Marching to the Fault Line Read online

  But Jones’ successors, who lacked his stature and strategic intelligence, insisted on Willis, partly because they did not want the TUC General Secretary to be too powerful a figure: it might reduce the power of big unions like the TGWU. As for Bickerstaffe, though he almost certainly thought he would be better than Willis, he was unwilling to leave the union he led, the National Union of Public Employees, and did not think his supporters had enough votes in the bag to defeat Willis.

  Norman Willis may have been thought to lack gravitas, but he did not lack courage. He knew that if the miners went down to total defeat, the power and influence of the trade union movement would go down with them. He had already been advocating a more interventionist approach to the dispute. Murray, having been firmly told to keep out by the NUM leadership, had agreed to do so, but Willis had already quietly made informal contact with Scargill and Heathfield to find out what their situation was and what they were thinking. What he heard alarmed him.

  In the run-up to the Congress, he was even more alarmed to see the proposals the NUM wanted to bring to it: a pledge that every union member – not just the transport unions – would refuse to cross any NUM picket lines; a ban on the use of any material that had been handled by non-union labour or soldiers. At first the miners also wanted a tenpence-a-week levy on every member of every trade union, but they abandoned this.

  The problem, quite apart from the fact that these demands would split the Congress down the middle, was that they were completely undeliverable. Delegates sitting in the Brighton conference centre might put up their hands to vote for them, but nothing would happen. They would make not a jot of difference in the real world. They were gesture politics. The aim of the NUM’s demands, it seemed to Willis, was not to help the strike but to show the workers that the TUC leaders were not really on their side; to brand Willis and his colleagues as class traitors.

  At the beginning of TUC week, Murray and the man who was to take over from him less than a week later tried to broker a compromise. At first Scargill and Heathfield refused to meet them, or even to come to Brighton, but McGahey, the miners’ representative on the TUC General Council, telephoned them from Brighton the day before the start of the Congress and said: ‘Comrades, you’ve got to come tonight.’ They agreed, reluctantly. They might not have done so had they realized that Norman Willis was in the room with McGahey when he made the call. If they had not agreed to come at McGahey’s instigation that night, they would not have been available for the meeting with Maxwell described earlier.

  They drove to Brighton. After their meeting with Maxwell, they saw Bill Keys before going into a meeting with the TUC top brass. Keys told them that he, too, thought their motion unworkable. Then, on Sunday, 2 September, at 8 p.m., in the splendid Louis XV suite in Brighton’s Metropole Hotel, the TUC team – Murray, Willis and their top officials, TUC Chairman Ray Buckton and David Basnett, leader of the GMB (General, Municipal, Boilermakers and Allied Trade Union) – met the three NUM leaders. Murray opened. He said the TUC wanted to help, but complained that the NUM seemed determined to appeal over its head to trade union members: a strategy, as he knew but did not say, which was doomed to failure. He added that the miners were not helping their case with other trade union members by picket-line violence.

  McGahey said there was no intention to snub the TUC (though everyone thought that his President had precisely that intention). Scargill told them how solid the strike was, how the NUM was acting in accordance with the 1974 Plan for Coal, how the NCB had sabotaged peace talks, how he could not condemn violence while members were suffering ‘great hardship, frustration, and in some cases provocation’, how there was great hardship in mining areas and a desperate need for financial help, and how what they wanted from the TUC was for power supply unions to give wholehearted support. None of this can have come as a surprise to the TUC team.

  Basnett opened for the TUC. A tall, stooping man with a slow, deliberate style of speaking, he must have sounded to Arthur Scargill like the worst sort of middle-class compromiser. His union included many workers in the power supply industry, and he said he could not accept the demand to respect picket lines. It would divide the unions without achieving its objective.

  Four hours on, the sometimes bad-tempered argument produced an uneasy proposal for a ‘concerted campaign’ to raise money, and a compromise on picket lines. The compromise said that union members would not move coal, coke or oil substitute for coal and coke across NUM picket lines, and would not use them; but the decisions would only be implemented after detailed discussions with the TUC General Council and affected unions.

