Marching to the Fault Line Read online

  MARCHING

  TO THE

  FAULT LINE

  MARCHING

  TO THE

  FAULT LINE

  THE MINERS’ STRIKE AND THE

  BATTLE FOR INDUSTRIAL BRITAIN

  Francis Beckett and David Hencke

  CONSTABLE • LONDON

  Constable & Robinson Ltd

  3 The Lanchesters

  162 Fulham Palace Road

  London W6 9ER

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First published in the UK in hardback by Constable,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2009

  This paperback edition published in 2009

  Copyright © Francis Beckett and David Hencke, 2009

  The right of Francis Beckett and David Hencke to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication data is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-1-84901-025-2

  Printed and bound in the EU

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  CONTENTS

  List of Illustrations

  Preface

  Introduction to the Paperback Edition

  Chapter 1 The Shadow of 1926

  Chapter 2 Enter Thatcher, Stage Right, and Scargill, Stage Left

  Chapter 3 The Great Strike

  Chapter 4 The Battle of Orgreave

  Chapter 5 Thatcher and the Enemy Within, Scargill and General Winter

  Chapter 6 Pit Managers, Moscow Gold and a Fatal Libyan Kiss

  Chapter 7 The Collapse of General Winter

  Chapter 8 Eleventh-Hour Talks

  Chapter 9 The Bitter End

  Chapter 10 The Post-Strike World: Lost Money, Lost Influence, Lost Reputations

  Chapter 11 Not an Industrial Dispute, But a War

  Abbreviations

  Chapter Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  London during the 1926 general strike. © Topham Picturepoint/Topfoto.co.uk (0235642).

  Miners greet the announcement of the strike, March 1984. © Peter Arkell.

  Attacking the police vans carrying strike breakers. © Peter Arkell.

  Police arresting picketers. © Topham Picturepoint/Topfoto.co.uk (0814365).

  A wounded miner, Yorkshire. © Peter Arkell.

  The Battle of Orgreave. © Peter Arkell.

  Arthur Scargill and Mick McGahey at the 1984 Trades Union Congress. © David Mansell, The Observer Ltd.

  Arthur Scargill and TUC General Secretary Norman Willis, 14 October 1984. © The Associated Press Ltd.

  Neil Kinnock, Arthur Scargill and Ron Todd at a Labour Party rally. © Roger Hutchings, The Observer Ltd.

  Margaret Thatcher at the 1984 Conservative Party Conference. © Peter Arkell.

  Coal Board chief Ian Macgregor. © Hulton Archive/Getty Images (73116464).

  Striking families at Christmas, 1984. © Peter Arkell.

  Women on the picket line in Yorkshire. © Peter Arkell.

  Whittle miners’ wives support group on the picket line. © Peter Arkell.

  NUM chief executive, Roger Windsor. © Topham Picturepoint/Topfoto.co.uk (0468540).

  Print union leader Bill Keys. © Andrew Wiard.

  Betteshanger Colliery, Kent. © Topham Picturepoint/Topfoto.co.uk (0021138).

  A closed down mine, Durham, 1987. © Peter Arkell.

  Winding gear broken up and recycled, 1989. © Peter Arkell.

  PREFACE

  Britain before the great miners’ strike of 1984–5 and Britain after it are two fundamentally different places, and they have little in common. The full story of this turning point in our history has not been written before, because documents were not available and people were not willing to talk. Much of what is in this book has never been made public.

  We could not have told it without the help and generosity of several people.

  A talented young journalist, Dan Johnson, was our principal researcher, conducting some of our most important interviews. Because of his deep knowledge of mining communities, and because he was brought up in Arthur Scargill’s village of Worsbrough, he turned into a great deal more than our researcher: he was also a thoughtful and knowledgeable guide to what it all meant. Dr Clare Beckett of Bradford University also brought her own knowledge and understanding to a research project she conducted for us on women in the strike.

