Category: Trade Union Reporting
- Details
A secret Downing Street report into the aftermath of the 1984-5 miners’ strike says that Margaret Thatcher would have been beaten by Arthur Scargill if she had not intervened personally in the first week of the dispute to establish what amounted to a national police force.
The decisive moment was her instruction to the Home Secretary that chief constables had to stiffen their resolve to stop the movement of flying pickets in order to keep the pits open for working miners.
“If that first battle had been lost, the rest would have been academic” says a review into the lessons of the year-long strike that was written in May 1985 and has been released by the National Archives as part of Mrs Thatcher’s cabinet papers for 1985-6.
The report set out the steps being taken to rebuild coal stocks at the power stations to prepare for the possibility of another strike in 1986-7. Mrs Thatcher wrote in the margin of an early draft that it was “too insipid, too little insight”.
But the report does acknowledge how close her “government came to disaster” because ministers had under-estimated the length of time that the miners could be kept out on strike “even on limited supplementary benefit, by a combination of union solidarity and intimidation”.
- Details
Margaret Thatcher was advised by her infamous press secretary Bernard Ingham that there should be “no gloating” by the Conservative government at the end of the year-long miners’ strike.
Her 1985 cabinet papers reveal she regarded the imminent defeat of Arthur Scargill as providing the “best opportunity” for some years to return the coal industry to profitability.
Her optimism reflected the advice she was being given during the closing weeks of the strike: she had received a dramatic forecast of what could be achieved by the so called “MacGregor miracle”.
If the National Coal Board chairman Ian MacGregor was encouraged to cut manpower by 50,000 plus by 1990, coal could become highly competitive and be “winning new business from gas and oil”.
“The immediate human costs would be large, but so would the corresponding gains in competitiveness,” was the upbeat assessment of one of her Downing Street advisers.
By reducing deep-mined production to 70 million tons a year, the “MacGregor miracle” would enable the NCB to deliver coal to inland power stations for “as much as £10 per ton less than imported coal”.
- Details
The Thatcher Foundation is attempting to rewrite the history of her role in the 1984-85 miners’ strike and is seeking to refute evidence implicating the former Prime Minister in covering up the true extent of the planned pit closures.
To support its case, the Foundation has challenged the accuracy of my analysis of her 1984 cabinet papers that was broadcast by the BBC and published by the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom.
I believed the most important document released by the National Archives in January 2014 was a secret Downing Street document, dated 15 September 1983, which stated that Ian MacGregor “had it in mind over the three years 1983-85 that a further 75 pits would be closed”.
To me this was evidence that Margaret Thatcher misled the country throughout the strike when she and her ministers insisted time and again that MacGregor and the government had only ever considered closing 20 pits.
But the Thatcher Foundation (www.margaretthatcher.org) says the document “established nothing of the kind”: MacGregor did not have a secret hit list of pits for closure and the Prime Minister had not given her approval.
In its analysis of the 1984 cabinet papers, the Foundation has challenged not only my findings but also the conclusions of many other observers, including Labour MPs and the National Union of Mineworkers; they agree with my conclusion that MacGregor’s secret advice in September 1983 that he “had it in mind” to close 75 pits was a highly accurate indication of the restructuring he intended to carry out as chairman of the National Coal Board.
- Details
Being asked to apologise for the BBC’s reporting thirty years ago of the 1984-5 pit strike comes as no surprise to the journalists who covered the most divisive industrial dispute of post-war Britain.
To this day miners who took part in the strike accuse the BBC and the rest of the main stream news media of siding with Margaret Thatcher during the year-long struggle in which the South Wales coalfield played a pivotal role.
It was perhaps only to be expected that the bitterness of the National Union of Mineworkers’ defeat at the hands of Mrs Thatcher should resurface during my lecture hosted by Cardiff University (18.11.2014), as it has during other talks I have given in the once mighty coalfields.
Former miners and their supporters from the wider trade union movement accuse journalists of failing to report the true extent of what they contend was police brutality on the picket line and for doing too little to highlight family hardship and for not recognising that the pit villages were in a fight to the finish to maintain the mining communities.
I have already acknowledged my own soul searching: in the final months of the strike broadcasters did become what I call the cheer leaders for the return to work.
- Details
After analysing the contradictions and cover-ups exposed in Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet papers about the 1984-5 pit dispute, the National Union of Mineworkers has called for “a full, transparent and open debate” about her government’s tactics during the strike.
While secret information about the role of the police and security services continues to be withheld from public scrutiny, the union says the men and families affected by the strike will never be able to secure the full truth about the extent of the government’s involvement.
But the consequences of the action taken by Mrs Thatcher and her ministers were undeniable and the time had come for an explanation as to why her government saw fit to “sustain a vicious and brutal attack on hundreds of thousands of tax-paying, law-abiding citizens”.
Eye-witness statements from strikers, police reports and parliamentary answers have been used with great effect to give added insight to the revelations contained in the cabinet office records.
When pieced together, along with data collected under Freedom of Information and from documents held by the Margaret Thatcher Foundation, the NUM has produced a compelling account of secret measures taken by both the government and the National Coal Board during the year-long stoppage.
Subcategories
40-year-old secret is out: coal board chiefs were Arthur Scargill's source of secret "hit list" for pit closures Article Count: 0
A tantalising secret has finally been revealed about the source of a controversial “hit list” for pit closures which became a critical issue in the year-long miners’ strike of 1984.
