Marching to the Fault Line Read online

  The government also remained proactive during August, as Cabinet Office papers released under the Freedom of Information Act reveal. Peter Gregson, in a long memo to Sir Robert Armstrong, then Cabinet Secretary, and Sir Robert, in a memo to Thatcher, show that, while the rest of Britain might have been on holiday, the PM was determined that the government should remain vigilant and not lose the initiative. The memos reveal that Bernard Ingham, the PM’s volatile and blunt press secretary, had drawn up detailed plans, and put his deputy Romola Christopherson in charge of media co-ordination while he was away.

  Sir Robert’s memo records that Peter Walker chaired a daily meeting to co-ordinate action during the strike with senior officials from the Home Office, Employment, Transport and the NCB and CEGB. Twice weekly, on Mondays and Wednesdays, Thatcher herself chaired MISC101, the ministerial group on coal. Its purpose was to exchange information, give a ministerial steer to the line with the media, and work out policy.

  Armstrong suggested standing down MISC101 during August after an early meeting chaired by Thatcher, though if any issue was to arise Lord Whitelaw could chair a meeting while she was away. Meanwhile, even in the quiet days of August, Armstrong proposed to Thatcher that Peter Walker’s meeting should be twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays, to co-ordinate action. Regular telephone contact was to be maintained with all key ministers and officials, with Christopherson having direct access to Thatcher if it was necessary to co-ordinate a media response. In the meantime a tough line was circulated to all ministers from the Department of Energy, urging them to continue the attack in the media.

  The agreed line on Scargill read: ‘What more does he want? A blank cheque from the taxpayer so that no pit should close, no matter how uneconomic it is? This is ludicrous. It would cripple the industry’s prospects for ever.’

  A more private line was added by Hector Laing, the chair of United Biscuits, and a Tory donor and supporter, in a letter to Robin Butler on 23 July. Starting from the point of view that Scargill’s action had a political end, he recommended more drastic action. He urged Thatcher to give redundancy to the 20,000 miners who wanted to leave, even though this could lead to an exodus of moderates. ‘I think that is a risk worth taking.’

  He also called on the NCB to publish a list of pits likely to be closed over the next five years, on the principle that ‘uncertainty is always more damaging to morale than even unpleasant fact.’ This should be coupled with a new expansion programme for coal, emphasizing high pay. ‘When we announced the closure of our Liverpool factory we made the benefits to the remaining biscuit factories very clear to them [the employees] and while that was of course no comfort to Liverpool, the others saw the advantages to them.’ He also included an unpublished graph showing a ‘super future’ for coal, predicting that by 2000 it would still have 24 per cent of the market, while oil would fall from 58 per cent to 36 per cent of European energy demand.

  But Laing’s advice was not wanted. According to Turnbull and Lord Wakeham, Thatcher’s Chief Whip, it was pigeonholed and never seriously considered.

  The situation during August was not as calm as might appear. The supply of coal was not plentiful everywhere in the UK, and particularly not in Northern Ireland. On 7 August, Jim Prior, the Northern Ireland Secretary, got his minister of state, Adam Butler, to write a secret letter to Peter Walker. In it he warned of an ‘awkward’ problem in the province that could rapidly alienate public opinion and give potential support to the NUM: the price of electricity.11 ‘Supplies of coal to the Northern Ireland Electricity Service have dried up completely and the Service, which had previously been maximising its coal burn, has had to switch to oil-fired generation, with a consequent increase in costs currently running at about £800,000 per month . . . the natural course of action would be to increase electricity tariffs by 3 per cent if it assumed that coal supplies will be resumed on October 1 or by 4 per cent if the date of resumed supply is assumed to be 1 November.’

  If this went ahead in Northern Ireland alone it would cause a political furore, so Butler wanted Walker to consider a general rise in electricity tariffs across the whole of the UK. He warned that, if this was delayed, the difficulties in Northern Ireland would multiply. He hinted that delaying a decision to 1 January would mean tariffs going up by 9.5 per cent. The other alternative was to find money from a cash-limited budget to subsidize the industry further. ‘It is that impossibility which is at the heart of the problem.’

