.’ The picture ran elsewhere, the Daily Express captioning it with a little more subtlety: ‘Napoleon of Barnsley’.
The personalized focus on Scargill was a deliberate tactic by the government and its supporters, who knew how controversial a figure he was, though their task was undoubtedly made easier by his own self-publicizing inclinations. It was a successful ploy, and not simply amongst the more obvious readers of tabloid papers; Routledge revealed that the Queen had suggested to him the strike was all down to one man: ‘she felt that the dispute was essentially promoted by Mr Scargill.’ But the personalization was resented by many in the rank and file of the union. ‘We’re not Scargill’s cannon fodder,’ insisted Terry Harrison, an NUM branch secretary in Kent. ‘He is responding to decisions we have taken in our branches. We have got a leader who does what we tell him to.’ Morris Bryan, another Kent miner, agreed: ‘Arthur Scargill is pursuing the policy of the union. It’s not his policy, it’s been formulated by the union.’ Such support was not universal, even on the left of the Labour Party: ‘Personally, I didn’t like Scargill. I thought his ego had taken over,’ wrote John Prescott later. ‘In my view it was “me me me” in so much of what he was doing and saying.’
Many of the themes that had developed in the early weeks of the strike came sharply into focus with the confrontation at the Orgreave coking plant in South Yorkshire in June 1984. A mass picket, seeking to close down the plant, was met by large numbers of police – estimates varied between five thousand and ten thousand on each side – and in the violence that ensued, mounted police made repeated charges. Amongst the injured was Scargill himself, briefly admitted into hospital. The television images of the battle horrified much of the nation (with the BBC accused of misleading the public about the order of events, so that the use of horses was seen to be reactive rather than unprovoked), and Tony Benn was not alone in concluding that ‘A kind of civil war is developing; there is no parallel that I remember in my lifetime’. That was indeed how it looked: armies of strikers and sympathizers trying to impose their will by force and being prevented only by even greater force. Even the government’s natural supporters were disturbed; the strike had been ‘bungled by both sides in the most pigheaded fashion,’ despaired actor Kenneth Williams in his diary. ‘Thatcher deserves to lose popularity over it: I’m not surprised she’s down in the polls. Governments are supposed to be competent not obdurately stupid.’
There was no consensus either in the police establishment. South Yorkshire’s assistant chief constable Tony Clement made it clear that Orgreave was not simply part of an industrial dispute: ‘If the pickets here win by force, the whole structure of industrial relations and policing and law and order and civil liberties is all gone.’ And although his view was certainly the majority position within the force, John Alderson, the former chief constable of Devon and Cornwall, was prepared to sound a discordant note: ‘For the first time we have seen the police having to resort to some kind of paramilitary style of policing which we have always associated with continental police forces and always prided ourselves in having avoided having to introduce.’
While the headlines were thus occupied, the everyday reality behind the dispute was the hardship endured by those on strike and their families. The cuts in benefits that had earlier been introduced bit deep, for there was no strike pay, just a daily allowance provided to those who did a stint on the picket-line. The DHSS also deducted from benefit payments any loans made to families by social work departments in local councils, while for single men, there was no income at all. In the resulting desperation, Labour MP Joe Ashton noted that ‘in Barnsley market local stalls were soon selling wedding rings for £5 each,’ and Benn described the scene at the Labour Club in his Chesterfield constituency: ‘it was like a field hospital, with people crowding in to collect food parcels. There are miners’ wives who are expecting babies, and the DHSS refuse to help with money for prams or cots or nappies, and this is causing great anxiety.’ The use of the benefit system as an adjunct to the government’s industrial policy, pointed out Peter Hain, was a new and powerful weapon, turning the achievements of previous Labour administrations against the people they were intended to help: ‘Because the poor are now more dependent on state benefits than in pre-welfare days when they had to rely on community self-help, they are more vulnerable to attacks on these benefits.’
What emerged in response was an alternative welfare system, with the establishment of kitchens serving meals and distributing food parcels. A large network of support across the country, involved upwards of a million people – ‘the biggest and most continuous civilian mobilization to confront the government since the Second World War,’ according to the Financial Times – and raised an estimated £60 million and made huge donations in kind. An endless round of benefit events was staged, featuring acts as diverse as Wham! and Napalm Death, as well as Crass’s last ever gig, and making folk-punk singer Billy Bragg a national figure (‘it energized the entire music industry,’ commented NME editor Neil Spencer). Every Saturday for months there were bucket-wielding groups in high streets across the country, urging shoppers to ‘dig deep for the miners’, and offering in return for their contributions a sticker calling for ‘Coal, Not Dole’.
