The Enemy Within

Today is the fortieth anniversary of the end of the 1984-5 miners’ strike. Living where I do, this resonates strongly with me, so it seems appropriate to post this piece, which I originally wrote some years ago.

Advisory: contains strong political opinions.

‘Galtieri and the Argentinians were the enemy without. Arthur Scargill and the miners are the enemy within.’

Not just Arthur Scargill, note, that supposed megalomaniac plotting to bring down his democratically elected government. Margaret Thatcher’s notorious pronouncement branded by inclusion the rank and file, the miners themselves, all of them. The insult still rankles bitterly throughout the former mining areas of Britain. The prime minister thought, or at least said, that the miners were traitors to their country, enemies on a par with the recently defeated Argentinians. The miners thought that they were fighting desperately to keep their jobs and head off the destruction of their communities, and suffering considerable privation and intimidation in the process.

So how real was the threat to democracy? If the miners’ strike had brought down the Thatcher government would it have led to a revolution, with Arthur Scargill emerging as führer? Let’s step back a little from the reds-under-the-bed hysteria whipped up back then by the government and the media.

That hysteria was fuelled by the fact that a miners’ strike had already brought down one Tory government, the Heath administration, in 1974. At least, that’s how it was put, and often still is, but a look at the actual facts quickly reveals that it wasn’t quite like that. When the National Union of Mineworkers called a national strike, Edward Heath called a snap election with the slogan ‘Who governs Britain?’, in the expectation of a vote of confidence for the government to tell the miners what they could do with their high-handed troublemaking.

It didn’t happen. The result was a hung parliament, and the government that was eventually formed was a Labour one. Heath was succeeded not by any red-eyed, mouth-foaming revolutionary but by Harold Wilson, who came to power by the normal process of free democratic election. The miners didn’t remove Heath from office: the electorate did. No one forced them. There were no miners picketing the polls to intimidate voters into voting Labour. They could have shown the hostility to the miners and their union that the media insisted was the prevailing mood by voting Heath back in, but they didn’t. Heath was brought down more by shooting himself in the foot than by the miners.

In more recent years the fashionable interpretation of the 1984-5 strike has changed to that of short-sighted, rigidly doctrinaire dinosaurs standing in the way of inevitable and much-needed progress. It was necessary to close the pits, it is said: they were outdated, uneconomic and required wasteful subsidies to keep them going. Unfortunately for that argument, economic studies have calculated that the cost to the nation in terms of benefits and loss of taxes (from people who couldn’t pay them because they had no jobs) has been considerably more than that of subsidising the pits would have been. This is not the wisdom of hindsight. It was predicted at the time, but was dismissed. It didn’t suit Thatcher’s agenda. The idea of investing in the pits to make them more efficient suited it even less.

So what was that agenda? Thatcher, whose university nickname was Snobby Roberts, seems to have held a deep loathing and contempt for the ordinary working people of this country. That such people should have had a hand in ‘bringing down’ a Tory government was intolerable to her, all the more so since in 1974 she had urged Heath to stand firm and fight the miners to the finish. And that’s what she was going to do. She was burning for revenge, and she was determined to destroy the unions, in particular the most powerful and troublesome of them, the NUM. No matter who got hurt in the process.

Draconian and far-reaching legislation to make it as difficult as possible to strike without actually outlawing the act altogether wasn’t enough for her. The working people had got above themselves and must be shown their place. A lesson must be taught, one that would break the heart and knock the stuffing out of the entire union movement. The NUM was the obvious target.

Coal was stockpiled. A new chairman was appointed to the National Coal Board, one with a reputation for ruthless, confrontational management and for union-bashing. A sweeping programme of pit closures was announced, in the full knowledge and expectation that it would trigger a strike. Having done all that she could to ensure that the NUM would lose a confrontation, Thatcher calculatedly provoked it into one. And the NUM duly obliged, although it is hard to see what alternative it had other than to roll over and meekly accept mass unemployment for its members. As Mick McGahey, NUM vice-president during the strike, put it many years later, ‘I’ve often been asked the question: had the miners any alternative in 1984? Yes, they had. The miners could have capitulated. Scargill, Heathfield and McGahey could have said: “There you are, walk over the top of us.”’ Compromise and negotiation were not on Thatcher’s agenda. She was out to destroy, not to tame.

