The Great Miners' Strike 1984-85

The miners’ strike of 1984-85 came to be called the "Great Strike". With good reason. It was the largest, longest trade union struggle in Britain, and the most far reaching in its consequences, since the 1926 General Strike. For a whole year, some 170,000 miners, plus the women of the mining communities, battled against everything the Tory government and the police threw at them.

The press witch hunted them as violent and anti-democratic thugs. The Tories tried to starve them back to work by cutting off all forms of state benefits. The police attacked their picket lines in paramilitary fashion. They occupied their villages like an invading army. The judges stole the union’s funds, "exiled" militants from their own homes and imprisoned striking miners en masse. The secret services spied on them, infiltrated the movement, tapped their phones, as the ex-head of M15, Stella Rimington, then in charge of the spying operation on the miners, has revealed in her memoirs. Thatcher famously called them "the enemy within". It was civil war, class war on a grand scale.

In the twelve months of the strike 11,312 miners were arrested, over 200 imprisoned and 966 sacked because of their role in the strike. Over 3,000 were injured and two killed on the picket line – David Jones and Joe Green. The entire strikebreaking operation cost the government more than Ł3 billion. The Tories’ bloody adventure in the Falklands/Malvinas war against Argentina, two years earlier, cost them less.

The striking miners, their wives and families met these attacks with courage, humour and an unbreakable will to win.

They showed fantastic creativity and imagination in all aspects of the strike. On the home front, they organised survival for twelve months with no wages, no benefits. They organised flying pickets, fought pitched battles with a militarised police force, they addressed meetings of thousands of other trade unionists in the campaign to win solidarity for their action. They traveled the world, spreading their message and winning support. The women of the mining communities built a mass women’s movement, almost from scratch.

Inspired by the miners’ struggle, hundreds of thousands of activists in the union and political labour movement, in the Black, Asian and other immigrant communities, in the women’s and Lesbian and Gay movements totally committed themselves to helping the miners to win. In the face of the disgraceful neglect and betrayal by the official labour movement, rank and file militants from all of these sectors built miners’ support committees that organised accommodation for miners and joined them on the picket line, made street and workplace collections, organised benefits, and a host of demonstrations and meetings.

Despite all this, the miners went back to work defeated, but every single one of them could walk tall down the pit lanes in March 1985. Every striker had given this battle their all. They had no reason to feel shame. Those with reason to hang their heads were the TUC leaders like Norman Willis, and most national union leaders.

To win such a battle needed more than heroism. It needed strategy and tactics and these had to go beyond even militant trade unionism. For this was a class struggle and, therefore, a political struggle. The politics of the National Union of Mineworkers’ (NUM) leadership, including its most militant and left wing member, the president, Arthur Scargill, were shaped by left reformism – in either a Labourite of Stalinist form. These politics played a decisive role in the strike.

Of course, unlike many bureaucrats, Scargill was a real fighter. He never had any intention of selling out. That is why militants, wherever he went, adored him and greeted him with the song, "Arthur Scargill walks on water". But while Scargill’s commitment to the miners’ struggle was unbreakable it was not enough.

His politics and his strategy for victory never transcended the twin limits of militant trade unionism and left reformism. Where, objectively, a revolutionary communist approach was required, Arthur Scargill deployed a policy based on manoeuvres within the left wing of the union bureaucracy and a syndicalist belief that militant picketing by the NUM could defeat the might of the state. In short, he deployed the tactics which gave the miners victory in two great battles in the 1970s and ignored the fact that things had changed both in the working class movement and in the preparation and leadership of the ruling class.

The terrible price Scargill paid for his initial sectionalism and his later willingness to abide by the rule of his fellow general secretaries, was to open the door, months later, to the outright traitors and cowards who stood at the head of the Trades Union Congress (TUC). They betrayed the miners and opened the door to a wave of attacks on the British working class. Instead of organising the whole class for victory they looked every which way they could for a means of calling the strike off. In the words of one of these swivel-chair generals of the labour movement, David Basnett of the GMB, "You cannot allow a dispute like this to rumble on. It is disturbing our economy and it is disturbing our industrial relations."

When the miners were finally forced back to work, without a settlement of the strike, the traitors heaved a sigh of relief. The vanguard of the British working class had been beaten and, therefore, the right argued, strikes were outdated. Unions needed to concentrate on servicing their individual members with credit card schemes and cheap holiday offers. They needed to strike single union deals with employers under which recognition was granted in exchange for a no-strike policy. "New realism" needed to replace the old style militancy.