Most noticeable about this support campaign was the fact that it was so enthusiastically embraced by the new left. It effectively took over from CND as the single unifying issue around which a disparate movement could rally, even though the cause seemed so firmly fixed in an old Labour world of a male-only manual industry. This was, it felt to many, not simply a strike, but a crusade against everything that Margaret Thatcher stood for, a civil war between two different philosophies who didn’t even seem to share a common language: the government and Ian MacGregor talked of ‘uneconomic pits’, the NUM’s supporters spoke of ‘mining communities’. The gulf in values, in the visions of society, that lay behind those two phrases motivated hundreds of thousands who opposed Thatcherism.
Journalist Julie Burchill was one of many to ridicule the incongruity of a group such as Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners – ‘as though a single gay or lesbian from the mining community could ever have come out and been themselves, and continued to live in a pit village’ – but the interaction of such organizations with striking miners did much to spread the new left’s agenda beyond its London base. Interviewed by Robin Denselow, Red Stripe from the a cappella group the Flying Pickets, remembered putting striking miners up in a house in London: ‘Miners from the Welsh valleys found themselves living alongside women who wore pink hair or Mohican haircuts, swore, accused them of being sexist, and insisted on being treated as equals. The miners were “shocked” by their supporters, and their attitudes changed too.’ It was far from one-way traffic: the leading role taken in the dispute by the Miners’ Wives Support Groups changed miners’ opinions, but it also reinvigorated a women’s movement that had been in danger of retreating into theoretical abstraction. And if there were one symbol of the transformations effected during the course of the strike, it was the presence of a contingent of miners, complete with brass bands, at the head of the 1985 Gay Pride march. Nor was it simply a political exchange. Mark Steel, in Derbyshire for a benefit gig, stayed with a striking miner and was greeted with: ‘I hope thee’s got some of that wacky baccy. That’s bloody marvellous stuff, that is.’ When Steel explained that he didn’t have any cannabis, the miner was confused: he’d never encountered it before the strike, but had recently come to the conclusion that every Londoner who was supportive of the strike was bound to be carrying a stash.
While the spirit was undoubtedly willing, however, the power of the new left was simply not up to the task of ensuring victory for the miners. The strike had faced an uphill struggle from the outset, with the government not only being better prepared, but also choosing the timing of the dispute, at the start of spring, just as the demand for energy was coming to the end of its seasonal peak. Unlike the 1970s, there were to be no power cuts, no significant disruptions to other industries as a result of the miners’ actions – the only people who went without heating the following winter were striking miners and their families. ‘Mrs Thatcher has been beaten once too often by the miners,’ noted the Daily Mirror as early as March 1984. ‘This time she holds most of the cards and she intends to win.’ The NUM’s sole chance of success lay in the hope that other groups of workers would join. It rapidly became apparent that no such development was going to happen.
At the time and in the years to come, much anger was directed by the left at the leadership of the Labour Party and the TUC for failing to provide full support for the strike or for the miners themselves. In fact, Neil Kinnock, scion of a South Wales mining family, had addressed the issue of policing the pickets: ‘What would be the instinct of any red-blooded man in this House, having put his family to all that inconvenience and near-misery, if he saw someone riding roughshod over his picket line?’ he had asked rhetorically in the Commons. ‘I know what my attitude would be. In fact, I should be worried if it were not the case.’ But that had been in February 1972; his position had changed over the intervening twelve years and now he mostly sat frustrated on the sidelines, infuriated by the way that the strike was postponing his attempts to re-orientate the party, reluctant even to push the issue of civil liberties. The situation wasn’t aided by a personal animosity between him and Scargill. For more than two months of the strike, the two men didn’t even meet. ‘What’s the strategy, Arthur?’ Kinnock asked, when finally they did. ‘What’s the game plan? Tell me and I’ll see what we can do.’ But Scargill didn’t answer, and the suspicion grew that there wasn’t really any strategy at all, just the tactic of mass-picketing that had worked back in 1972, but was now being contained by the police.
