There Is No Alternative

Alan Clark supposedly told the journalist Edward Pearce that “It’s all absolute crap, of course, to talk about liberal market theory. What Margaret is on about is the Class War.” This is certainly how the miners’ strike was widely perceived, among the miners, at least. But Thatcher herself was not from a privileged class background: As this 1979 photo of Thatcher on the campaign trail suggests, she drew considerable support from Britain’s middle- and lower middle-classes, who identified with her. She was able to pursue an anti-socialist agenda in large measure because her own lower-middle-class roots tempered the perception that she was waging an all-out class war. (Courtesy of the family of Srdja Djukanovic)

There had never before been a strike over pit closures. Previous strikes had revolved around the issue of wages, not closures. Thus the question, at heart, was not the closure of the pits. The great miners’ strike was an ideological struggle. For Thatcher, the miners’ union and the bureaucrats who managed the coal industry represented everything wrong with socialism: waste, inefficiency, irresponsibility, unaccountability. To the miners, Thatcher represented everything wrong with capitalism: avarice, heartlessness, the privi-tation of profits over human dignity. Thatcher had made her goal explicit: She sought to destroy socialism in Britain. In return, Scargill made his goal explicit: He sought to destroy Thatcher.

And so the strike began.

In September 1979, six months after Thatcher won the first general election, John Hoskyns sent the prime minister a memorandum: Begin your preparations now, he warned her. The miners are going to give you grief. The received wisdom in the Conservative Party, he tells me over lunch, was that the miners couldn’t be defeated. The attitude was “part of that whole postwar malaise, this sort of deep-down defeatist ‘we won the war but we can’t win the peace, somehow—there may be some way that you can make peace with the miners, so they don’t bring you down and they don’t cripple the economy, but don’t think that you can actually defeat them, because they’ve got the biggest guns, and they’ll just bring everything to a halt.’”

In his memo, Hoskyns urged her to challenge this received wisdom. At the time, Joe Gormley was head of the miners’ union. Gormley was “an honorable, old-fashioned, democratic trade unionist,” Hoskyns recalls. But he would be retiring. And it was increasingly clear that he would be replaced by Scargill. Gormley’s interests, says Hoskyns, “were not ours. But there is a big difference between an old-fashioned trade unionist and a raging Marxist, there really is. One’s just someone you disagree with, and the other’s the enemy.”

Despite Hoskyns’s warnings, nothing was done at all. Hoskyns wrote, in his memo, that it might well be possible to change the balance of power. Thatcher returned the memo to him with her reply: “Only at the margins, I fear.” Hoskyns decided it would be unwise to insist. “I didn’t push her on that, because there’s a lot of importance, in my view, in the handling of someone who is under enormous pressures. You cannot go on and on banging at them, because eventually they say, you know, ‘Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?’”

Thatcher put the issue on the back burner. As a result, when the miners challenged her in 1981, the government was entirely unprepared. Thatcher was forced to capitulate. Hoskyns was disgusted, and while he was too savvy to say “I told you so” explicitly, I expect his sentiments were clear enough. Hoskyns was not invited to the urgent meeting Thatcher subsequently convened to discuss the miners. He suspects this was because she did not want to be reminded that he had, indeed, told her so. “You know, she’s only human. And she knew that we’d been right on that.” Not long after this, Hoskyns resigned. “Our relationship,” he says, “was quite a difficult one. I wasn’t part of her sort of feel-good factor, as it were.”

But following this humiliation, Thatcher began to prepare for war. “It was that strike threat, which, to put it bluntly, scared the shit out of her,” says Hoskyns. “Suddenly the whole of Whitehall was on a war footing.” Thatcher instructed the Civil Contingencies Unit, usually charged with preparing for national disasters, to begin studying the possibility of withstanding a strike. Plans were drawn up for stockpiling coal, training the military to drive trains in the event of a sympathy strike by the railway workers, accelerating the development of nuclear power, importing electricity by cable from France, and refurbishing coal-fired power stations to permit them to run on oil.

Thatcher asked Nigel Lawson to be her energy secretary. He too had been appalled that the government was forced to stand down. “I was determined,” he writes in his memoirs, “that, if I had anything to do with it, it would never happen again.”¹⁶⁶ He was not seeking a strike, he stresses. “But it was clear that Arthur Scargill was, and I was determined that he should lose it when it came.”¹⁶⁷

I believe it to be true that the government was not going out of its way to provoke a strike. But obviously, if these characteristic words are any guide, by 1984 the mood in Downing Street had become distinctly Clint Eastwoodish. Go ahead. Make our day.

Lawson appointed the physicist Walter Marshall to head the Coal and Electricity Generating Board. Scargill’s ally Tony Benn—remember him? Wedgie?—had sacked Marshall from his position as chief scientist at the Department of Energy. Lawson was well aware of this. Marshall devoted himself with vindictive relish to developing plans to defeat Scargill; Lawson recalls Marshall’s “great zest” for devising schemes to smuggle strategic chemicals into the power stations. Those that could not be smuggled would be flown in by helicopter; landing sites were identified near every power station.