  Even in this form it divided the Congress. On Monday afternoon in the conference hall, Scargill produced his usual oratorical tour deforce, saying all the easy things that everyone wanted to hear, and was cheered to the rafters. The engineers’ leader Gavin Laird was jeered when he said: ‘The NUM saw fit for many months to ignore the general council and the government of the trade union movement’ and there was ‘no excuse for violence on the picket line’. Engineering union leader John Lyons also spoke against the agreed proposal, to cries of‘scab’ and ‘Tory swine’. Lyons, Bill Sirs of the steelworkers and Eric Hammond of the electricians all led their delegations in voting against it. But the big battalions - the unions with the votes, Basnett’s GMB and Moss Evans’s TGWU - ensured that it went through. It was, of course, meaningless, because it was undeliverable, and Norman Willis quickly regretted that they had not taken the chance to tell the miners’ leaders firmly that their position was hopeless, and they must be guided by the TUC if they expected any support.

  Lyons was privately furious with Basnett, whom he considered weak and vain, for agreeing to something that the unions with members in power supply could not deliver. ‘It was criminal for the TUC General Council to go in for kidology with the miners on strike and suffering. The General Council knew it was a sham. Lionel Murray framed a resolution with weasel words in it,’ he told one of the writers shortly afterwards. His speech, he said, brought him more letters of support from his members than anything else he ever did as General Secretary.

  ‘The TUC wrote out a cheque and forgot to sign it’ is John Monks’ assessment today. But the miners’ leaders left Brighton with the cheers of delegates ringing in their ears. Much good would it do their members. Yet Scargill seems to have had some hope that something helpful would come out of Brighton. After Orgreave he had been focusing more of his attention on leaders of other trade unions. The power unions could, in theory, deliver a decisive blow to the Government’s hope of getting through the winter without electricity cuts. And, on one well-informed left-wing analysis, ‘involving the TUC in the strike would mean that, if the miners were defeated, responsibility would be seen to fall on the shoulders of the trade union leaders.’19

  Outside the conference hall, hundreds of demonstrators chanted, ‘General strike now.’ Under the WRP banner were Mark and Doreen Jones, parents of the first picket to die, David Jones. They had hitched to Brighton to lobby the TUC. On their return to Yorkshire they found a letter from the National Working Miners Committee, offering sympathy and a cheque for £250. They were hard up and £250 would have meant a lot, but they tore it up and sent it back with a letter saying it was an insult to their dead son.

  Just after the Congress Neil Kinnock met the industrial correspondents and told them that the possibility of talks was getting stronger. ‘I would say weeks not months. The NUM has been committed throughout to attending negotiations, but if possible they’re even more committed since the TUC. The less attention to Thatcher the better ... By investing her credit in “no surrender” she has introduced an inflexibility which even the Board doesn’t welcome. The NUM cannot compromise on twenty pits and 20,000 jobs. That would tear up previous agreements; would say, uniquely in British industry, that management can close units of production like picking apples off a tree. It is clear that you close pits which are exhausting or exhausted, and pits which are unsafe.’
r />   A journalist asked if he had his own formula for ending the strike. Yes, said Kinnock, he did, but he was not going to say what it was. But of course, he had none.

  Downing Street was not sitting back after the TUC conference either. On 4 September Peter Gregson wrote another secret memo to Mrs Thatcher on the next round of NCB and NUM negotiations.20 He said she had three choices: wait for an NUM counter proposal; table again the NCB’s July text; or try a new approach. The last option could involve giving up an agreed definition of pit exhaustion, seeking agreement to get rid of X million tonnes of coal or going ahead with the closures anyway.