Frank Chapple, whose union included the power-station workers, acknowledged that his members had the ability to cause real disruption to society, which might well have swung the dispute in favour of the miners, but he insisted: ‘They had not used that strength on their own behalf and would not be compelled or manipulated to do so for some other group with the muscle to throw up a blockade.’ Bill Sirs, general secretary of the steel-workers union, was similarly reluctant to become involved: ‘I am not here to see the steel industry crucified on someone else’s altar.’ But the truth was that even if other union leaders had thrown their weight behind the miners, there was no guarantee that a call for action would have been heeded. The union movement was already in full retreat, having lost every conflict with the government over the last four years (save for when, as with the miners in 1981, the government had refused to give battle); the leadership was weak, demoralized and unable to rely on the support of their members, a large proportion of whom had voted Tory in 1979 and again in 1983. And still the lack of an NUM ballot rankled: if Scargill couldn’t persuade a fifth of his own members to come out, why should others risk their livelihoods?
Amongst the wider public, polling evidence showed a steady loss of support for the action, and certainly nothing comparable to the position enjoyed by the NUM in the strikes of the previous decade: in February 1974 a Gallup poll had found that 52 per cent said their sympathies were with the miners, with only 24 per cent siding with the employers; in December 1984, these figures were reversed. ‘It was as if we were the same crowd each time,’ Mark Steel wrote of the massive anti-Thatcher demonstrations of the early 1980s. ‘The protest movement wasn’t reaching beyond its own ranks of around 150,000 people and it was dawning on those of us that despised her that she was getting away with it.’ The numbers might be greater now, but the essential problem remained: the strike alienated rather than attracted potential support. The longer it continued, with the chance of victory slipping ever further from the grasp of the NUM, the uglier the conflict became. A new depth was reached in November 1984 with the killing of a South Wales taxi driver named David Wilkie, who had been driving a working miner to work when two strikers dropped a concrete block from an overhead bridge onto his car. The two men were convicted of murder, though this was later reduced on appeal to manslaughter.
The odds were clearly against the miners, and though the sheer length of the dispute meant that there were moments when it seemed that the tide was turning for them, outright victory never seemed to be a real possibility. Just four weeks into the strike the Daily Mail ran a headline MINERS START ‘SLOW DRIFT BACK TO WORK’, which was absurdly premature, but did set the tone for much of the media coverage as autumn arrived and a drift back did occur. Although the numbers of those returning to work were distorted for propaganda purposes, the trend was clear and reality could not be ignored indefinitely. In March 1985, nearly a year after the strike had begun, the 63 per cent of miners who were still out staged simultaneous marches back to their pits, having suffered the biggest defeat the trade unions had faced in over half a century.
The closure programme that had triggered the strike was now put into full force, and over the next year some thirty-six mines were closed, with massive job losses that were as disruptive and damaging as everyone had always been known they would be. ‘Take away the coal and their lives were finished,’ lamented Joe Ashton. ‘In other towns redundant men could move down the road a couple of miles and take their skills to another factory. When a pit shut, there was no other factory. Coal-mining skills, unlike engineering, are not transferable or of any use in any other industry.’ The financial costs to the nation were also heavy; somewhere between three and five billion pounds were spent beating the strike, in addition to the cost of the closures and redundancies that followed, though the chancellor, Nigel Lawson, professed himself unconcerned: ‘It was essential that the government spent whatever was necessary to defeat Arthur Scargill.’ As with the Falklands, it had been an expensive victory, but like that war, it was seen in Conservative circles as a defence of basic principles. ‘Margaret Thatcher’s government had broken not just a strike but a spell,’ wrote Norman Tebbit in his memoirs. ‘Parliament had regained its sovereignty.’
By this stage, however, Tebbit’s own life had been horribly turned upside down. For while the miners’ strike was still continuing, amidst all the inflated talk of enemies within, a more clear-cut enemy came close to scoring its greatest ever propaganda success. In the early hours of 12 October 1984, with the Conservative Party gathered in Brighton for its annual conference, the IRA detonated a bomb in the Grand Hotel, where Thatcher and most of the party’s leadership were staying. Five people – including the MP Sir Anthony Berry – were killed, and many others injured, amongst them both Tebbit and his wife, Margaret, the latter left permanently disabled. Rescuers continued to work through the rubble until, seven hours after the explosion, the chief whip, John Wakeham, became the last person to be pulled out alive from the wreckage. Thatcher herself escaped unharmed, though the windows to her suite were blown in and the bathroom destroyed, and she went on to deliver her speech that afternoon to the conference, displaying a calm and resolve that merely enhanced her status: ‘The fact that we are gathered here now, shocked but composed and determined, is a sign not only that this attack has failed, but that all attempts to destroy democracy by terrorism will fail.’