Stockpiling coal is no trivial matter. It is costly, and it is tricky: In critically large quantities, coal can self-ignite. It was, moreover, viewed by many of Thatcher’s advisors as a risky gambit. “Up went the great defeatist cry of the most useless civil servants,” recalls Hoskyns. “‘If we start moving coal to the power stations, that’s an outright provocation!’” Thatcher’s cabinet was divided; Jim Prior, in particular, considered these preparations a dangerous escalation. Hoskyns draws an analogy to the debate about Reagan’s military spending: “I’ve been through exactly the same process that clearly he and his advisers went through about the Cold War. I mean, I felt ratcheting up economic costs and staying in the struggle was the way to destroy the economic union. I mean, the Soviet Union. Just the same. If you just do everything bit by bit, and try to avoid any single action that makes their alarm bells ring, there’s a habituation to what’s going on. I mean, thinking through the eyes of Scargill, ‘Oh, they’re moving a lot of coal, aren’t they, well, you know, yes, but it’s not too bad,’ six months later, ‘Hmmm, really a hell of a lot of coal . . . ’”

Thatcher ignored the pleading of the wets. The preparation continued. By 1982, trains ferrying coal to the power stations were running twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

Meanwhile, her government ushered in significant changes in the trade union law. The 1982 Employment Act made it vastly more difficult, almost impossible, to form a closed shop, a union with mandatory membership. Unions that engaged in sympathy strikes or dispatched flying pickets could now be sued, fined, or held in contempt of court. By making unions liable to civil suits, Thatcher gave the judiciary a more prominent role in labor relations. The judges ultimately proved, as Thatcher had hoped, to be no friends of the striking miners.

In September 1983, Thatcher named Ian MacGregor chairman of the National Coal Board. MacGregor, who was half American and spoke with an American accent, had previously managed British Steel, cutting its workforce by 100,000. “Ian,” recalls Lawson, “was widely seen as an overpaid, over-aged, ruthless American whose main achievement at British Steel had been to slash the workforce.”¹⁶⁸ What more could you want? Everything was in place.

Then Scargill was elected. “The moment that happened,” John Hoskyns remembers, “we basically said, ‘There will be a war. Perhaps the last battle.’”

Yet there remains a great mystery. Clearly, a hell of a lot of coal had been stockpiled. Equally clearly, the government was determined to win a strike. So why, given this, did Scargill call for a strike against pit closures, when no such strike had ever been called, no less won, before? And why did he call it in the springtime, in particular? By this point, Scargill could not have been ignorant of Thatcher’s nature. General Galtieri had said to the American envoy, Vernon Walters, “That woman wouldn’t dare” attempt to retake the Falklands. Walters raised an eyebrow. He recalled Thatcher’s willingness—even eagerness, truth be told—to let the Irish hunger strikers perish. “Mr. President,” he replied, “‘that woman’ has let a number of hunger strikers of her own basic ethnic origin starve themselves to death without flickering an eyelash. I wouldn’t count on that if I were you.”¹⁶⁹

Scargill had seen what happened to Galtieri. I simply cannot understand why he thought he would meet a different fate.

Hoskyns shrugs. “He did something quite crazy. I mean, he was actually, I suspect, in strategic terms, a fool. A stupid man.”

Neil Kinnock: They deserved each other. Scargill and Thatcher deserved each other. But nobody else deserved them.

CB: Do you see a lot of similarities in their temperaments?

NK: Well, temperament, maybe not, but there are similarities. Infinite self-belief. A huge sense of superiority, coupled with some chips on their shoulders. Scargill thought that anybody who wasn’t actually kissing his ass was patronizing him. Or plotting against him. And Margaret Thatcher was more conscious than she should have been about being a grocer’s daughter, and had changed her accent, her voice—C

B: You know, can you explain that to me? Because this is something—for an American it’s a little bit hard—¹⁷⁰

NK: Yeah, sure.

CB: Can you tell me what she sounded like before? Can you imitate it?

NK: Well, for instance, I’ll tell you what, I’ll give you a couple o’ words whose pronunciations she would’ve changed. Margaret Thatcher, prime minister, Oxford graduate, millionaire’s wife, would say, “graaaahz.” With a long “a.” Margaret Thatcher, schoolgirl, would say, “grass.” With a very short “a.” C

B: Do you speak the same way as you did when you were growing up?

NK: Yeah, pretty much . . . I’ve made absolutely no conscious effort to change it. Whereas I can give you the names of a few Welshmen, roughly of my generation, who have changed their accent—

CB: I don’t know why a Welshman would want to lose his accent—

NK: Well, yeah, I . . . I don’t begin to understand it.

CB: Look, this is fascinating, but I’m losing the thread, which is Margaret Thatcher, and her changing her accent, and her class background, which you think she had a chip on her shoulder about—

NK: Well, yeah. Because it made her acutely conscious of not picking up the wrong fork, you know? In Britain maybe more than anywhere else. I don’t know, Turgenev wrote about it in Russia, and I guess there are German writers and French writers who’ve noticed the same tendency, but I think it may have been more pronounced in the United Kingdom then.

CB: Well, you say that she had “a chip on her shoulder” about it, but then what you just said suggests that she was quite right to be self-conscious about it.

NK: Well, no, of course she wasn’t—I mean, there was never any danger. I mean, bloody hell, my father was a coal miner, I was brought up to hold my knife and fork properly and know which fork to use, and how to eat—

CB: OK. So your point here—is it that she was or she wasn’t right to have a chip on her shoulder? Because you’re telling me on the one hand that there’s an incredible attention to these subtle signals of class, and you’re also telling me that this “chip on her shoulder” was somehow not rational—

NK: ’Course it wasn’t! I mean just—first of all, she had nothing to fear—

CB: But there was a lot of prejudice against her because of her class background. I mean, I’ve heard it dripping out of the mouths of her own cabinet members.

NK: Oh, sure. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But that’s their kind of stupidity. That’s their chinless delusion. She was in charge! She was in charge! She could have said, “I’m me. I’m bright. I’m Margaret. I’m a Tory. Get out of my bloody way—”

CB: She did say that.