  Waiting for the NUM to put forward a counter proposal had the advantage of putting the onus on the NUM to negotiate constructively. But the NUM might simply propose the July text without the words ‘beneficially developed’, and in this way ‘it may be able to appear [underlined] constructive, while simply ignoring the problem of loss-making pits. The NCB would then be faced with trying to negotiate extra words back into the text.’

  Retabling the NCB text had the advantage of putting the NUM in the position of having to justify exclusion of the words ‘beneficially developed’ or to substitute others that acknowledged the need to close loss-making pits. But it might imply that the NCB was prepared to make further concessions of substance.

  Gregson also toyed with a new approach altogether, on the grounds that it could ‘rescue both sides from an argument about words and formulae which is becoming sterile and unproductive’. But he was put off by major disadvantages. It could have given the NCB a new line but ‘badly handled it could lead to a rout’. A new approach would probably be even harder for the NUM to swallow if it included new concrete arrangements such as timetables and quantities of coal to be produced, while ‘a change of approach by the NCB would be much harder to explain publicly and could be presented by the NUM as a wrecking move’.

  All in all, he thought the best thing was for the NCB to table the July text again, ‘making it clear that any agreement has to deal with the problem of loss-making pits, but indicating a willingness to consider alternative forms of words which deal adequately with the problem’.

  He also raised other issues from Scargill’s speeches, asking whether the settlement of the pit closures dispute would not just lead to other disputes, for example about pay. This was one more reason why ‘it will be vital to pin the blame for a breakdown on NUM intransigence’. This might be crucial in the government’s efforts to last out the strike, because it would affect power union members’ willingness to give effect to the TUC resolution. So he wanted to be sure that the NCB had plans ‘to ensure that the right message gets across to the media immediately and effectively’.

  Thatcher followed Gregson’s advice. She was adamant that there should be no change. Neil Kinnock wrote to her demanding a recall of Parliament. He noted that the PM had said she could not leave the country for a tour of the Far East because ‘it would not be right for her to be so far away from Britain’, and he urged the government to become actively involved in seeking a resolution to the dispute. He received an icy reply saying a recall of Parliament would not serve any useful purpose. She said that the same pit closure procedures had been agreed by Labour in its Report for Coal and the dispute could be quickly settled if the NUM negotiated with the NCB along the same lines. To rub it in, she sent him the NCB press release at the end of July explaining why talks had collapsed. She stuck firmly to the NCB line.

  Nevertheless talks between the NCB and the NUM continued, despite the collapse of negotiations in mid-July. They seemed to be getting somewhere, but collapsed again on 14 September. The fault this time appeared to be Scargill’s intransigence. The Board tabled two amendments to the proposed closure procedure. The NUM insisted that the closures could only take place on grounds of exhaustion or for safety reasons. The NCB were determined to allow closures on economic grounds. But the Board did agree to modify the wording of the closure procedures, removing the use of the word ‘beneficially’ and including a proposal for a joint examination of potentially doomed pits by mining engineers. This was rejected by the NUM but, after a second attempt at a redraft, the NUM appeared to be about to agree.

  When talks were adjourned on 13 September, the only difference was between ‘satisfactory’ or ‘acceptable’. But the next day the NUM stepped back from what they agreed, and talks collapsed. The NCB put out a press release saying the dispute was ‘quite unnecessary’ and repeated pledges for a future stable industry, no compulsory redundancies, an offer of new jobs for everyone at closed collieries plus generous transfer payments, improved redundancy, a 5.2 per cent pay rise and continued high investments, specified as between £700m and £800m in 1984/85.

  Meanwhile ministers continued to fret about coal supplies. Peter Walker received a letter on 6 September from Patrick Jenkin, the Environment Secretary, about whether to use the crisis to remove more than 1,000 tonnes by road from an open-cast site in Staffordshire. Staffordshire County Council objected on planning grounds to lorries removing so much coal in April, but now ministers were desperate to get as much coal stockpiled as possible. Jenkin even speculated on breaking the planning laws to get the coal moved, though it ran the risk of a local council taking enforcement action, which would place the government in the position of committing a criminal offence.