The scale of the atrocity, the attempt to murder the prime minister, was unprecedented in the Northern Ireland war – indeed one had to look back to the Gunpowder Plot or the Cato Street Conspiracy for a parallel – but it could, as Alan Clark noted in his diary, have been much worse: ‘If they had just had the wit to press their advantage, a couple of chaps with guns in the crowd, they could have got the whole government as they blearily emerged – and the assassins could in all probability have made their getaway unpunished.’ The same thought occurred to another diarist, Alan Bennett: ‘If the IRA had really wanted to succeed they should have left a sniper behind and he would have had an easy task.’
The attack was greeted as a tremendous propaganda coup by the IRA. ‘Today we were unlucky,’ read the group’s message, admitting that it had been responsible, ‘but remember we only have to be lucky once.’ In the longer term, however, it did nothing to improve their chances of victory; Thatcher had already lost one of her closest colleagues, Airey Neave, to a terrorist bomb shortly before the election in 1979, and the Brighton bomb simply reinforced her implacable opposition to any thought of compromise. The failed attempt to kill her and her cabinet ensured that the IRA and its political wing, Sinn Fein, would be locked out of talks for the remainder of the decade. The following year, the IRA claimed to have detonated more explosives than in any other year since the conflict had resumed in 1969, but they were peripheral to the main political event: the talks between the London and Dublin governments that led to the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985. The Agreement was hailed at the time as a major breakthrough, allowing the Republic a symbolic involvement in the North’s affairs in exchange for recognizing that there could be no unification of Ireland without the consent of the people. In truth there was little concrete on which to build, save for the contribution the negotiations made towards breaking down barriers of mistrust and suspicion between the two governments. That was in itself a not inconsiderable achievement, but the absence of the major parties from the North meant that both the Unionists and the Republicans were infuriated, and without their participation no real progress was possible. In her memoirs, even Thatcher professed herself disappointed with what had been gained: ‘Our concessions alienated the Unionists without gaining the level of security co-operation we had a right to expect.’
The Brighton bombing took over the media for a brief while, but then, as ever with the issues of Northern Ireland, it faded from the headlines, too intractable to hold the interest of either journalists or public. Meanwhile the government, in conflict with its traditional enemies in the NUM and the IRA, was also being threatened with a final showdown in the long-running conflict with local councils.
Central government had, from the mid-1970s onwards, been steadily reducing the level of its funding for local authorities, with the result that councils were obliged either to cut back the services they provided or to increase the rates, the local property tax that then existed. From a Conservative perspective, too many authorities – particularly those under Labour control – chose the latter option, burdening residents and businesses with ever higher taxes in order to fund overtly political programmes. Consequently a Rates Act was passed in 1984 that would enable Whitehall to determine the maximum budget for any council that it believed was performing poorly; should councillors choose to defy this by setting a tax-rate that was higher than that permitted, they would face disqualification from holding public office and be personally fined. A list of eighteen councils who were thus to be rate-capped (as the process was known) was issued, all of them Labour-controlled, with the exception of Portsmouth, which many assumed had been included solely as a nod towards being even-handed. The other seventeen authorities, together with a further nine who were also in dispute with the government, came together and agreed on a common tactic: not to set a rate at all, in the hope of forcing confrontation. The government would then be obliged to remove more than a thousand councillors from office, and install administrators, a procedure so complicated as to seem almost impossible to achieve.
The best-known figure in the proposed defiance was Ken Livingstone, but with his recent rehabilitation, his position as the media’s favourite hate figure had been usurped by Derek Hatton, the deputy leader of Liverpool Council. A member of the Trotskyist group Militant, who had spent decades building their numbers within the Labour Party, Hatton was widely seen as the major player in Liverpool, with the actual leader of the council, John Hamilton, kept in office to act as something between a figurehead and a fig leaf. When interviewed by David Selbourne of New Society magazine, Hamilton conceded the point: ‘I am the leader but I don’t have power,’ he said, somewhat pitifully. Hatton, on the other hand, did have power and appeared to enjoy his new-found fame immensely, sporting a sharper line in clothes than other politicians and driving a Jaguar with a personalized number-plate DEG5Y (‘Degsy’ being his favoured diminutive). He and other Militant leaders were also alleged to behave like town-hall thugs, using the council’s security force as a private army. ‘Yes, they were loyal to us, and yes, some of them were heavy-looking lads,’ admitted Hatton. ‘There were occasions, I will concede, when some of them got out of hand, and went over the top.’ And, he added: ‘Certainly they acted as my minders on some occasions.’