  A week later he received a firm rebuff from Walker. ‘There is no plan to raise electricity tariffs in Great Britain during the strike. This conclusion was reached after careful consideration of the impact of any such move on the handling of the strike itself and of the scale and nature of the extra costs arising from it. The position will be reviewed at the end of the strike.’

  The statement is revealing. It shows that the strike, contrary to public statements, was biting already, even in high summer, and that the government was quite prepared to fund extra costs until the miners were brought to heel, even if it was going to be a long haul. Expense was not to be spared.

  Two weeks later a more cynical approach to mundane matters was revealed. For years the government had run an energy-saving advertising campaign, encouraging the public to switch off power and save money. A letter from Peter Rees, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, reveals that Walker wanted to step up that campaign, in order to ‘extend endurance . . . if the miners’ strike were to last through the autumn.’12

  Rees told Walker that he would agree additional expenditure, but on conditions. Walker had to secure all the necessary savings from within the cash limits of this expenditure. The government itself was short of cash: ‘The state of the contingency reserve is such that we cannot use it to meet any part of this expenditure. If the strike ends earlier I suggest we reconsider the case for additional spending.’

  This little vignette shows how fighting the miners’ strike was dominating everything, even routine energy-saving campaigns. It also shows that ministers would use everything at their disposal, even encouraging people to turn out the lights, but would not be unduly bothered once the strike was settled.

  On the strike’s front line, picket-line battles were commonplace, but there was now no doubt who was winning them. According to Kevin Barron, a former miner and NUM leader and by then an MP, ‘The police were acting as judge and jury.’ But Barron adds that pickets were not blameless; Scargill’s denials that any violence had come from his side were foolish and self-defeating, he says, for everyone could see on their television that he was not telling the truth. Even the loyal Peter Heathfield could see it, says Barron, who recalls being at a public meeting with him in Blackburn, after which they watched Scargill on television saying: ‘I’ve not seen anyone throwing stones.’ Heathfield, says Barron, put his head in his hands.

  The truth was that miners still on strike were desperately frustrated by their powerlessness to stop the drift back to work, which newspapers were gloating about, using often grossly inflated figures, but which Ned Smith was still privately charting twice a day with lethal accuracy. Whatever rubbish the public were fed or Scargill chose to believe, Smith’s colleagues knew the real position.

  Yet the extraordinary thing is not how many men were going back, but how many were still out. In August journalist Barbara Fox visited the Crigglestone and Hall Green miners’ support group near Barnsley in Yorkshire, and provided some insight into why this was so:

  The village is not big, nearly all the 300 workers in the pit live here with their families. The wages were never very high . . . but they have cars and many own their little houses. The village with its well tended gardens, pretty curtains and tidy streets looks nice, almost prosperous. If this pit were to close – and it is on the list of pits to be closed – then the 300 men would be without jobs, and the chances of finding other work do not exist here. They say: ‘We just want to be allowed to continue working. When this pit closes, there’ll be nothing for us, and nothing for ou
r sons . . .’ It is the fear of a future without work, the vision of deserted villages and towns, which keep the workers on strike.

  Already members of other trade unions were digging deep into their pockets to help the miners. The print union SOGAT was one of the more active, and its leader Bill Keys wrote in his diary on 1 August: ‘Today was a day I shall never forget. The convoy of twenty-five lorries which I had organized with about £100,000 of food assembled at County Hall . . . It was an impressive sight seeing all the lorries of food and yet it was so little. Per heads of Yorkshire miners, it works out at less than £2 a family. Talk with [Yorkshire NUM leader] Owen Briscoe in evening over problems. It is money, it is food, it is clothing. This can only come by mobilising the movement.’13

  Another NUM special conference was held on 10 August, which confirmed the rejection of the NCB offer and appealed for £500,000 a week from other unions. There were, of course, no delegates from the rebel areas of Nottinghamshire, South Derbyshire and Leicestershire, which made the defeat of the offer more certain, but also less impressive. As for the £500,000, other unions were already fundraising furiously and sending as much as they could.