  Some fellow journalists were very generous with their knowledge, time and contacts. Jeff Apter, Paris stringer for newspapers and magazines throughout the English-speaking world, not only arranged our interview with French and international trade union leader Alain Simon and acted as interpreter during it, but also threw new light on the mechanics of the strike by describing to us his own role in getting French trade unionists’ money into the hands of the National Union ofMineworkers.

  Paul Routledge, at the time industrial correspondent of The Times and later Arthur Scargill’s biographer, gave us full access to his papers, his contacts, his memories and his great store of knowledge. Nicholas Jones was the BBC’s industrial correspondent, and he showed us how the battle for public opinion was won and lost. Geoffrey Goodman, then the industrial editor of the Daily Mirror, was not just a reporter but at one point a player, and he gave generously of his knowledge and understanding. David Seymour of the Mirror gave us important insights into the Maxwell era. Reporting on the strike for the Mirror was Terry Pattinson, and he too played his own part in the story; he helped us to piece together the incident in which he was involved, and offered his own interesting reflections.

  We are also grateful to freelance photographer Peter Arkell; the Guardian’s Paul Brown; freelance Kevin Cahill; Mick Costello, former industrial editor of the Morning Star and industrial organizer of the Communist Party; freelance Barbara Fox; the Guardian’s Seumas Milne, author of a book about the tangled finances of the miners’ union during the strike; Helen Hague; and Simon Pirani, formerly of Newsline.

  Members of the Conservative government of the time gave us helpful, open interviews and clear insights into their thinking as the strike possessed. We want to thank in particular Peter Walker, the then Energy Secretary, and his then Parliamentary Under Secretary, the coal minister David Hunt; Norman Tebbit, then Trade and Industry Secretary; and Lord Wakeham, Chief Whip at the time and later Energy Secretary, for his help and political insight. Of course we would have liked to talk to Margaret Thatcher, but we understand she is too frail to give interviews.

  Some of their civil servants gave us invaluable interviews, and we have to thank in particular Lord Turnbull, the former Cabinet Secretary, who, as Margaret Thatcher’s private secretary in Downing Street during the strike, provided very useful insights and interpretation of some of the material the authors obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. Ivor Manley, Deputy Secretary at the Department of Energy, and Sir Tim Bell, who advised ministers on strategy and in particular communications strategy, were also very helpful.

  Miners’ leaders of the time were extremely helpful too, with one significant exception. We want to express our gratitude for useful and frank interviews given to us by Kevin Barron (now MP for Rother Valley), Trevor Bell, Ken Capstick, Dave Feickert, Eric Illsley (now MP for Barnsley Central) and Anne Scargill. The late Mick McGa
hey gave an interview to one of the authors for another book some years ago, and we have used it here. We also want to thank Roger Windsor for helping us, as far as he could, from his home in France, and Nell Myers for the brief but useful discussion we had with her at Arthur Scargill’s door. We had some limited assistance from the architect who designed the NUM building, Malcolm Lister.

  Neil Kinnock, Leader of the Opposition at the time, opened up his papers to us, and talked openly and honestly about everything he did during the strike, and what he thinks and feels about it now. Alain Simon, former leader of the miners’ section of the Confédération Générale du Travail and a key player in international trade union politics, gave us an interesting interview.

  Key players in British trade unions were central to our research, and we are grateful to them for the trouble they took and the candour with which they spoke to us. We are especially grateful to a trade union leader who was no longer alive while we were researching this book. Soon after his retirement, the late Bill Keys handed one of the authors his detailed thirty-page diary of the miners’ strike, explaining his secret negotiations, and told us all about it. Keys, we reveal here, was the TUC’s secret player, the man on whom its hopes for a settlement finally depended. His diary has enabled us to tell the full story of the last few months of the strike for the first time.