NK: Well, she—

CB: I mean, if anybody ever said, “I’m a Tory, get out of my bloody way,” it’s Margaret Thatcher.

NK: Yeah . . . [long pause] Maybe.

Let us return to Peter Walker, who is telling us how he discovered that Scargill was a Marxist.

Lord Walker: He spoke at loads of Marxist conferences all over the world. And—

[Waiter interrupts]

PW: Now, my guest is having the, um, the halibut and asparagus. And I will have six oysters please. [Sound of clock chiming.] And then my guest is having the scallops, and I’ll have the Dover sole.

Waiter: Will you have it off the bone, Milord?

PW: Off the bone, yes, I’m a very lazy man. And, um, now, vegetables.

Waiter: Spinach, French beans, broccoli, cauliflower?

PW: Potatoes?

Waiter: Potatoes, I’ve got sautéed, new, French fries . . .

CB: What do you recommend?

Waiter: What do I recommend? Well, spinach is fine, and, er, sautéed potatoes—

CB: Sounds good to me.

PW: I’ll have spinach and new potatoes, please, and, um, we’ll have a bottle of the nice Chablis. Fizzy water or still water?

CB: I like what I’m drinking very much, the fizzy water.

PW: And um, when they introduced profit-sharing, he delivered a speech, with another very hard-line lady communist, that said, “We must stop profit-sharing. The capitalists are doing this to make capitalism attractive. And if we’re going to achieve the Revolution, we don’t want capitalism to become attractive.” And so he urged unions not to participate in profit-sharing schemes. And right away, anything he could do to bring about the day of Revolution was in all his speeches and all his remarks.

Imagine that.

But before concluding that Scargill may have had a point, you should know this about Lord Walker. He is the son of a factory worker. His father was a union man—a shop steward, in fact. Walker did not emerge from the privileged class of which he is now a member. He, more than anyone, has the right to say that if equality of opportunity is present, the hardworking and talented will rise to the top. He did, after all.

In fact, Walker was the miners’ great champion. I believe him when he says that he did everything within his power to avert a strike. Prior to the strike, Walker proposed to offer the miners an extremely conciliatory deal. It would not have forced a single miner into redundancy. He offered early retirement, on generous terms, to miners over the age of fifty. Miners working at the pits slated for closure would be offered the choice of a job at another pit or a voluntary redundancy package. Another 800 million pounds of taxpayer money would be invested in the coal industry. Given the losses the industry had been running, it is impossible to see this as anything other than a bribe.

Walker went to Thatcher, alone, to persuade her that the bribe, though costly, was essential. “Look,” he said, “I think this meets every emotional issue the miners have. And it’s expensive, but not as expensive as a coal strike. And I think we should do it.”

Thatcher thought about it.

“You know,” she decided, “I agree with you.”

It is often held—it is certainly still believed widely among the miners—that Thatcher provoked the strike deliberately to punish them for the humiliations they had inflicted on prior Conservative governments. Walker says this is a myth, and the logic is on his side. “If you’d wanted a strike,” he reasonably notes, “the last thing you’d have done was make an offer of that sort—I mean, an offer that was superb. You could have made an offer which was reasonable, and you’d have got a strike, or you might have got a strike. But we made an offer that was absolutely perfect.” Since becoming president of the union, Scargill had tried three times to convince the miners to strike; three times the union had voted no. There was no reason to imagine this time would be different: The deal was too good.

Walker was immensely gratified when Thatcher and the rest of the cabinet agreed to his proposal. The wets, he imagined, would save the day. He thought the miners would never reject such a handsome deal. And indeed, they did not.

In principle, the National Union of Mineworkers was a democratic organization. Its charter called for a ballot of all its members, and the agreement of 55 percent of its membership, before the declaration of a strike. “I presumed there was no way he could win a ballot,” Walker says, “so there wouldn’t be a strike. And I was wrong.”

Upon seeing the terms of Walker’s package, Scargill presumably realized that in all likelihood, the union would accept it. To Walker’s astonishment, he simply decided not to hold a vote. “What he did was—with money from the Soviet Union—he paid miners to go and violently picket against miners who stayed at work. And he got a strike by brute force instead of the ballot.”

When the strike began on March 12, miners in the Midlands and Nottingham refused to join. Their pits were profitable. They were not slated for closure. They had cars, mortgages, decent salaries, pension plans—they had no desire to throw themselves on the bonfire of Scargill’s vanity. Their lack of solidarity confirmed Scargill’s deepest instincts about the unwisdom of the unpoliti-cized laboring classes: How easily they were tempted by baubles and trinkets! The dissenting miners demanded a national ballot. Scargill refused. Why, he asked, should a treacherous labor aristocracy be allowed to vote other working men out of a job?

According to Scargill’s logic, the union was a federation; therefore, each region should decide independently whether to strike. He assumed that once it had begun, the strike would spread—he would see to it that it did. Defying him, nine constituent unions held a vote, and to Scargill’s disgust, eight voted against the strike. In Leicestershire, 89 percent voted nay. In the Midlands, 73 percent. In Nottinghamshire, 73 percent.

It was an appalling display of false consciousness, Scargill concluded. He dispatched flying pickets from Yorkshire to close down their mines—for their own good. This, too, was an extraordinarily stupid decision. The miners of Nottinghamshire, in particular, were enraged. They took vengeance.