The miners’ defeat represented a strategic setback for the whole class. In the years that followed, section after section of workers was defeated, including the strongest remaining sections of the movement like the printers (1986) and the dockers (1989). Union membership figures plummeted. There was widespread union de-recognition in whole industries, especially the print. The right wing triumphed in the Labour Party. The left was systematically purged under Kinnock, a process that culminated with the elevation of Tony Blair to the leadership of the Labour Party.

New realism is directly responsible for the utterly false, but unfortunately widespread, belief in the unions today that you must never have an all out strike. The idea that one and two day strikes are the furthest we can go and that industrial action should always stay within the framework of the anti-union laws was born out of the defeat of the miners.

Twenty years on, growing numbers of workers are beginning to question the policies of the right. Left wingers have started to win union elections. More and more workers now view Blair as a sinner, not a saint. It has taken such a long time to recover ground for the simple reason that the lies of the right looked brighter in the dark days that followed the defeat of the miners.

But there was an alternative. Had a revolutionary party existed, had it built real roots across the whole working class, had it secured influence in the unions, then victory would have been possible. Victory required a strategy based on the transformation of what everybody recognised was a struggle with class wide significance into an actual class wide assault on the forces of capitalism and its state. Tragically, no such party existed. And never, since the defeat of the 1926 general strike, had the absence of a revolutionary party of the working class been so decisive in the outcome of a major class battle.

Thatcher, trade unions and politics

There was nothing inevitable about the defeats of the 1980s: struggle decided. The struggle of working class men and women had the potential to stop Thatcher. Time and again, opportunities presented themselves – and these opportunities were not just missed, they were either negligently or maliciously thrown away by those entrusted with leadership in the movement.

The outcome of every working class struggle depends on two key factors: the preparedness of the workers to fight and the political strategy of their leaders when the fight is on. In the 1980s, section after section of workers moved into the front rank of struggle. From the car workers at Longbridge in 1979, through the steelworkers, to the printers, to the dockers at every major port in the country in 1989, they risked their livelihoods, their homes, their family life, and their jobs to fight Thatcher.

If the outcome had depended on the courage and determination of rank and file workers alone, Thatcher would have been out of office by 1983 at the latest. But the second factor – the leadership’s politics and strategy – enabled her to survive every crisis. Most union leaders were opposed to Thatcher and did want to defend their unions against her attacks, but they did not believe it was their business to bring her down. This was strictly forbidden by the basic ground rules of democracy. Trade unions negotiated with the employers: sometimes they fought them in strikes. Of course, they knew governments acted politically against the unions. Then they could protest, withdraw co-operation, and even give a nod and a wink if the rank and file took direct action. But they knew that it was strictly forbidden to openly leap the barriers between the "industrial" and the "political" struggle.

This was not just a question of cowardice by individual leaders. It was the outlook of an entire caste, the trade union bureaucracy. Indeed, "trade unionism", as such, could not leap over this boundary without becoming something else, revolutionary working class politics, committed to abolishing the capitalist system "by any means necessary". And those who were already won to these politics had the absolute duty to say what means were necessary. Those who knew, but did not say so, were revolutionaries in name only.

The union bureaucrats were, by and large, fearful of the militancy of their own members. That militancy, if it went unchecked or, even worse, brought tangible results, could lead to a challenge to the privileged position of the union leaders. It could rob them of their function in life – negotiating on behalf of workers within capitalism. It could bring down their entire political strategy – piecemeal reform via a Labour government and peaceful co-existence with the capitalist system.

The political strategy of the trade union leaders who oversaw the great struggles of the 1980s was to view each one in isolation from the others, to carefully maintain each sectional division. From Bill Sirs at the head of the ISTC in the 1980 steel strike, through to Ron Todd of the TGWU during the dock strike of 1989, reformist leaders set strict limits beyond which the rank and file could not be allowed to go. Anti-union laws had to be obeyed to save union funds from the courts and union officials from the cells. Industrial action could not be used to defy and change the law, despite the evidence that this could be done and had been done in the 1970s. The struggle should not be allowed to become political, lest the union leaders get accused of subverting democracy. Above all else, nothing should be allowed to lead to a direct challenge to capitalism itself.

Scargillism

Arthur Scargill, like his political ally Tony Benn inside the Labour Party, seemed to offer a radical alternative to official reformism. The brand of militant left reformism that shaped the politics of both men was hugely influential amongst militants in the 1970s and 1980s. The ruling class demonised Scargill as a politically motivated wrecker in every newspaper. However, between his reputation and his actual politics there was a gap. Scargill was a very militant left reformist but not a revolutionary. For Scargill, militant trade union action was decisive in fighting capitalism because it could push Labour well to the left and install people like Benn in the top leadership of the party. A left-led Labour government, backed by militant unions, could bring about a socialist transformation through parliament.