  On 17 September there was a key personnel change in the government. Giles Shaw, Parliamentary Under-Secretary at the Department of Energy, stood down, weary of all the stress and problems. His replacement added a new dynamism to the scene. David Hunt, a close colleague of Peter Walker and then a Tory Party vice-chairman in charge of candidates, was Walker’s chosen replacement, and Walker persuaded Thatcher. Hunt was to bring a new energy and relish for the conflict to the Department, and Walker trusted him absolutely.

  His appointment was marked by both drama and comedy. On that day David Hunt was at Conservative Central Office dealing with one of the most difficult and delicate problems any vice-chairman in charge of the candidates list could expect in his career. He was interviewing Sarah Keays, the mistress of Cecil Parkinson, who had hit the headlines the previous year when the Cabinet minister had to resign after it was revealed that he had fathered her daughter Flora.

  Sarah Keays – who was to become increasingly embittered - had political ambitions and wanted to remain on the Tory parliamentary candidates list. Thatcher, who had been forewarned, did not want her there. So Hunt was charged with telling Keays that she had no future with the Conservatives. Just as he had reached this delicate point the telephone rang. He was told it was the Prime Minister who wished to speak him. ‘David, I am appointing you the new minister for coal,’ she told him.

  But Hunt did not believe he was really speaking to the Prime Minister. He told us: ‘John Gummer [who was then Party Chairman] often used to play pranks on people, by getting people to ring you up pretending to be someone else. I wasn’t certain whether this was another of his jokes, so I started cross-questioning the PM to make sure she really was the person on the other end of the line.’

  ‘When will I take up this job?’ he asked. ‘Six p.m. tonight’ came the immediate reply. Hunt began to realize it was true.

  The government, in September, was willing to look at ways of ending the strike which, though they must not be capable of being interpreted as giving Scargill victory, might at least have the appearance of compromise, and leave the miners with their spirits and their union unbroken. Now, it seems, it was Scargill who was determined not to settle. Privately, Mick McGahey told mining MP Kevin Barron: ‘Something has taken Arthur over.’

  CHAPTER 6

  PIT MANAGERS, MOSCOW GOLD AND A FATAL LIBYAN KISS

  2 OCTOBER TO 13 NOVEMBER

  Nineteen-eighty-four was one year when Neil Kinnock could have done without the relentless arrival of the Labour Party’s annual conference. Most years, for the Leader of the Opposition, the annual party conference is a chance to make some headway in the opinion polls. But Ki
nnock went to Blackpool in the first week of October knowing that all he could hope to do was limit the damage the week was going to do to his party.

  It was increasingly obvious that Scargill was going to clash with the courts, and that he would choose to defy them, opening up endless possibilities for embarrassment for a Labour leader who was straining every nerve to sound like a safe pair of hands whom the electorate could trust. Neither Stan Orme nor Bill Keys could yet offer him hope of a solution. Scargill’s trust that General Winter would come to his aid, a faith shared by few other trade union leaders, seemed undimmed, and neither the government nor the NCB seemed to have any strategy except to grind the miners down.

  It was a bleak prospect for a Labour leader whose party was closely identified with the unions, and who was himself closely identified with the miners. And Kinnock did not yet know the worst: that Arthur Scargill was sending an emissary to Libya – just months after a policewoman had been shot dead from the windows of the Libyan embassy – to beg for money from the most potent hate figure in the world, the Libyan dictator Colonel Gaddafi, a public relations blunder of extraordinary magnitude; and that Scargill’s efforts to keep his union and the strike alive financially were to engulf the NUM in yet more damaging controversy.

  Kinnock had to walk a delicate line between splitting his party irrevocably by failing to support the NUM, and committing electoral suicide by failing to support the police. ‘I condemn the violence of stone-throwers and battering-ram carriers and I condemn the violence of cavalry charges, the truncheon groups and the shield-bangers,’ he told the conference, mollifying no one.