But while Hatton was taking the headlines, behind the scenes it was David Blunkett, leader of Sheffield Council, who emerged as the most weighty figure in the fight to defend what was seen as the cause of local democracy. In 1983 he had been elected to the national executive committee at his first attempt, the first person elected by the constituencies section for 35 years who wasn’t then and never had been an MP. His own record in Sheffield seemed to some to vindicate the need for rate-capping (rates virtually doubled within his first two years in office), but he was an attractive personality, much less combative than the likes of Hatton, and conveying a sense of honesty and decency. The fact that he was accompanied at all times not by heavy-duty minders but by his guide-dog, Offa, did his image no harm either. Clearly he had a bright future in the party, and being barred from office for non-compliance with the new law was not a particularly attractive career option. Nonetheless he tried to hold the line of not setting a rate: ‘Being martyrs is not what we seek,’ he insisted. ‘Martyrs fail. We intend to succeed.’ But with no indication that the government might back down, and with little sign of support from the public – or even from councillors, who were beginning to worry about those fines and the prospect of being disqualified – it became clear that martyrdom was the most likely outcome.
The united front crumbled rapidly. The GLC, deeply split and in a state of confusion, ended up setting a rate that was actually lower than the level permitted by government, while Blunkett was unable to hold the Labour group in Sheffield together, and again a legal rate was set. Others too abandoned the struggle, with only Liverpool and Lambeth holding out until the summer, by which stage their councillors had become liable for the penalties specified under the Act. The collapse of the campaign produced much bitterness on the left, with many blaming Livingstone and Blunkett in particular. As Hatton bragged: ‘Councils like Islington and Sheffield saw themselves as rebels cast in the same mould as Liverpool. But when it came to the crunch they just didn’t have our bottle.’
When Liverpool finally did set a rate, it was fixed at a level well below that needed to meet the council’s spending, a new tactic designed to ensure that bankruptcy would become a real possibility within months. This would then, it was hoped, provoke a crisis, though what was then supposed to happen was unclear, save for providing a propaganda victory; it would, claimed Hatton, ‘hammer home the sharp reality of our arguments: that unless more money was available to Liverpool from the central funds, then jobs were really on the line.’ The inevitable crash came in September 1985 when the council announced that by the end of the year it would have run out of money and wouldn’t be able to pay the council’s thirty-one thousand employees. Consequently redundancy notices, giving the statutory three months’ notice, were sent round to the employees’ homes, some of them in a fleet of taxis that had been requisitioned to ensure delivery, a move that brought the wrath of the unions down upon the council. As even Hatton was to admit: ‘We had badly miscalculated.’
This should have been, and was intended to be, a battle with government, and in some quarters there was excitable talk of opening a ‘second front’ to augment the struggle of the miners. But the anticipated confrontation with Thatcher never came and, rather than the government, it was the Labour leadership that placed itself in the front line.
In October 1985, at the Labour Party conference in Bournemouth, Neil Kinnock, who had opposed the tactic of defying rate-capping and who shared no common ground with Hatton at all, save for them being in the same party, used the example of Liverpool as the climax of what became his most famous speech. ‘I’ll tell you what happens with impossible promises,’ he said, turning his attention to the left after an hour spent attacking the Conservatives. ‘You start with far-fetched resolutions. They are then pickled into a rigid dogma, a code, and you go through the years sticking to that. Outdated, misplaced, irrelevant to the real needs, and you end up with the grotesque chaos of a Labour council – a Labour council! – hiring taxis to scuttle round a city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers.’