  It was in the aftermath of this conference, and of the rejection of the NCB offer, that the idea began to emerge of Bill Keys, one of the most able and experienced wheelers and dealers the trade union movement possessed, taking a hand and trying to broker a deal. It was not conceived as an alternative to Stan Orme’s efforts; the two would keep each other informed. Between them, they would know every possible avenue that might be tried. TUC General Secretary Len Murray and Labour leader Neil Kinnock were keen. Others consulted at this early stage were the train drivers’ leader Ray Buckton, a leading General Council left-winger, and Ron Todd, who led the TGWU. Just four days after the miners’ special conference, Keys and Todd were meeting Scargill and Heathfield at a London hotel, and Keys was briefing Stan Orme.14

  On 15 August Keys was meeting Len Murray and Neil Kinnock and telling them that he thought a chance to settle had been missed three weeks earlier. Kinnock and Murray made it clear they believed Keys was the best man to find a way through that would cause minimum damage to the unions, and Keys quickly fixed a meeting with Scargill and Heathfield. Keys had with him Ron Todd, whose union owned the hotel in Bournemouth where they met, hoping to attract the minimum of attention.

  It was not an easy meeting. Todd told Scargill bluntly that he should condemn picket-line violence. But Keys felt that Scargill and Heathfield were open to a compromise – or an ‘honourable settlement’, as he diplomatically put it – and pressed them to support the initiative taken by Stan Orme. They agreed to start with a public appeal for new negotiations, and the Daily Mirror’s industrial editor Geoffrey Goodman was called in. He drafted an article for the following morning, 24 August. Keys thought that whether it worked or not would depend on whether Ian MacGregor was taking a political or an industrial stance. ‘I believe the chances of pulling this off are remote, but it must be worth the endeavour,’ he confided to his diary.

  But when he opened his Daily Mirror the next morning, the article was not there. Keys thought Mirror proprietor Robert Maxwell had censored the article, and he was probably right. A dispute with one of Maxwell’s companies had dominated most of the first half of 1984 in Bill Keys’ union SOGAT.15 Maxwell, or Cap’n Bob as he liked to be called, had taken over the Mirror about six weeks earlier, and wanted to use his new status as a national newspaper proprietor to be a player in national politics, a latterday Beaverbrook or Rothermere.

  A larger-than-life figure, a bully, a spy who certainly worked for British Intelligence during the fall of Berlin, probably for the CIA and Mossad, and possibly for MI5 and MI6 during this dispute, Maxwell had a mission. He was going to solve the miners’ strike single-handed and bring great glory to his new acquisition. He had even written the headline in his mind: ‘The Mirror solves the Miners’ Dispute.’

  Geoffrey Goodman had excellent contacts on both sides of the dispute. He had already had a disagreement with his new proprietor, who, arriving back after a good dinner and somewhat the worse for drink, decided to rewrite Goodman’s column himself overnight. His efforts destroyed a revelation in the copy that Margaret Thatcher and Sir Keith Joseph had both voted against Edward Heath when he decided to go to the country in 1974 on ‘Who governs Britain?’ The offending copy changes, since this was the pre-computer age and required much hammering of hot metal, did not appear until the late London edition, but the damage was done. The next day a somewhat abashed Maxwell invited his industrial editor for a drink in his office, hugged him and apologized. ‘I promise it will never happen again. I behaved stupidly’ are the words Goodman recalls.16

  So as the annual TUC meeting opened at the start of September, there were three peace initiatives running at the same time, steered by three very different men: Stan Orme, Bill Keys and Robert Maxwell.

  Scargill had wanted the TUC to stay out of the dispute, even though he lambasted the trade union movement for not giving enough support. By this time his relationship with the TUC General Secretary Len Murray was strained, to say the least. According to John Lyons, General Secretary of the EMA, Murray said to Lyons that the miners’ strike was against ‘the coal board, the government and the TUC. Geoffrey Goodman recalls that Murray asked Scargill for his home telephone number, so he could contact him directly if he needed to in a crisis, and Scargill refused to give it to him.17 But with a new General Secretary, Norman Willis, due to take over at the end of the week, there was a chance for change.