This strategy meant that his style of leadership inside the NUM was very different from that of his predecessors or his fellow union leaders. He positively encouraged militancy. He boldly championed socialist ideas. He excoriated those who preached retreat in the face of the Tory onslaught. This made him a much better trade union leader, but it did not make him a communist and it did not amount to a strategy for victory in the great strike.

In the first place, his strategy left the NUM’s own bureaucratic structures in place. Its undemocratic rules, forged during periods of right wing ascendancy, were left untouched. Only when the strike was underway did he move to abolish one of the worst, the need for a 55 per cent majority in a national strike ballot. Equally, he left the strength of the regional bureaucracies intact. His strategy was the classic Stalinist Broad Left one: to capture the bureaucratic machine, not to dissolve it into rank and file democratic control which could hold the officials accountable, make them servants of the members. These weaknesses in his strategy revealed themselves in the early days of the strike, when right wing bureaucrats held out against taking action and the centre-left ones temporised, and again during the Battle of Orgreave, when even the left regions conspired to block pickets going to the coking plant.

A second key failing of Scargill’s politics was his refusal to break with and denounce the right wing traitors in the other unions and the TUC bureaucracy. He was wary of them for months but, when he finally turned to them, he did so by accepting their terms, their control. This was fatal in the fight to get workers to take action alongside the miners. It meant that militants could not use a call from Scargill and the miners as a means of mobilising their fellow workers. This problem became acute during the two dock strikes of the summer of 1984 and then again after the September TUC. Just as Benn had put the unity of Labour, which he thought was essential to win the next election, above the opportunity to the finish off the right wing back in 1982, when he concluded a truce on the eve of the general election, so Scargill put the unity of the union movement, which was, in fact, the unity of the bureaucratic caste at its head, above the need to destroy the power and influence of that caste as a means of securing victory in the miners’ struggle.

Scargill’s politics also dictated that the political consequences of the battle he was leading be avoided at all costs. What were these? The need to split the Labour Party, ousting the right and rallying hundreds of thousands of the best militants to a totally revolutionised party, one based on uncompromising class struggle and a revolutionary programme. Just as the opportunity existed for the miners to defeat Thatcher so the opportunity existed to defeat Hattersley and Kinnock. Indeed, this was not an optional extra. If the right in the unions and the Labour Party were not defeated and ousted, then it would be the left who would be ousted. In Lenin’s phrase it was merely a question of "who would do it – or to whom would it be done?" There was no third way.
Scargill eventually split from Labour, many years later, when the troops who could have formed a mass party had long gone. During the strike, to the militants who could see how rotten the Labour leadership was under "Judas Kinnock" (as militants called him), Scargill repeated that the "NUM was their party". Behind this syndicalist phrase-mongering, he concealed an actual unity with Labour based on the illusion that the NUM party could one day transform the Labour Party. Always and everywhere, he excluded the idea of a new, revolutionary party.

The revolutionary communist starts from the reality of the class struggle and outlines a strategy capable of taking it forward to a struggle against the system itself. The two are directly connected by life; the job of the revolutionary agitator is to convince thousands to act on that connection. Where the bureaucrats preached sectionalism, we fought for active solidarity. Where the bureaucrats left each union leader free to do what they liked, we sought to organise the rank and file against those bureaucrats so that class interest prevailed over sectional interest. Where the bureaucrats preached obedience to the anti-union laws, we strove to rally the class to a general strike to smash them, a general strike that would pave the way to the victory of the miners and many other workers besides. Where the bureaucrats preached loyalty to a Labour Party that was siding with the police, we urged the building of a new working class party to fight the Labour traitors. And where the bureaucrats bemoaned picket line violence, we fought to organise the self-defence of those pickets so that their impact against both police and scabs could be maximised.

Above all, revolutionary policy meant that, when Scargill stayed silent about the backsliding of elements within his own union, and about the treachery of the TUC leaders, the revolutionaries had to tell the workers the truth.

To argue these things was not to ignore the daily round of small-scale tactical decisions that are posed by any strike. Such details are vital to victory, but they are not the deciding factor, especially when the ruling class had set out to win a strategic victory over the entire class by defeating its recognised vanguard. The deciding factor is politics, and the politics of revolutionary communism were the key to defeating the ruling class onslaught on the miners, an onslaught that they had been preparing for at least ten years.

The state prepares for class war

Thatcher’s war plan was predicated on two documents drawn up by two of her key allies. The first was a pamphlet by Keith Joseph called Solving the union problem is the key to Britain’s recovery, which set out the case for irreversibly shifting the balance of class forces away from "the militants" and towards the bosses by "changing the framework, the rules of the game".