As it became clear just how explicit this assault on Militant in Liverpool was to be, the hall erupted. Initially the noise was dominated by howls of protest, with the television pictures showing Derek Hatton on his feet and shouting ‘Liar!’ The Liverpool MP Eric Heffer, sitting alongside Kinnock as a member of the NEC, stood up and climbed down from the stage, walking out of the hall (‘It was too much to bear,’ he wrote later). He was followed by the Young Socialist representative on the NEC, the Militant-supporting Frances Curran. When Kinnock resumed, the audience was still far from settled and his next statement reignited the clamour: ‘You can’t play politics with people’s jobs.’ By now, though, the noise was mostly coming from supporters, recovering from the shock of a Labour leader – a Labour leader – publicly laying into the left. At the end of the speech, he was given a standing ovation, amidst prolonged cheers.
Tony Benn, who also left the hall early, came across a delegate in tears: ‘I can’t understand what they’ve done to our party,’ she wept. But elsewhere there was jubilation. Benn’s old enemy, Denis Healey, was exultant: ‘Neil’s speech was of historic importance. He has shifted the centre of gravity of the Labour movement.’ Roy Hattersley stressed the other crucial dimension of what Kinnock had been aiming for: ‘It was historic because it will change the country’s perception of the Labour Party.’ The actress Glenda Jackson, later to become a Labour MP, sent Kinnock a note: ‘At last, at last – thank you, thank you.’ And the party’s newly appointed director of communications, Peter Mandelson, declared it ‘the most moving, most exciting speech I’ve ever heard.’
After years of conferences that had more often damaged than boosted the party, Kinnock’s dramatic denunciation of the left also played well with the public. Ten days before the conference started, a Gallup poll had the Alliance on 35 per cent, and the Tories and Labour level on 29 per cent; a Harris poll immediately afterwards showed Labour on 39 per cent, the Tories on 32 per cent and the Alliance on 27 per cent. Kinnock’s success brought him a new status, sufficiently worrying to the Conservatives to prompt Norman Tebbit towards the end of the year to ask him outside in an encounter in the Commons lobby. ‘I’m not too old to take you on, sonny boy,’ the Tory hard man was alleged to have snarled, though – to the disappointment of many – the altercation never reached the stage of fisticuffs.
The primary political consequence of the collapse of the rate-capping campaign, together with the loss of the miners’ strike, was the growing dominance of the centre-right on Labour’s national executive committee. NEC members like Blunkett and Michael Meacher, who had previously voted solidly with the left, began to transfer allegiance to the reforming leadership. Seven months after the conference, in May 1986, the first of a succession of Militant supporters from Liverpool were brought before the NEC, charged with membership of a proscribed organization and bringing the Labour Party into disrepute, a process that saw sixteen members expelled from the party. It was at the NEC hearing that Tony Mulhearn, perhaps an even more powerful figure than Hatton in Liverpool and in Militant, if not as celebrated by the media, finally admitted how foolish it had been to give ammunition to Militant’s enemies: ‘We did make a tactical error in handing out the redundancy notices.’ Combined with the legal moves against councillors, the expulsions ended the dominance of Militant in Liverpool, one of the few successes that world Trotskyism had been able to claim in the second half of the twentieth century. Looking back on the era, Hatton was keen to stress the achievements: ‘we created 6,000 new jobs, we built 5,000 new houses, we changed the education system, and raised the whole level of political awareness within the city.’ And, with some justification, he cited as evidence of their success the fact that, despite all the attacks from almost every quarter, the May 1986 council elections saw the Labour group in the city increase their strength.
For Kinnock, that speech and the reception it received was about as good as his tenure as leader was ever going to get. It announced his real arrival on the centre-stage of British politics after two years of struggling to establish his authority, and it was one of the most significant moments in the postwar history of the Labour Party, marking the effective end of the left’s power within the party. One didn’t have to be a member of Militant, however, to experience a sense of regret that while Thatcher had spent her second term fighting external enemies in the shape of the NUM, the IRA and the GLC, Kinnock’s finest moment came with an attack on a faction within his own party.
It was the Labour conference of the following year that saw the dawn of the red rose as the party’s new symbol. And, after Neil and Glenys Kinnock had flung roses out into the audience, the hall broke into a spontaneous rendition of the chant from the football terraces that had been adopted by the striking miners: ‘Here we go, here we go, here we go’, sung to the tune of John Philip Sousa’s ‘Stars and Stripes Forever’. It was evidently intended as a rallying cry, in anticipation of the election that was widely expected the following year, but it was hard not to see it as being also an elegy for a Labour movement that, with the twin defeats of the miners and Militant, would never be the same again.