  John Monks, the TUC’s head of organization and industrial relations at the time and later its General Secretary, was one of the few people in the secret of the Keys initiative, and apart from confirming what is in Keys’ diary, he was a great source of help, information and advice. Paul Mackney, recently retired General Secretary of the University and College Union, turned up at the home of one of the authors carrying a holdall containing his huge and magnificent collection of books and pamphlets about the strike, which he loaned to us for the duration. The late John Lyons gave one of the authors an interview some years ago, which has been recycled here.

  Other union leaders who gave us helpful interviews and information include Rodney Bickerstaffe, Ken Cameron, Cyril Cooper and John Edmonds.

  Of course, the name missing from all this is Arthur Scargill. We would dearly have liked to talk to him. He was the central figure. We are sure that he will passionately disagree with some of our conclusions, and we would have wanted to give his view. He mounted a ferocious attack on two previous writers in which he wrote: ‘Authority on this subject [the strike] can only come from the NUM itself – to be precise, from the Union’s national officials who were at the very heart of the struggle, and who knew exactly what took place throughout.’1 Of those three national officials, Mick McGahey is dead and Peter Heathfield is too frail to be interviewed – which leaves Scargill. So we shall not have much sympathy if Scargill denounces us, too, for failing to talk to the national officials.

  We have done everything possible to ensure that Scargill’s perspective is reflected here, interviewing his closest union collaborators, including Alain Simon (who says he is today perhaps Scargill’s closest friend) and Ken Capstick, and putting to them all the questions we would have liked to put to Scargill. But occasionally, faced with the sometimes baffling question ‘Why did Arthur do such-and-such?’, even they, after a brave stab at an answer, had to say: ‘I don’t know. You’d have to ask Arthur.’ We’d love to.

  But we have done the best we can by Arthur, despite Arthur – which we suspect is something a large number of people could say truthfully. We do not know why he chooses not to defend his own record. We did everything we could to get an interview, working through his close friend, press officer and amanuensis Nell Myers, and our only insight into his reasons for refusing us comes from her.

  We wrote to Scargill at both the union headquarters and his home address. When, after a month, we had had no reply, Francis Beckett and researcher Dan Johnson drove to his house and knocked on the door, unannounced. It was answered by Nell Myers.

  Nell is tall and elegant, with an intelligent face and a thoughtful, literary style of speech. But this was not the grim, unsmiling Nell Myers we had known in the 1980s. She seemed more relaxed, easier in her own skin, happier, instinctively courteous. We could see Scargill through the window, sitting in the living room, reading a book.

  Things did not get off to a good start. Beckett explained their mission, and reminded her that they had known each other in the 1980s when they were both trade union press officers. Myers, in a friendly way, said she remembered it all well, but then added: ‘Then you wrote that dreadful book about the Communist Party.’

  Leaving behind as fast as possible this apparently awkward topic, Beckett and Johnson moved the conversation on, and left with a promise that if they emailed Myers, they would not this time go without a reply. She was as good as her word, replying very quickly to Beckett’s follow-up email to say that his earlier letters had not been received, and asking what the point was of another book on the strike. She made it clear that she thought the book might be a hatchet job on Scargill, and in his reply Beckett assured her that this was not the intention. The book could offer a historical perspective that was to be found in no previous work, he said. Myers then wrote to say that Arthur had turned us down – and that she herself had ‘picked up a sense of foreboding when reading your second email. All these people perpetually lurking in some historical ether ready or so it seems to have a go at him; or perhaps you have a fresh tranche!’ She felt, she told us, that Arthur’s ‘warnings of what would happen if the entire trade union movement didn’t fight alongside the NUM have been proved correct.’

  And that was that.

  INTRODUCTION TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION

  If we thought that, twenty-five years on, people might be willing to llook at new information and re-evaluate their views about the 1984 miners’ strike, we were very soon unburdened of this delusion. It was extraordinary how vivid people’s memories were about the strike. Opinions were as divided as though it had happened yesterday. The bitterness on both sides was as strong as ever.