The new rules were introduced not as a single package (the mistake Heath had made) but as a series of legislative measures, normally introduced once every two years, which, in their totality, made effective trade unionism unlawful. Thatcher’s success in this regard was to give us the most draconian range of anti-union laws in the western world, laws that Blair has carefully preserved.

However, changing the legal framework could not be done without undermining the capacity of the union movement to resist those changes. Here, Thatcher drew on a document that became known as the Ridley Plan, named after one of her closest acolytes, Nicholas Ridley. Once again, learning from the mistakes of Heath, the idea behind Ridley’s plan was to ensure that the potential for generalised resistance to the Tory attacks was minimised. Workers would be taken on one section at a time. The issues would be apparently purely economic sectional ones and, in each case, the ground would be carefully prepared in advance. This meant dividing the working class by temporarily buying some sections off, building up supplies to outlast strikes, and ensuring that the state machine was reorganised in order to carry through brutal repression where need be.

At the very heart of the Ridley Plan, was taking on and destroying the National Union of Mineworkers. Of course, the Tories’ hatred of the NUM was fuelled by the humiliation the party had suffered at the hands of the union in both 1972 and 1974, but there was more to it than that.

Harold Macmillan, Tory leader in the early 1960s, once referred to the miners as the guards’ regiment of the working class. That was how they were regarded by the entire labour movement, especially after their stunning victories of the 1970s. They were the vanguard, the section to which all others looked for a lead. Smashing the NUM would constitute a strategic victory over the entire working class. That was exactly Thatcher’s aim.

Ridley’s strategy was geared to mobilising all the resources necessary to achieve such a victory. From 1979 on, the Tories, at a ridiculous cost to the public purse and in total defiance of their stated economic policies, spent millions building up coal stocks as well as shifting more and more energy production to nuclear power stations. There would be no power cuts or three-day working weeks (as there had been under Heath) if the miners struck.

At the level of the state, the police were reorganised into a national strike breaking force, so that officers from different regions could be deployed, in military style operations, wherever there were mass pickets. To co-ordinate this operation, the National Reporting Centre, directly accountable to Thatcher and run by the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) was established. In the context of a strike, Britain would, effectively, become a police state, without the government having to declare a state of emergency. At the same time, the weaponry available to the police was improved and increased.

In September 1983, Ian MacGregor, an American industrialist who had recently helped Michael Edwardes slash jobs, victimise militants and destroy union organisation in British Leyland, was appointed chair of British Coal. He was a close personal friend of Thatcher’s and has subsequently admitted that he was appointed by her to take on and defeat the NUM, to savage the industry and prepare it for privatisation. The only issue, he said, was when to do it. The launch of the fight was an "exercise in timing".

The last element of the Ridley Plan was to ensure that the miners would be isolated. This was achieved in two ways. First, by taking on and defeating other key sectors of the class. A series of defeats for the unions would, the Tories rightly reasoned, sap morale and undermine the potential for widespread solidarity action, especially if such action was now illegal under the anti-union laws. Car workers in 1979, steel workers in 1980, rail workers and civil servants in 1982 and the print unions in 1983, were all defeated. In each case, their strikes were left isolated by the leadership of the labour movement, which was shifting ever more to the right.

At the same time, the Tories started to cultivate sections of the union bureaucracy who were open to actual organised scabbing. In Frank Chapple of the electricians (and his successor Eric Hammond) and in Gavin Laird of the AUEW, they found just such allies. The Tories also began to look for allies in the NUM itself, in the "moderate" areas, that is, those that had enjoyed huge pay rises thanks to productivity deals and who had voted against national strikes in three ballots prior to 1984. In Nottinghamshire, they found them.

Only when each of these components of the Ridley Plan was in place did Thatcher give the order for the opening shot of the war against the enemy within to be fired. Indeed, she showed she was not afraid to retreat until she was ready. In 1981, a series of pit closures was announced in South Wales and in Kent. The announcements were met by rolling strikes in these areas that threatened to go national. Coal stocks were low. The police were not ready. The scabs hadn’t been organised. Thatcher ordered a tactical retreat and announced that she was intervening to keep the pits open!

By this time, Arthur Scargill, a left wing Yorkshire leader, had succeeded Joe Gormley, beating the right wing candidate hands down. Scargill had been personally responsible for organising the hugely effective flying pickets in the 1972 strike and was regarded by the entire ruling class as their public enemy number one. He made it clear that he expected there to be a fight to the death with Thatcher.