Mr. Fields: How does the Prime Minister feel, having attempted to display to the world a caring mother’s face and a preparedness to travel anywhere in the interests of her children, when she sees miners’ children and families seeking sustenance from soup kitchens and charities? Is she aware of the repugnance felt by millions of people at her attempts to starve miners back to work? Is she not ashamed of herself, and does she agree that she has disgraced her motherhood? Will she consider joining a closed monastic order as quickly as possible to repent of her sins and reflect on her crimes against humanity?¹⁷¹

Scargill called at the beginning of the strike for the “total mobilization of the trade and labor movement,” and Linda Sheridan is right: Had the call been heeded—had the miners hung together, and had the other unions come out in support of them—the strike would have been won. But the other unions demurred, and this was no accident. Thatcher made sure of it.

I say “Thatcher,” but this was not how it was presented. Officially, this was a dispute between the National Coal Board and the miners’ union; Thatcher maintained the pretense throughout that it was not her role to interfere. “The government,” she said, “will leave the National Coal Board to deal with the matter as it thinks fit.”¹⁷² Unofficially, Thatcher supervised every detail of the operations. She established and chaired “Misc. 101,” the cabinet committee that debated and determined every aspect of the government’s response to the strike. She met her key ministers daily to receive reports on recent developments and guide the government’s response. In her memoirs, she recalls that even when she went to Switzerland on vacation, “The telex chattered constantly . . . I sometimes thought at the end of the day that I would look out the window and see a couple of Yorkshire miners striding down the Swiss slopes.”¹⁷³

When the railway workers threatened to strike, she offered them a 7 percent raise. In September, the union of mine supervisors—responsible for the maintenance and safety of the pits—threatened to join the pickets. The supervisors had until then been reluctant to strike on the reasonable grounds that mines, when shut, can quickly flood or otherwise become so damaged that they cannot safely be reopened. Showing more foresight than the men they supervised, the supervisors had thus far argued against the strike on the grounds that prolonged closure could physically destroy the mines and put them out of jobs permanently. This is in fact what did happen to quite a number of pits.

A supervisors’ strike would have meant the end for the government. “We were in danger of losing everything,” Thatcher recalls. Fortunately, this problem had been anticipated. The government had a mole inside the supervisors’ union. Thatcher knew the supervisors’ bottom line. She bought them off too.

“Scargill,” Nigel Lawson says to me, expressing what is distinctly a minority view, “wasn’t an imposing personality.” (Mind you, this is from one of the few men who was not intimidated by Thatcher, so it may simply be that Lawson is not particularly gifted at recognizing imposing personalities.) “I mean, his resistance to rational argument gave him a strength of a kind, but it was not he who was strong, it was the president of the National Union of Mineworkers who was strong, provided he could count on the loyalty of the mineworkers. And that was why it was very important to try and engineer a state of affairs in which he didn’t have the complete support of the mineworkers.” That is just what Thatcher did. When Lawson was energy secretary, and against the strenuous objections of environmentalists, he had rammed through proposals to sink two new mines in “a lovely stretch of countryside” in Leicestershire.¹⁷⁴ The miners of the Midlands had been itching to get their hands on the coal seam there, which was underneath the Vale of Belvoir.

Lawson: Beaver.

CB: I’m sorry?

NL: It’s pronounced “Beaver.”

CB: Is it really?

NL: Yes. But English pronunciation is always a bit weird.

CB: Yes, that’s definitely weird.

Understandably, the Vale of Belvoir’s residents did not wish to see slag heaps rising from their backyards, but Lawson persuaded Thatcher that it was more important to shore up the support of the Midlands miners than to placate a handful of eager Belvoir environmentalists. The deal, he argued, would increase the likelihood that the miners who stood to benefit would defy Scargill: If push came to shove, Lawson reckoned, they would shovel, not push. And that is just what they did. During the strike, with the government’s very active support, those miners broke away from Scargill’s union and with miners from Nottinghamshire formed their own union—the Union of Democratic Mineworkers. They kept working, and thanks to their output, stockpiles remained high throughout the winter.

In August, two miners from Nottinghamshire took the National Union of Mineworkers to court for failing to hold a ballot. David Hart, one of Thatcher’s friends, paid their legal costs. He organized their legal campaign from his luxury suite at Claridge’s, where he met miners who wanted to return to work. When finally they did go back to work, he paid for them to be protected by former SAS bodyguards.

In September, the court ruled in the Nottinghamshire miners’ favor, finding that the union had indeed breached its own constitution. The union was fined £200,000.¹⁷⁵ The court ordered the union’s assets sequestered. Other unions, observing this, came to the conclusion that strike action might be financially imprudent.

Thatcher determined that violent picketers would be met by an equally violent police force, but she feared that local authorities might be hesitant to do the needful. They would, after all, be arresting the citizens of their own hometowns, people with whom they had grown up. Appropriating Scargill’s tactic of deploying flying pickets, the government took the unprecedented step of coordinating the police at a national level and bringing in forces from distant counties to confront the picketers. Over the course of the strike, 11,291 miners were arrested; an untold number injured; eleven killed.

Thatcher also had the wisdom to go no further than this. When it was suggested to her that were this America, the National Guard would be called in with tanks, she immediately dismissed the idea as “political suicide.”¹⁷⁶

The dockworkers were told they would be fired if they refused to handle coal.

The steelworkers, likewise.

The electricians’ union was so completely co-opted that its leaders supplied the government with intelligence about the miners.

The Special Branch infiltrated a spy—codenamed Silver Fox—right into Scargill’s inner circle.¹⁷⁷ This is one of those assertions that is usually prefaced by “allegedly.” I’ll let you judge for yourself:

FINAL SCRIPT OF “TRUE SPIES”

Archive of miners

Commentary

But it was in the epic showdown between Mrs. Thatcher and the miners that the Secret State was tested to the limit. Could the tide of so-called subversion be stopped?