  This book placed in the public domain a vast amount of new information about the great strike of 1984–5, and we are sad to report that where our new information conflicted with opinions formed in 1984 and left for twenty-five years to set and become rock hard, the new information was not welcomed. Shooting the messenger quickly became a very popular sport.

  We have pressed on regardless, and there is yet more new information in this paperback. Requests under the Freedom of Information Act have revealed more about the government’s ruthlessly meticulous preparations for policing the great strike, the huge cost of doing so, and the emerging concerns about its implications for civil liberties. They have also revealed a plan, never implemented, to prosecute Arthur Scargill for conspiracy, and have provided us with more details about the peace efforts made by the Labour industry spokesman Stan Orme.

  Meanwhile former miners’ union research officer Dave Feickert came up with what we are sure is the best and most reliable analysis of the overall cost of closing down Britain’s mining industry, together with some other interesting ideas about its implications. And the two sons of print union leader Bill Keys, Keith and Ian, brought us the original Keys diaries – previously, we had only the extracts Bill Keys gave us before he died. From the diaries it became clear that Keys’ attempts to find a peace deal, revealed for the first time in this book, began far earlier than we originally thought – in the summer of 1984.

  We also looked again at the Communist Party’s interesting role in the strike, prompted partly by Paul Mackney and his book Birmingham and the Miners’ Strike, and partly by a startlingly personal and hysterical attack on us in the Communist paper the Morning Star, which suggested to us that the author felt his party had not played quite the supportive role which, in retrospect, it likes to claim for itself.

  None of this will endear the book to some of our critics. Charles Moore complained in the Daily Telegraph that we were too kind to Arthur Scargill and insufficiently generous to Margaret Thatcher, while
Seumas Milne blasted at us from several pages of the Guardian for being far too unkind to Scargill. It’s understandable. Moore is one of Baroness Thatcher’s staunchest admirers and her official biographer, and Milne is the author of what seems to be the authorized Scargill version of these events. But for us the job is not to be kind or unkind to anyone, but to tell the story, putting together as much new information as we can find.

  Francis Beckett and David Hencke

  May 2009

  CHAPTER 1

  THE SHADOW OF 1926

  1920 TO 1945

  The story of the 1984–5 miners’ strike starts in 1926. Without the 1926 general strike, nothing that happened in the next six decades makes sense. And the foundations of the 1926 general strike were laid six years earlier, in 1920, when trade unions were more powerful than they had ever been before – as they were again in 1978, six years before the‘great strike for jobs’.

  Unions in 1920 had real power, and a record 45 per cent of the work-force belonged to one. This percentage was not reached again until 1974, when the unions were again stronger than ever – and, again, were within a decade of their most decisive defeat. Six and a half million trade unionists were affiliated through their unions to the Trades Union Congress, a peak not reached again until after the Second World War.1

  Many small craft unions had merged into big general unions that survived more or less intact until very recently – the Amalgamated Engineering Union, the Transport and General Workers’ Union, the National Union of General and Municipal Workers, with a quarter of a million or so workers. There was another merger mania in the 1970s, in which dozens of smaller unions disappeared into these three already huge unions. But in 1920 even the biggest general unions were dwarfed by the 900,000-strong Miners’ Federation of Great Britain (MFGB) – the aristocracy of organized labour.

  There were reasons for that. Britain needed coal, and had needed it for more than a century. Getting it out of the ground was harsh, back-breaking and horrifyingly dangerous work, and the coal owners had a long record of exploiting the men, forcing them to work long hours for little pay, housing them in hovels and skimping on the expenditure necessary to provide safe working conditions. So the miners had built up a strong trade union tradition to protect themselves. When they went on strike, they all went, though they knew that after the strike the owners, if they emerged from the battle strong enough to do so, would victimize strike leaders and evict them from their homes. ‘Scab’ – strike-breaker – was the most offensive name you could call a miner.