Unlike the Tories and their class, Scargill did not have the undivided backing of the labour movement. Indeed, the majority of the TUC General Council hated him. The Labour Party leaders regarded him as a dangerous liability. Nor did he himself have any equivalent of the Ridley Plan, no strategy for putting the entire labour movement on a war footing for the battle that was about to commence. Of course, he made sensible precautions to preserve union funds from the courts and launched a propaganda campaign to prepare miners for the fight that was coming and so on. But all his preparations were based on the idea that the miners, and the miners alone, could and would defeat Thatcher, bring her down and restore the glory days of 1974. The problem was, 1974 was a distant memory and, in between, many things, not least the fighting organisations in the workplaces, had changed dramatically.

So, in 1981, although Scargill could claim to have won round one, the contest had not really started as far as Thatcher was concerned. Only after her military victory over Argentina in the South Atlantic and her massive election victory in Britain in 1983, was she ready. The Ridley Plan could now be put into operation against the miners. In early 1984 The Economist magazine hinted at what was to come:

"For three years the government has been afraid of tackling its biggest industrial headache – the coal mines. Now is the time."

The fight for a national strike

On 1 March, 1984, the Coal Board announced the closure of Cortonwood Colliery in Yorkshire. Scargill had argued that MacGregor’s plan was to launch a huge pit closure programme – beginning with 20 designated "uneconomic pits", but going on to close down 70, with around 70,000 job losses.

Within three days of the announcement of its closure Cortonwood was on strike. Within two days the whole of Yorkshire was out. Pickets were sent to other areas and most responded. Scotland, South Wales, Kent, the North East and North Derbyshire were soon on all out strike.

Throughout the Midlands, the action was patchy. In Nottinghamshire, the right wing began to hit back with calls for a national ballot if there were to be a national strike. The militants answered this wavering with more pickets.

The battle line had been drawn and it was crystal clear that the call for a national ballot coming from the right wing of the NUM executive was a way of avoiding a fight. The NUM had an old rule that stipulated that there had to be a 55 per cent majority in a ballot (as opposed to a simple majority) for a strike to take place. In two ballots, Scargill had won a majority just short of 55 per cent and as a result no strikes had taken place.

With a rolling strike underway, a return to work in order to have a ballot would have been a disaster. The momentum of the struggle would have been lost and pits would have been closed while the ballot was underway. The rolling strike, bringing out each area and then sanctioning the action and co-ordinating it nationally via the executive was, under the circumstances, the correct way to go forward.

Although anything else would have meant a return to work, on its own, this strategy, based on Rule 41 of the NUM rule book, was not enough to win the campaign for a national strike. A national strike needed a national decision and that could only be won by taking the fight to the right wing leaders in the Midlands. It meant using the weapon of workers’ democracy against those leaders. But Scargill and his two closest allies in the NUM – Peter Heathfield and Mick McGahey (a left Labour and a Communist Party member respectively) – failed to utilise the weapon of workers’ democracy in order to make the strike truly national.

Firstly, the NUM executive refused to call a national strike. Their motive was to avoid getting bogged down in a protracted ballot procedure but, while the motive was good, the decision was bad. What they did instead was to announce that it was up to the regions themselves whether or not to strike.

This effectively "legalised" the right wing leaders’ campaign, in the non-striking areas, against any strike action at all, unless sanctioned by a national ballot. It also meant that many Midlands miners believed, at first, that they were not scabbing, because their region had not called them out. This was the excuse they were able to shout at the mass pickets who were increasingly being herded behind impenetrable police lines. Of course, the most class conscious miners in these areas supported the strike, but they had no weapon beyond arguing that "picket lines mean don’t cross" to win over their workmates.

It was a fatal mistake that allowed the lines of division inside the NUM itself to harden. Had the executive called a national strike from the outset, it would have deprived the right of this opportunity and ensured that the NUM loyalism which was still strong even in the "moderate" areas, especially Nottinghamshire, could have led to more widespread action. The reason the executive held back from this stemmed from one of the most sacred tenets of the trade union bureaucracy, never interfere on someone else’s patch.

Normally this means not interfering in the affairs of another union by appealing to the members over the heads of the leaders of that union. This is the unforgivable sin. Inside the NUM, however, because it was a federation, this tenet also applied to the regional bureaucracies themselves. The NUM was born out of a series of regional unions. Indeed, it first came together as the Miners Federation of Great Britain. Those regional bureaucracies were entrenched, jealous of their own specific power base, and operated for much of the time as separate entities.

Scargill himself had played this regional power game. During the 1981 closure crisis, he held back from bringing Yorkshire out on strike alongside South Wales and Kent, despite Yorkshire having voted by an 86 per cent majority to strike, because, as yet, no closures had been announced in that region. This led to rancorous divisions between the regions that treacherous South Welsh NUM leaders were able to use towards the end of the Great Strike to engineer the return to work with no settlement.