Commentary

At its secret spy school at Fort Monkton, MI5 planned for the worst—virtually a civil war scenario. [PAUSE] It summoned selected Special Branch officers for advanced training in agent handling.

Curzon street pix

Commentary

To meet the political threat, the Secret State decided that covert means would have to be used to spy on its enemies. At the time, Stella Rimington was Assistant Director of the MI5 division that countered domestic subversion.

ASTON
STELLA RIMINGTON
Director General, MI5, 1992–96
Stella Rimington sync

S.R.: The leaders of the miners strike themselves had actually said that one of the purposes of the miners strike was to overthrow Mrs. Thatcher who was the elected Prime Minister of the country and the industrial department of the Communist Party was very involved in all sorts of different ways in the strike and that was of concern to us, that’s what we were interested in.

ASTON
ARTHUR SCARGILL
President, N.U.M. 1981–2002
Arthur Scargill sync

A.S.: . . . There were agents planted within the NUM both for a number of years prior to 1984 in readiness, almost like sleepers. I believe that all our offices were constantly bugged . . . I also know that I was under close personal supervision, so to speak, wherever I went and whoever I met.

Orgreave violence
Orgreave, June 1984
Set to BILLY BRAGG
Commentary

The strike became increasingly violent as flying pickets from all over the country converged on Orgreave coking plant. Scargill hoped to repeat Saltley Gate. The dramatic images of that violent day are etched on the memory of the senior officer in charge on the ground.

ASTON
TONY CLEMENT
Asst Chief Constable, S. Yorks Police, 1981–85
Tony Clement sync

There was violence, there was violence on both sides. You cannot expect that sort of situation to arise when police officers are not at times going to lose their temper or lose their cool or their discipline disappears. It would happen to me, I feel sure, if I was in that situation. There were what, 30 or 40 police officers a day being taken to hospital. We didn’t have that sort of situation in this country, they didn’t attack police officers like that, not at that time, not until our friend Mr. Scargill decided that that was the way to impose his will.

Commentary

Scargill was on the front line, marshalling his troops to confront the police who’d been drafted in from the Met and Forces nationwide.

Tony Clement sync

T.C.: He thought he was going to win. It was symbolic, it was a trial of strength. He said I’m going to close that. We said you’re not.

IX OF BARNSLEY
Exterior and interiors
Commentary

Although Stella Rimington steadfastly refuses to be drawn about monitoring Scargill’s Headquarters, we can reveal that the Secret State was running a highly placed agent, close to Scargill and the leadership of the NUM. We understand the agent’s codename was “Silver Fox.”

Tony Clement sync

T.C.: There was a fairly senior man within the NUM who was talking to Special Branch. He was at the level where he would sit round the table with the NUM leadership.

John Nesbit sync

We were in a position to get information, very, very specific and precise information that was correct every time, as to where the violent picketing would be taking place, particularly when the miners started to go back to work.

Commentary

“Silver Fox,” the Secret State’s spy in Scargill’s inner sanctum, gave the police the crucial advantage.

ACTUALITY Police control room
Arthur Scargill sync

INTERVIEWER: Did you know that there was an agent very close to you at your shoulder almost who was feeding information to his or her Special Branch handler about the movement of pickets during the ’84 strike?

Arthur Scargill: I would be amazed if there wasn’t.

INT: Doesn’t come as any surprise?

A.S.: Not at all.

INT: Do you know who this person was?

A.S.: I haven’t got a clue and I wouldn’t like to guess, because I know from experience that you can always make assumptions that are wrong, and so I rule nobody in, and I rule nobody out.¹⁷⁸

“I rule nobody out.” Imagine the world of paranoia in which Scargill lived that year.

The strike wore on and on and on. The miners suffered desperate impoverishment. But the preparations put in place by the government, the output from the Nottinghamshire pits, and the intelligence “allegedly” provided by the Silver Fox ensured that the lights stayed on. The other unions stayed sweet. The power stations kept running. The steel furnaces kept burning. It was a mild winter. The government, it was now clear, could last until the spring. Springtime is not a striking miner’s friend.

Mr. Parry: Is the Prime Minister aware that this Christmas thousands of striking miners, workers sacked from Cammell Laird, single-parent families and people on lower incomes will not be able to buy their children food or toys or new clothes and will tell their children that Father Christmas is dead? Is she aware that, in addition to having blood on her hands, she will go down in history as the woman who killed Santa Claus?¹⁷⁹

Scargill kept telling the miners the coal stocks would run out soon. Within weeks, he promised. Within weeks. When the press started repeating Scargill’s assurances, Walker arranged for journalists to be taken up in helicopters and flown over the power stations to see the size of the stocks.

Neil Kinnock remembers visiting a coal miners’ lodge in his constituency: “The boys were pretty frigid at the start, and they’re asking me questions, and you know, they’d never be vicious, but obviously, they’d swallowed all this crap about me not supportin’ the miners and all that stuff. But nevertheless they asked their questions, and eventually I said, ‘Now listen. I wasn’t going to do this, because I think you’ve had enough punishment. But my union, the Transport and General Workers Union, has just sent me last week’s figures for coal stocks in several power stations. And I’ll read ’em out to you.’ And I read them out. And the guys just sort of looked at me. And I said, ‘Now, I don’t know’—and there were only several hundred men there—‘I don’t know how many of you are surprised. I guess there are some of you who’ve been picketing the power stations who are not surprised, because you’ve looked through the fence. And you’ve talked to the drivers. And you’ve talked to the guys working in the power stations. And you know bloody well that when Scargill said there’s three weeks left—there’s three years left.’ And the guys said—yup.”

“And if they knew that, why didn’t they turn on him?”