  Scargill set the scene himself in an article in the Guardian on 3 September. This was no ordinary solidarity call to fellow workers fighting an industrial dispute. He called the dispute a fight against the government to save communities. He recalled Nicholas Ridley’s blueprint of 1975, when the Tories were in opposition, to privatize nationalized industries, and insisted that the government wanted to close seventy pits and destroy 70,000 jobs.

  ‘Our members will not submit to the butchery of their livelihoods and their communities. There was only one course of action: to fight,’ he wrote. ‘That fight has been an inspiration to working people around the world. Here in Britain, it has awakened the very soul of the trade union and Labour movement from a state of helplessness. Ours is a campaign unique in many respects, two of which deserve special mention. One is the mobilisation of young miners, fighting to save jobs which they regard as a trust, to be held and passed on to the youngsters of tomorrow. They utterly reject the horrors of the dole. The other inspiring feature of the dispute is, of course, the regeneration of community spirit – a phenomenon in which women have played a crucial role.’ He made it clear that he intended to break anti-union laws – a decision that brought fears of the sequestration of union funds, and was certain to alarm other unions.

  The article set the scene for further confrontation at the TUC between the NUM and other unions, and again at the Labour Party conference the following month.

  Maxwell was still determined to appear as the saviour of the day. He badgered Goodman to set up secret meetings with the key figures and planned a big role for himself in mediation. It came to a head at the TUC conference in Brighton, on the Sunday before the conference opened on Monday. That day Maxwell had persuaded Goodman to organize a secret meeting in the basement of the Bedford Hotel, to be attended by Scargill, Mick McGahey and Peter Heathfield. On the Mirror’s side were Maxwell, Goodman and editor Mike Molloy.

  Goodman had warned Maxwell to be ‘very careful’ about trying to organize such a meeting and was ‘very uneasy’ about success. But Maxwell was determined. Midway through the talks he insisted that Goodman ring Ned Smith, the NCB’s labour relations director, at home. Dragged off a golf course to take the call (there were no mobile telephones then), Smith agreed to contact MacGregor, and to Goodman’s astonishment MacGregor agreed to come to a meeting the next day at a hotel near Gatwick Airport to meet the miners’ leaders.

  The Sunday meeting we
nt on for two hours, and Maxwell spent the rest of the evening in his hotel room, trying to get Thatcher on the telephone, and ending up calling Robin Butler, her principal private secretary.

  But the meeting the next day came to nothing. It was quickly clear that the sides were still as far apart as ever, and, despite a further call to Number Ten, they reached an impasse. As Goodman writes: ‘The sight of Cap’n Bob ambulating up and down the Brighton sea front looking for peace formulae was as irrelevant to both Thatcher and Scargill as counting pebbles on Brighton beach.’18

  Future meetings were also to be futile. David Seymour, then a leader writer on the Mirror, said: ‘They always broke down once both parties got together and realized instantly that what Maxwell had said each side was committed to change was completely wrong.’ The truth was that, at the TUC in Brighton, Maxwell was a sideshow – a noisy sideshow, and one that attracted a lot of publicity, but a sideshow nonetheless. The real business of the Congress was to see what, if anything, the rest of the trade union movement could do to help the miners.

  The 1984 Congress saw the retirement of General Secretary Len Murray. There comes a time, he told Congress, to move on ‘and make way for a more substantial man’, looking at the portly figure of his successor Norman Willis.

  Willis, kindly, jovial, popular, with an impressive portfolio of jokes with which he had delighted fellow trade unionists and journalists for years, was widely considered a lightweight, appearances notwithstanding. He got the job on the ‘Buggins’s turn’ principle, as Murray’s deputy and as a man who had come out of the most powerful of the unions, the TGWU. But Jack Jones, formerly the TGWU General Secretary (he had retired in 1979) and one of the two most powerful union leaders Britain has ever known, was among those who urged that, in this crisis, Buggins’s turn should be abandoned. He wanted a stronger figure: his candidate was the formidable white-collar union leader Rodney Bickerstaffe.