This was the context in which the strike began. The NUM leaders nationally would not risk openly challenging the right wing regional leaders in the Midlands. So, men like Jack Jones in Leicester called on his members to cross picket lines, while Ray Chadburn in Nottinghamshire urged his men to vote no to a strike in a regional ballot. At this point, these men had ceased to be representatives of the NUM. No matter what their members had voted for locally, the union, nationally, was on strike. The overwhelming majority of NUM members were on strike. The line had been drawn and Jones and Chadburn , trailblazers for the scab union that followed, were betraying the union. They needed to be fought. Scargill should have said clearly that he stood with the men on strike in the Midlands, not with the leaders sabotaging the strike. But the bureaucratic regard for federalism inside the union meant that they were able to conduct their anti-strike campaign free from restraint, at least publicly.

This was a fatal mistake by the leadership of the strike. In the battle for a national strike, it meant that a whole month was lost. That month was critical because it allowed the right wing, with unprecedented media support, to whip up hysteria over the lack of "democracy" and the necessity of a ballot.

In the early days of the strike, there were large numbers of miners in favour of action in Nottinghamshire as well as in some of the smaller "moderate" areas, like Lancashire and Leicestershire. At Notts pits like Cresswell, 395 voted to strike, 488 against. At Ollerton, where the police had staged a massive show of strength against the pickets, 335 voted for action, 681 against. These figures show that there was a big enough minority in the "moderate" areas to guarantee that the call for a national strike could be won in every pit.

The key was to link up with the striking minority in those areas and get representatives of the striking miners to address pithead meetings at every colliery. It was critical to create an alternative, democratic means for deciding on the strike, where the opponents and waverers could be confronted and convinced. This was particularly important through March and April when the entire strike was dominated by the question of the ballot. The press were running a virulent pro-scab campaign throughout this period and access to pits that were still working was becoming increasingly difficult because of the police operation against pickets.

Nottinghamshire, in particular, was becoming a no-go area for pickets as the National Reporting Centre deployed road blocks, roving picket busting squads and massed ranks of police at working collieries to batter any pickets that did get through, resulting in the tragic death of a young striker, David Jones, early in the dispute. In one incident, cars carrying Kent miners bound for Nottinghamshire were stopped and turned back at the Dartford Tunnel near London. In all, some 10,000 police were used as scab protectors and a total of 167,000 people were turned away from the county at road blocks. The Attorney General ruled that such limits on freedom of movement were perfectly legal.

Of course, all of this should have been met by organised picket defence and, in part, it was, but to break the strikebreakers more than this was needed. The militants needed to get to the pitheads to call mass meetings. As Workers Power argued at the time:

"The NEC must organise for pithead meetings to be held in every colliery in every coalfield. They must hear speakers from the areas that are immediately under MacGregor’s axe. They should hear from workers taking action in support of the miners. All NEC members, and the National President in particular, should address mass rallies – most vitally in the Midlands – to urge maximum support for the NEC’s call [for a national strike] ... At pithead meetings a show of hands should precede the constitutionally prescribed ballot. These should be organised in the shortest possible time. Days not weeks." (5 April 1984).

The NUM leadership did not follow this course. Instead, the leadership convened a national delegate conference on 19 April which finally declared the strike national and ordered the Notts miners and others to stop work. This was far less effective than the pithead mass meeting strategy we proposed. But, once the conference made its decision, it was necessary to enforce it.

At this stage, it was necessary to show to the then large minority of NUM members in the Midlands areas who did abide by the conference decision that the union, including the officials in the "moderate" areas, was deadly serious. Every member who scabbed was now in breach of union policy and should have been disciplined. At this point, the hard scabs were still disorganised and loyalty to the NUM was still very strong.

Once again, however, the NUM leadership preferred a half-measure. They agreed to a new rule giving them the option to discipline the scabs, but they did not enforce it. This gave the hard right scabs the chance to organise which immediate expulsion would have denied them. They were now backed by key ruling class figures, like David Hart, who poured money in to help them organise. Together with a man called Chris Butcher, now thankfully a broken man, then a scab herder who called himself Silver Birch, he financed the setting up of the Nottingham Working Miners Committee. Appropriately conceived in Hart’s Claridges hotel suite, it met with warm approval from Thatcher and she gave it a guaranteed future, with financial backing (via businessmen) and the promise of sole negotiating rights in the areas it controlled. It went on to become a fully-fledged breakaway union, the Union of Democratic Mineworkers (UDM), an organisation founded for the sole purpose of scabbing.

Over the course of the next months, the Tories were not only able to use the huge coal stocks they had built up to keep the country free of power cuts but were also able to rely on scabs to keep the coal coming, and they had now engineered a split in the union itself. A mounting irony now attended the miners’ chant, "the miners united will never be defeated."