“Because of loyalty. Because they were isolated, under attack, and they weren’t gonna break ranks and turn on their own leadership—”

“So their loyalty was to the union?”

“No, the loyalty was to their own communities and their own comrades. That being said—”

“But what kind of loyalty is it to march together like lemmings off a cliff?”

“That’s how wars are fought, luv. If generals couldn’t get men to line abreast against machine guns, there wouldn’t be any wars.”

“Yeah, I understand your point, but I’m still surprised by this—”

“No, this is the thing. Other than people who know the mining communities and miners very well, people will receive what I say, and they’ll think, ‘Well, he doesn’t have any interest in bullshitting us about this, and maybe there’s some truth in it, but it can’t really be true.’ Nobody who comes from a coal-mining community says that. You just say, ‘Yeah, that’s right. That’s what it’s like.’ And that is what it’s like. To some extent it’s to do with the physical sociology of coal mining. You depend on all the other guys. Including the ones you don’t like. All rivalries die the moment you go down the colliery. As far as you’re concerned, whether you like someone or not, they’re lookin’ out for you, and you’re lookin’ out for them.”

Bernard Ingham, of course, sees it a bit differently. The miners “were paralyzed. Because they were in the hands of a military junta, in effect. And the discipline that they exercised, the brutality of their message, was really quite remarkable. I mean, this wasn’t a democratic institution, this was a menacing institution. I don’t think people really understood the depths to which the British trade union movement sank during Scargill’s time. He had a private army! The purpose of these flying pickets was to impose his will upon his union, and of course upon the police and the nation. And these flying pickets went far and wide, and I think I’m right in saying they were the only people the union paid during the strike. Those who formed his private army and fought the battle at Orgreave, against the police. Now, that is the nature of the man.”

Kinnock’s loyalties were utterly conflicted. He loathed Scargill and knew he would bring the miners to ruin. But he represented the Labour Party—whose origins are in the trade union movement—and came from a mining town himself. He could not bring himself publicly to condemn Scargill’s failure to ballot the union membership.

Walker implored Kinnock to call for a ballot. He persuaded two Labour parliamentarians—“I can’t name names, for obvious reasons”—to go to Kinnock with a message: Look, Kinnock. Obviously I can’t ask you to support a Tory government in a miners’ strike. All I ask you to do is say, “The miners have always had a ballot. This terrible dispute doesn’t have the support of a ballot. I ask you as leader of the Labour Party to now quickly hold a ballot on this strike.” It’s in your interest: If they ballot in favor of the strike, you’ll be supported by the miners, not by Scargill. If they ballot against it, you will be praised for having settled the strike. As party leader, you have nothing to lose. The envoys did their best to persuade them. “But he said no, he couldn’t be seen, you know, bullying the miners’ union.”

Kinnock told me that he tried, repeatedly, to talk sense into Scargill behind the scenes. Given how much the men loathed each other, I wondered about the tenor of those conversations. Were they acrimonious, I ask? “Did he speak to you disrespectfully, or—?”

“No, no, no, no, no, no. No, no. Nothing like that. I mean, the only time that Scargill would ever have a go at me was when he was surrounded by a couple o’ thousand people. I mean, he’d never do it to my face.”

“So what was he saying to justify his actions?”

“Well, he just kept dodging around, you know, and moving the goalposts. I’d say something like, ‘It’s going to be very difficult for you to get any kind of picketing support, ’cause you have no ballot. Sympathetic action is very difficult,’ and he’d say, ‘Ah, but the coal stocks, there’s only a fortnight left!’”

“But that’s nuts! I mean, he knew it was nuts!”

“Of course it’s nuts! Of course it’s nuts!”

“So why weren’t you insisting on a ballot?” I asked.

“Well, if I’d said at that stage, ‘Either have a ballot, or go back to work,’ then two things would have happened. First of all, I would have been kicking the miners in the face. Secondly, of course, Scargill could always have blamed me for the failure of the strike. So I wasn’t going to allow either of those things to happen. So that was the reason.”

“In retrospect do you regret that you made that decision?”

“Oh yeah. It was the worst decision I ever made in my life.”

“Really? You think that was the worst decision you ever made?”

“Oh, Christ, yeah. Yeah, yeah.”

When I ask Nigel Lawson about Kinnock’s odd passivity during the miners’ strike, he snorts derisively. “He was a very weak man. He was and is a very weak man.”

I don’t agree. Kinnock was in fact courageous; it was Kinnock, after all, who after this debacle purged his party of its hard-left wing, paving the way for the rise of New Labour. But I suspect that until the very last, Kinnock, like Scargill, thought the miners would win. After all, Kinnock comes from a mining town; he is a miner’s son. He hated Scargill, and he hated Thatcher, but he loved the miners. So he bet on the wrong horse.

. . . When a miner is hurt it is of course impossible to attend to him immediately. He lies crushed under several hundredweight of stone in some dreadful cranny underground, and even after he has been extricated it is necessary to drag his body a mile or more, perhaps, through galleries where nobody can stand upright. They are liable to rheumatism and a man with defective lungs does not last long in that dust-impregnated air, but the most characteristic industrial disease is nystagmus. This is a disease of the eyes which makes the eyeballs oscillate in a strange manner when they come near a light. It is due presumably to working in half-darkness, and sometimes results in total blindness . . . ¹⁸⁰

I do not understand the miners’ determination to keep the pits open. I understand their rage—a life in the pits would madden anyone, I reckon—but I don’t understand its object. Why were they demanding the right to mine coal? Why were they not demanding the very opposite—that the government do something, anything, to shut every last one of those hellishly cruel pits down? The miners chanted, “Coal, not dole.” But a lifetime on the dole, it seems to me, would have been preferable to going down the mines. And the dole was the worst alternative in 1984. Unemployment would not have meant starvation, as it might have a century prior.

