Adrian Lee is a solicitor-advocate in London, specialising in criminal defence, and was twice a Conservative parliamentary candidate.
“When I first met Arthur Scargill, he was just a little lad.
Now he is a total a*sehole, full of sh*t, completely mad.
Working miners, working miners!
Crossing picket lines each day (each day) …
Crossing picket lines each day.
“I am just a Nottinghamshire miner, off to do my work each day.
At the end of every week, I get f**king loads of pay.
Working miners, working miners!
Crossing picket lines each day (each day) …
Crossing picket lines each day.
“When I went to work last Christmas, I got extra for my coal.
And the strikers soon discovered, presents can’t be bought with dole.
Working miners, working miners!
Crossing picket lines each day (each day) …
Crossing picket lines each day.”
(“The Working Miners Song.”
Ayre: Bread of Heaven. Warwick University Conservative Association, 1985)
Forty years ago, on 6 March 1984, members of the Yorkshire National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) walked out of Cortonwood Colliery, starting the chain of events that led to the longest and, arguably, most bitter industrial dispute in British history. Ostensibly, about proposed pit closures, the strike was also aimed at toppling the Thatcher Government.
At the conflict’s centre was the unique and unusual personality of Arthur Scargill, President of the NUM 1982-2002. The course of the strike would have been different under another leader. Her late Majesty correctly summed it up when she privately remarked to Times journalist Paul Routledge that the strike was “all about one man”.
Scargill, born on 11 January 1938, the son of a Communist Yorkshire miner and doting Christian mother, left school without qualifications and ended up working at Woolley Colliery. He claimed that his shock at colliery working conditions got him involved in politics, but that might be only partially true.
In 1955, Scargill joined the Young Communist League (YCL), the youth wing of the Soviet-funded Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). He eventually ascended to the YCL’s National Executive Committee and in 1957 attended 6th World Festival of Youth and Students in Moscow. A year later, he attended another Soviet freebie, the Youth Congress of the World Federation of Trades Unions, in Prague.
From his earliest union days, Scargill was ideologically a syndicalist. He advocated direct action, working to rule, passive resistance and strikes. All of these were tactics in the class struggle and preferable to bourgeois notions of electoral politics. Scargill wanted to control the miner’s union and use it to forge revolutionary change by way of strikes and worker’s soviets; “The Parliamentary road to Socialism” was not for him.
Unfortunately, being a Communist in an arena dominated by Gaitskell’s Labour Party did not exactly turbo-charge his union career. So, Scargill dumped the CPGB in 1962 for the Labour-affiliated Co-operative Party. However, he maintained a soft spot for his first love, opposing the Polish independent trades union, Solidarity, and taking money from the USSR for the NUM during the 1984 strike.
Scargill understood the importance of publicity. Austin Mitchell once remarked how frequently he appeared on Yorkshire Television during the strikes of the early Seventies. By the end of the 1972 dispute, he had become a media celebrity, which helped his election as President of the Yorkshire Area in 1974 and National President eight years later.
Ironically, in his private life, he was something of a loner, not enjoying drinking or socialising with colleagues.
As strike leader in 1984-85, Scargill was incompetent, closed-minded, and devoid of tactics or strategy. During the course of the year, he walked into every trap set for him by the National Coal Board (NCB) and the Government. Eric Hammond, a fellow trades union boss as General Secretary of the EETPU (the electricians union), used a World War One analogy, and told the TUC conference in September 1994 that Scargill’s leadership of his members amounted to “lions led by donkeys”.
Jimmy Reid, ex-Communist leader of the the Upper Clyde shipbuilders in the ‘70s, said in 1985: “I criticise Arthur Scargill not for being a militant, but for being a stupid militant.”
Scargill’s mistakes are renowned. Firstly, he called a strike in the Spring, as the weather improved and less coal was required to generate energy. Anyone of average intelligence should have realised that the strikers would have to live without wages for around seven months, until the start of October, when the weather started to deteriorate.
But Scargill, the narcissist, who spoke in third person, with his flat in the Barbican, a taste for luxury cars, and a salary equivalent to £90,000 in today’s value, was too selfish and too busy grandstanding to concern himself with the suffering caused. Anyway, it was always someone else’s fault.
Secondly, he did not have the courage to call a ballot validating the strike. Instead, the Yorkshire NUM relied on a 1981 ballot result. The other areas were then meant to “come out” in solidarity.
Consequently, he divided the NUM into two factions: striking and working miners. Nottinghamshire Area mostly kept on working. Scargill set worker against worker. This resulted in the injury of many miners and the killing of a taxi driver carrying a working miner. It also led to the establishment of the Union of Democratic Mineworkers.
In September 1984, the courts declared the strike illegal under the new union legislation, but still Scargill refused to call a members’ ballot. Again Reid, the Red Clydesider, commented that no working miner could be called a “scab” if a vote on strike action had been denied by the NUM leadership.
(In truth, Scargill had good reason for refusing a vote: he knew that he did not command majority support. He had already lost membership ballots for proposed national strikes in January and October 1982 and in March 1983.)
Thirdly, he was opposed in principle to negotiating with his employers. It is true that he attended many conferences with the NCB, but on every occasion he just wanted to know if his opponents would agree to his terms. In other words, he acted like the Allies demanding unconditional surrender in World War Two. When the NCB said no, the NUM withdrew.
Neil Kinnock, then Labour Leader, remarked that he thought that this attitude was the antithesis of good trades unionism.
Fourthly, Scargill relied on the same tactics he had used in the 1972 and 1974 strikes as an official of Yorkshire Area NUM (and in the Grunwick dispute of 1977). These involved the deployment of flying pickets and “encouraging” solidarity from workers in other industries to boycott coal products.
Scargill still saw himself as the victor of 1972 “Battle of Saltley Gate”. He had on his office wall a Socialist Realist painting portraying him as a Stakanovite hero. He never credited that his opponents had got his measure and were waiting to ambush him when he tried to shut down the Orgreave coking plant.
For all the passion and determination of the NUM’s demagogic leader, and widespread use of violence and intimidation to “convince” fellow miners to support the strike, a year later, in March 1985, they marched back to work defeated. Scargill arranged for his members to walk proudly through the colliery gates behind brass bands, to display the miner’s unbroken spirit.
Unfortunately, it more resembled Alec Guinness’ regiment in The Bridge on the River Kwai, marching into the Japanese prisoner of war camp in their tattered uniforms, whistling Colonel Bogie. Anyone watching the scenes that evening on the news knew that British trades unionism would never be the same again.