Far from being a subversive attack on democracy or even a blinkered protest against the inevitable, the miners’ strike was their reaction, the only one available to them, to a deliberate and vindictive assault on them and their union by their own democratically elected government, whose leader had promised to bring peace and harmony to the country. They were fighting, backs to the wall, for their livelihoods and for the survival of their communities, which they knew would be devastated if the pits closed.

There is no need to go into detail about the sufferings of the miners and their families, starved of cash by the government’s sequestration of the NUM’s funds, the many reported instances of intimidating and provocative behaviour by the police culminating in the appalling violence at Orgreave, or the orchestrated chorus of hostile propaganda in the Tory-dominated media painting the conflict as a struggle to defend democracy against red dictatorship. Distressing though those things were to anyone with a social conscience, the lasting significance of the strike is that the miners suffered a humiliating defeat, returning to work on the government’s terms with no settlement. The dice had been loaded to make sure that they lost, and in the end they were more or less starved into submission.

The pits were closed, even those in the Midlands that had stayed open throughout the strike, thus contributing to its failure, and whose workers were sadly disappointed if they had hoped for any gratitude from the government. Some of the mines that were closed were still profitable. Some had been modernised quite recently. That didn’t save them in the face of the government’s determination to destroy the industry and its union with it.

Whole communities were left with virtually no employment. And no assistance, financial or otherwise, for regeneration was forthcoming. They were abandoned, left to rot. The lesson was rammed down the throats of the union movement. This government will do what it likes to you, and you are powerless to do anything about it. Step out of line and you will be punished.

And the mines were only the start. Over the succeeding years the industrial and manufacturing heart of Britain was ripped out piece by piece, with undertaking after undertaking either closed down or sold off to foreign entrepreneurs concerned only with profit and not at all with the welfare or prosperity of the people of this country. With its livelihood taken away, the troublesome industrial working class was effectively all but exterminated, and with the sources of their membership dried up the industrial unions withered. Thatcher’s objective was achieved.

The cost in human suffering has been heavy. In South Wales, for instance, levels of suicide, alcoholism and drug abuse rocketed in the wake of the pit closures, and remained well above the national average for many years. It is doubtful whether Thatcher lost any sleep over this. A woman who was prepared to lay waste to whole swathes of the country to satisfy her own bile and spite, and who counted as a ‘dear friend’ (her own words) a brutal dictator who was responsible for the murder and torture of thousands, was hardly likely to trouble her conscience with the sufferings of people she appears to have regarded as dross, of no significance beyond the trouble they had caused to the ruling and employing classes by daring to fight for a decent standard of living.

Forty years on, the legacy of the miners’ defeat is still with us in the shape of the proliferation of minimum-wage jobs, zero-hours contracts, arbitrary sackings. With no opposition to speak of, employers are free to dictate whatever working conditions they like. They have taken full advantage of that freedom, and rights that the unions spent decades fighting to secure have been eroded. And people in the former mining areas are still mourning the comradeship and close community spirit that faded away after the pits were closed.

Thatcher’s apologists say that she inherited a crippled, collapsing economy that was the laughing stock of Europe and turned it into a strong, prosperous one. In which case it is relevant to ask who is enjoying that prosperity. It is not immediately evident to the increasing numbers who have to work longer and longer hours for effectively less and less money, nor to the thousands who in former times would have been able to buy their own homes but can no longer do so because they don’t have the security of earnings needed to take out a mortgage, and least of all to those who administer or use the food banks, institutions that were unknown before Thatcher’s time. Studies have shown that the average British family’s income in real terms has been falling for years, with no prospect of any improvement in sight. Whoever is prospering, it is not the ordinary people of this country. The divide between rich and poor has been steadily growing ever since Thatcher took office, and continues to grow.

Is it too idealistic to believe that a civilised government’s proper function is to work for the good of the whole nation rather than for the benefit of a favoured few? And are we to understand the word ‘nation’ to mean that favoured few or the population at large? So who was the real enemy within this nation during the miners’ strike?

The spontaneous outbreak of celebrations all over the country when Thatcher’s death was announced, unparalleled by the reaction to any other public figure’s death in living memory, indicates the answer many would give to that question.

Footnote: It could be argued that, in the face of global warming and the need to drastically cut carbon emissions, we should have moved away from coal anyway and started using cleaner forms of power. The argument is valid, but the fact remains that a large proportion of Britain’s power is still produced from coal. The difference is that, instead of giving employment to British workers, we leave our own coal in the ground and import it from abroad, with all the extra cost this entails.