Peter Walker nods when I say something to this effect. “I used to go down in the valleys, and knock door-to-door on all the rather humble houses. And it was a terrible experience, because nearly always a widow would come to the door. Her husband had either died of mining illnesses, or mining accidents. Or alternatively, she’d come to the door, and you’d hear in the background an elderly man coughing . . . ”

The waiter refills Walker’s wine glass. “Was there ever a moment when you doubted that the government would win?” I ask him.

“Never. No.”

“You were always completely confident? Why was that?”

“If he had found a way of closing all the pits, I would have imported coal. I mean, there’s plenty of coal to be imported. And I would have put the army in charge of protecting the lorries. And I knew that in whatever I wanted to do, I was absolutely confident that if I said, ‘Look, we’ve got to import coal, you know, we’ve got to have the army monitoring the delivery of coal,’ I would have had the support of the cabinet, and Margaret. But I was never anywhere near that. There was never a moment when the coal stocks went down. He tried to do other things, like stop spare parts going in to the power stations, and we found ways to smuggle them in.”

The dessert cart arrives. I order the lemongrass crème brûlée; Walker opts for the trio of homemade sorbets. I finish the last drop of wine in my glass.

“I mean,” says Walker, “it was a strike you couldn’t lose. If you’d lost, it would have been a total disaster for democratic capitalism. It would have been unbelievable.”

The miners, increasingly desperate and increasingly humiliated, grew more violent. Working miners were assaulted, their families terrorized. A taxi driver carrying a scab to work in South Wales was killed.

Reports surfaced in the papers that Scargill had taken money from Libyan agents. Not long before, a British policewoman had been murdered by gunfire emerging from the Libyan embassy in London. Scargill did not deny the reports. He argued—characteristically—that the money came from “Libyan trade unions.”

In December 1984 an interviewer remarked to the prime minister that people were literally being killed over coal. Was it not time, he asked her, to do something, anything, to bring the strike to an end? No, she replied. “As far as Government is concerned, never, never, never give in to violence. Never. This strike has been sustained by violence and it took a long time for certain people to condemn that violence, and that length of time should never have occurred in a democracy. This strike is sustained by violence and by a refusal to have the democratic right to a ballot. Now, if anyone is suggesting that I appease those: No.”¹⁸¹ The words echoed, as they were intended to do, Churchill’s: “Never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.” By December, it was perfectly clear to the nation that no matter the cost, no matter who died, Thatcher would not break. In her rhetoric, the striking miners had now been elevated, by analogy, to Nazis. At the height of this crisis, on October 12, the Brighton Hotel was bombed. As she makes clear in her memoirs, Thatcher held the bombers and Arthur Scargill to be morally indistinguishable.¹⁸²

The miners, desperate to feed themselves and their families, began trickling back to work. By late February, more than half the miners had returned.

On March 3, nearly a year after the announcement of the strike, the delegates of the miners’ union at last defied Scargill. They voted—narrowly—to abandon the cause.

They had lost.

“It was a pivotal event,” says Charles Powell of the strike. “The Falklands were pivotal in restoring Britain’s national self-confidence, and that was an important part of it, because the country again felt invigorated, proud, capable of seeing people off, capable of achieving things. That provided a very good psychological environment for subsequent battles on the domestic front. But the miners’ strike, which brought us to the very brink of civil war—”

“Do you really mean that? A civil war?”

“Yes, I do, yeah, I do. I really mean that. It was close to a civil war situation, and you’ve got tens of thousands of police battling miners, huge confrontations, the whole trade union movement on the edge, sort of ready to go. It was a very, very fraught and tense time. And it was almost like fighting a war. If you’d been there on Downing Street at the heart of that you’d have felt that, you know, bulletins from the front, and war councils taking place late at night and all those sorts of things. It was a real crisis atmosphere.”

“Do you think that level of conflict could have been avoided with a more delicate policy, while still achieving the same ends—”

“No. Certainly not.”

“So you place the blame for the extremity of the dispute entirely on Scargill?”

“She knew there had to be a major confrontation. Scargill had to be defeated in battle. It was almost medieval, you know, this idea, a challenge, a joust, whatever it was. She knew he could only win by deploying all these miners, as many as he could, taking her on, taking on the state . . . I think it really was an exceptional situation, it needed to be. The symbolism was so important, namely, you had to establish this dominance over the trade unions. Finally. You can’t really imagine what it was like, for people of my generation, we used to switch on the television at night, in the 1960s and ’70s, and there were the trade union leaders, coming out of Number 10 Downing Street, night after night, having told the government what to do, what they could do, what they’d put up with and not put up with, and they’d got their way, time after time.”

“You say I can’t imagine what it was like. But try to explain it to me.”

“It was demoralizing. Seeing this band of men, holding the whole country to ransom. Looking after the interests of their members at the expense of everything and everyone else. They had no broader view of the national interest, or anything of that sort at all, they were intent only on their narrow interest.”

“Were there any moments in the dispute when you thought, ‘We’re not on the right track here, we’re not going to win this’?”

“I don’t recall thinking we’d ever lose. There were setbacks, there were things we got wrong, you know, there was all this business about the mine supervisors—but no, no, those were tactical errors. I think the strategy, because it had been so carefully prepared, was always bound to succeed. Now, many people will tell you that they were responsible for it as much as she was. Peter Walker, I think, would certainly argue that he was the man who won the miners’ strike—”

“I spoke to him, and yes, he does argue that.”