The only way now was to shut down British industry by winning the solidarity of workers in power generation, transport and heavy industry. The Tories had the coal but, if they could not move it, or use it, what good would it do them? If the miners succeeded in the battle for solidarity action, then, despite the scabs, victory was still possible. Thus, a second phase of the Great Strike began.

The battle to close down industry

Anyone who looked at the situation in Britain in 1984 should have been able to see that it would not be possible simply to repeat the tactics which brought the miners their famous victories in 1972 and 1974. Much had happened in the intervening ten years. In 1982, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) ordered the rail drivers’ union, ASLEF, to suspend its industrial action, accept a rotten sell out hatched between the TUC’s then leader, Len Murray, and British Rail or else face being cast out of the TUC.

In 1983, the print union, the NGA, went into dispute at the Stockport Messenger, a small printing plant run by a pioneer Thatcherite union-busting employer, Eddy Shah. The police were vicious and the bosses used every weapon the anti-union laws had given them. The TUC, at first, huffed and puffed about support but then it caved in and ordered the NGA to surrender, prompting Thatcher, in words heavy with sarcasm, to say of Len Murray, "I welcome the gracious action of the General Secretary of the TUC." Later, Murray claimed, quite possibly truthfully, that the NGA leaders themselves had pleaded with him to find them a way out of the strike.

In early 1984, Thatcher launched another vicious provocation and banned trade unions at the government’s listening station, GCHQ, on the grounds of "national security". The workers there voted to fight but, again, the TUC surrendered without a blow being struck, and the first major attempt to forcibly de-unionise an entire workforce succeeded.

No wonder Scargill and the militant miners were determined not to let the TUC get their hands on the strike. As the section of British workers most educated in their own union’s history, they also remembered the strike of 1926, when the TUC, having called off the general strike after nine days, left the miners to go down to defeat after fighting alone for six months. They rightly feared that the TUC would intervene in the strike only to rob them of the fruits of victory. The influential bosses’ magazine, The Economist, showed that it, too, had the same measure of Murray and Co:

"Already the TUC has offered Mr Scargill its collective embrace. Thus do the trade union barons declare their interests in a strike, so as to manipulate the eventual settlement. In the 1982 rail strike they offered themselves as honest brokers – enforcing a settlement on the train drivers by threatening withdrawal of collective support… Mediation of this kind would be a second best outcome to a straight defeat of Mr Scargill, which should be tried first." (21 April 1984)

When Scargill told the TUC to keep its nose out, this had total support from the most militant rank and file miners. As one, Robert from South Wales, told Workers Power, "You can forget the TUC and Len Murray."

Understandable, but wrong. Certainly, it was right to deny the TUC any negotiating rights on behalf of the miners. That would have ensured defeat. However, "forgetting" to put the traitors in our midst on the spot weakened the fight for solidarity. To achieve this, the miners needed a twin-track approach. On the one hand, they needed to issue a direct appeal to the rank and file of every other union, especially those under the threat of imminent job losses themselves, to build a common front of struggle around common goals. On the other, it was necessary to demand solidarity from the TUC itself.

Every union leader should have been forced to show their hand: were they with the miners or not? If they were, then they must deliver not just money to the miners’ strike fund but action to bring victory. Certain unions were critical to getting solidarity. Workers in the power stations were facing closures and privatisation themselves. The rail workers, a huge part of whose jobs depended on transporting coal, were also under attack by the Tories. The TGWU could have stopped many of the lorries that were being used to move scab coal. The steel workers, also facing massive closures, could have been drawn into action to defend their own jobs.

Many sections of militants in these industries took great risks to give solidarity to the miners, observing picket lines and escalating local disputes. Rank and file organisation within and between the unions could have spread the action to mass proportions. The right wing leaders, like John Lyons and Eric Hammond, could have been isolated and defeated. The failure to do this led to a repetition of the very problem that had led to the Notts and other Midlands miners not joining the strike. More hesitant, less spontaneously sympathetic, workers in these other industries could claim that they had received no instructions from their unions to honour miners’ picket lines and industry could carry on functioning, protected by the growing militarised police presence at every potential target for the flying pickets.

Once again, Scargill placed his reliance on the left bureaucracy – Ray Buckton of ASLEF, Jimmy Knapp of the NUR (today the RMT) – to get solidarity for the miners. The NUM contacted other unions and asked them not to touch scab coal. Pickets were dispatched to key coking plants and to the major blast furnaces of what was left of the British steel industry. The "Triple Alliance" – coal, steel and rail – was summoned and its leaders solemnly swore to support the miners. In contrast, apart from a weekly phone conversation between Len Murray and Peter Heathfield of the NUM, the TUC was kept out of the whole struggle. This was fine by them, as the TUC’s own minutes smugly recorded in May:

"The general council should be content to wish the NUM well in their struggle and leave it at that unless the NUM made a special request."