“Yes, and there are sort of politics in that—”

“Of course, of course—”

“Well, he did have a very important role, absolutely. But the ultimate willpower was really hers. She became a Boudicea-like figure at the forefront of the battle. That’s how it seemed to people in the country, I think. I mean, it was all the Iron Lady and Battling Maggie stuff. I mean, that’s how she proceeded.”

In 1985, a triumphant Thatcher addressed the Conservative Party conference:

We were told you’ll never stand a major industrial strike, let alone a coal strike . . . But we did just that—and won. It was a strike conducted with violence and intimidation on the picket line and in the villages. Yet Labour supported that strike to the bitter end . . . What do you think would have happened if Mr. Scargill had won? I think the whole country knows the answer. Neil would have knelt.¹⁸³

Linger for a moment on that last line. Consider all of its emasculating, sadistic, and sexual implications. Kinnock says he didn’t think it chivalrous to hit a girl. That hardly stopped Thatcher from kicking him between the legs—even when he was already on the ground. That too is how she proceeded.

“Was Scargill a megalomaniac, or was he desperate?” I ask Bernard Ingham.

“Megalomaniac, in my view. I mean, it was a gamble, no doubt about it, a bad gamble, but he believed that they were invincible. I mean, no government that he’d come across would stand up to him, and of course he was astounded when Mrs. Thatcher did! I think he felt he was invincible, and that is fair! After all, it was a pretty close-run thing!”

“Was it?”

“Oh, yeah, it was closer than people imagined. I mean, without her resolution, they would have caved in a long time earlier.”

“Well it’s interesting that you say that, because just yesterday, speaking to Lord Walker, I asked, ‘Was there ever a moment when you were in doubt that you would win?’ and he said, ‘Never.’”

“That’s not true.”

“At what point was there a doubt?”

“I mean, if power supplies had faltered, then they would have been in real trouble. And fortunately, they had Walter Marshall, at the seams, who coaxed every bolt that he could find from anything, you know, and kept us going. And also, it wasn’t an excessively cold winter. Of course, if he’d have called a ballot, and won that ballot—”

“Would there have been any chance of him winning?”

“Oh, yes, I think he would, because he wouldn’t have split the union. And the very act of splitting the union meant that the government had coal production moving.”

“But my understanding was that the reason he didn’t call a ballot was because he knew he wouldn’t win.”

“Well, that’s what people say. But you never know. You never know when there’s a ballot called. I honestly don’t know, and I don’t think anyone who’s honest does know whether he’d have won . . . But I can’t agree with Peter Walker that everything was plain sailing. It wasn’t.”

“He didn’t say ‘plain sailing.’ He said he never had a doubt that there would be victory in the end. He never believed for a second that there was a chance that Mrs. Thatcher would fail.”

“Oh, I see. Well, I never believed for a second that Mrs. Thatcher would give in. That’s different.”

“How so?”

“Well, she could have been stolid to the end, but if the lights went out . . . if British industry were crippled, what do you do then?”

As the men trooped dejectedly back into the pits, their wives distributed carnations—the symbol of heroism—at the gates. At many mines, they marched back to the sound of brass bands. But everyone knew this was no victory.

It was the end of the mining industry in Britain. The pits had permanently lost their customers, who sought to acquire fuel sources that would not be held hostage to the manic caprices of Arthur Scargill.

It was the end of the era of widespread strikes in Britain. Six months after the end of the miners’ strike, railway workers threatened to strike over the introduction of new trains that could be operated with fewer men. Union leaders put the motion to a ballot. Of course they did; they had seen what happened to Scargill. Members voted against it. Of course they did; they had seen what happened to the miners. In 1979, 29.5 million work days were lost in Britain due to strikes. Five years later, that number had plummeted a hundredfold, to 278,000. Britain now has the most efficient labor market in Europe.

It was the end of revolutionary socialism in Britain. Shortly thereafter, Kinnock triumphed over and marginalized the Trotskyite wing of the Labour Party, transforming the party into one in which men who proclaimed that they were all Thatcherites now could and did rise to the top.

With the miners permanently neutered as a political force, the government accelerated the closure of loss-making pits. The coal industry was entirely privatized in 1994. The Nottinghamshire miners had expected their cooperation would ensure the security of their jobs, but most of their pits closed, too. When the Labour Party came back into power, in 1997, it made no attempt whatsoever to revive the coal industry. By 2005, only eight major deep mines, employing fewer than 3,000 men, remained.

Scargill had always claimed that the government intended to destroy the coal industry. He says now that he has been vindicated. But the industry was dying anyway. The strike was the coup de grace, and the strike was Scargill’s fault.

It is a dreadful job that they do, an almost superhuman job by the standard of an ordinary person. For they are not only shifting monstrous quantities of coal, they are also doing it in a position that doubles or trebles the work. They have got to remain kneeling all the while—they could hardly rise from their knees without hitting the ceiling—and you can easily see by trying it what a tremendous effort this means . . . And the other conditions do not exactly make things easier. There is the heat—it varies, but in some mines it is suffocating—and the coal dust that stuffs up your throat and nostrils and collects along your eyelids, and the unending rattle of the conveyor . . . Every miner has blue scars on his nose and forehead, and will carry them to his death. The coal dust of which the air underground is full enters every cut, and then the skin grows over it and forms a blue stain like tattooing, which in fact it is . . . ¹⁸⁴

The rattle of the conveyor has been silenced now. The slag heaps have disappeared from the British countryside, overgrown by hills and meadow dotted with cow parsley and buttercups, smooth-stalked grass and Yorkshire fog.

Good riddance.