Scargill hoped that the NUM itself could get the key unions to stop touching coal. The danger was already evident here, but it took revolutionary communists with an understanding of the bureaucratic caste at the head of the unions to see it, and say it. It meant, of course, fierce arguments with the very best and most militant miners, those influenced by Scargill. In the same paper in which Robert told us to "forget the TUC", Workers Power warned:

"Whilst we need to build class wide action from below we shouldn’t let the TUC get away with total inactivity... If we let them get away with doing nothing they will be free to ‘intervene’ at the first difficult turn of events or whenever they see a weak spot in the struggle." (2 May 1984)

Our warning was proved only too true. In the first place, the Triple Alliance proved to be as much of a broken reed as its historic predecessor in the1920s. Within hours of the steel union, the ISTC, declaring its solemn support for the miners, its right wing leader, Bill Sirs, announced to the press that it was vital to keep steel production going, even if this meant using scab coal. The steel workers, he insisted were not going to be "sacrificed on someone else’s altar."

This should have sparked a call to arms for steel workers to rise up against Sirs, and build a common front to save the interlinked industries, coal and steel, and for the other union leaders to call Sirs to account within the TUC for sabotaging a struggle vital to all the unions.

But Scargill did not launch a public fight against Sirs. Worse, the regional NUM bureaucracies actively sought local deals with ISTC branches at the key plants of Ravenscraig in Scotland, Scunthorpe in Lincolnshire (supplied by coal from South Yorkshire), and Port Talbot and Llanwern in South Wales. The problem was that the NUM confined its proposal to asking steel workers to support the miners. But steel workers had been through a major strike four years earlier, and been defeated. Closing down the steel works for lack of coal threatened their own jobs. Only a clear commitment by miners to unite with steel workers in a common fight to defend the jobs in both industries could have overcome this fear. Such an appeal could have been an inspirational alliance in defence of jobs.

The exact opposite happened. The NUM regional officials in Yorkshire, Scotland and South Wales, struck deals with the steel union to exempt their plants from the call not to use coal. Pickets were called off the steel plants and steel production continued. In Scotland, Mick McGahey announced that the exemption for Ravenscraig was "in the interests of Scotland’s industrial future." This typical reformist, in this case Stalinist, position of putting the national interest before the class struggle, saved neither the Scottish pits nor Ravenscraig, which was closed in 1992, but it did have a terrible effect on the strike. It meant that the key target industry that the NUM had tried to close down, in order to make the strike bite during the spring, when power cuts would be unlikely, failed at the first attempt.

While Scargill himself was furious that the exemptions had been granted, his respect for the federal rules of the NUM meant that he was unable to challenge McGahey in Scotland, Emlyn Williams in South Wales or Jack Taylor in Yorkshire, for their truly fatal error. Despite some later attempts to close the plants by mass picketing, the damage was done and the blast furnaces were getting as much coal as they needed to keep going.

The rail unions did deliver far better solidarity action, with rank and file workers stopping trains carrying coal from the pitheads or from the scab areas. Hardly any coal moved by rail (or by sea, with the Seafarers’ union playing an honourable role) throughout the strike. Particular tribute should be paid to the ASLEF and NUR workers at Coalville, in the heart of Leicestershire, where NUM strikers numbered precisely thirty, the heroic "Dirty Thirty" as they came to be known. At the Coalville freight depot, the rail workers were asked by their unions not to move coal trains on 4 April 1984. They didn’t. No scab coal moved. The workers were then faced with bribery, intimidation, the shipping in of scabs and victimisation. They stood absolutely firm throughout the strike.

What a contrast with their union leaders! Ray Buckton of ASLEF was a case in point. This "left winger" was chair of the TUC during the strike. He had a duty not only to support the miners but also to back up his own members who were loyally taking action to stop scab coal. Instead, echoing the famous TUC line that they had not been asked by the NUM for help, he declared, "We cannot say, what help, if any, we can offer."

The rail union leaders, who had accepted an inflated wage rise on behalf of their members which everyone recognised to be a Tory bribe, refused to call such action. They left the rank and file rail workers to stand alone against an offensive that culminated in the loss of thousands of rail jobs and the privatisation of the network.

Meanwhile, the Tories compensated for the rail workers’ blacking by deploying thousands of lorries, run by anti-union small businessmen, to transport coal.

Part 2 here

Tue 27, May 2008 @ 23:31