Throughout the long dispute and its bitter aftermath, Arthur Scargill prided himself on his ability to obtain confidential documents from high-level sources about the future of the coal industry.
He always claimed the information he had received proved the accuracy of his predictions about the true intentions of Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her ministers.
For 40 years Scargill refused to reveal either the source or status of what he declared was a secret plan prepared by the National Coal Board to “butcher” the coal industry.
He changed his mind when invited to speak at recent events to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the strike – and the secret he revealed was that the source of the leak was the then deputy chairman of the coal board.
Scargill was determined to use speeches commemorating the strike’s 40th anniversary as an opportunity to correct what he said were myths and lies perpetuated by the news media and historians.
In seeking to set the record straight, he told me he was anxious to unlock some of the secrets about those with inside knowledge who had supplied him with confidential information about what was afoot.
Perhaps the greatest unresolved mystery was the origin of the “hit list” which Scargill used to great effect to warn that thousands of miners’ jobs were at risk.
The timeline started in November 1982, shortly after his election as President of the National Union of Mineworkers and well before the start of the strike, when he told a news conference that he had been given a confidential report indicating that “75 short life” collieries had been earmarked for closure.
Journalists who had crowded into the union’s former London headquarters in Euston Road were waiting to hear Mr Scargill’s response to a crushing ballot defeat.
In what newspapers had already dubbed a personal humiliation for the union’s newly elected president, miners had voted in a pit head ballot against an NUM recommendation to reject an 8.5 per cent pay offer and to endorse industrial action over future pit closures.
To the surprise of the media pack, Scargill seized the agenda by holding up what he said was a copy of a secret document on plans for a drastic cut back in the mining industry.
A coal board briefing prepared in March indicated that “75 short-life pits” would close within the next five years.
Scargill chose a 40th anniversary rally at Goldthorpe miners’ welfare in South Yorkshire (29.6.2024) to reveal “certain important facts” about the lead-up to the union’s “historic struggle”.
He said that during the early summer of 1982, in his first months as NUM President, he was told – “obviously in great confidence” – by the board’s director of public relations, Geoff Kirk, that the NCB and the Tory government intended to launch a pit closure programme in the autumn of 1982.
“On the basis of our union’s experience and without betraying the source of my information, I warned that a pit closure attack on our industry was looming.
“On the evening of 1st November 1982, Don Loney, the NUM chief executive officer, came to my office with a sealed package.
“He said it had been given to him by John Mills, the NCB deputy chairman, to hand to me privately. I opened it and read it.
“The following morning, 2nd November, I reported to a meeting of the NUM national executive committee that I had been handed documents which showed that the coal board intended:
“A. To close 30 pits which were described as uneconomic, and according to the board accounted for operating losses exceeding £200 million.
“B. To close 75 short-life collieries (including Coegnant in South Wales, which had already been closed).
“There was a note: included in the list of short-life collieries were 10 of the uneconomic pits. The total number of threatened pits was 95.”
In his report to that day to the executive committee, he said the documents were dated March 1982, eight months earlier, at a time when the board had been denying that there was any “hit list” or closure plan.
Once the executive committee finished its meeting, Scargill met journalists waiting for his briefing on the ballot defeat only to find that he succeeded in upstaging their hostile questions by what I later said on BBC Radio was a master class in how to seize the news agenda.
In my book, Strikes and the Media (1986), I explained that Mr Scargill’s sense of timing can best be appreciated by listening to a tape recording of his news conference.
“In front of him are the outstretched microphones of the radio and television reporters, the newspaper cameramen and the journalists with their notebooks.
“At the precise moment that he announces he has some secret information, he holds up the document in his right hand, just beside his face, ready for the instant pictures for the television and the press.
“On the tape the clicking of the flashlights can be heard coming precisely on cue. Next day Fleet Street gave its account of the news conference:
“Scargill had pulled out a white rabbit, a coal board briefing on pit closures. It was his only shot.” (Daily Mail, 3 November 1982)
I concluded this was proof if proof was needed that Scargill thrived on confrontation with the news media:
“The incident demonstrates to the full Scargill’s resilience and ingenuity. He never seemed daunted on entering a room packed with journalists, baying like hounds...”
Perhaps the most significant historical footnote regarding the revelation about the source of the secret document was that it illustrated the unease within the coal board’s management over Mrs Thatcher’s determination to downsize the coal industry.
The briefing papers had been prepared by the board for the Monopolies Commission and the board’s hierarchy knew the writing was on the wall.
Mrs Thatcher was ready to seize the opportunity to slash the coal industry’s losses – an opportunity which had arisen with the imminent departure of the then board chairman Sir Derek Ezra and the outgoing NUM President Joe Gormley.
The two men had worked behind the scenes to do all they could to sustain the coal industry, but the management knew that era of co-operation was about to change with the expected appointment as chairman of Ian MacGregor.
He was quite prepared to take on the trade unions, as he had done during the action he had taken to slim down the British Steel Corporation.
The two coal board chiefs named by Scargill as the source of leaks – public relations director Geoff Kirk and deputy chairman John Mills – were both known to have great sympathy for mining communities.
Perhaps they were hoping that by taking Scargill into their confidence there was a possibility the industry might be able to continue the behind-the-scenes management-union co-operation that had been so effective in the past.
As events would demonstrate there was never any likelihood in reality of replicating the cordial relationships of the Ezra-Gormley era.
Mrs Thatcher was determined to smash the consensus that had developed within the nationalised industries; Ian MacGregor had no intention of becoming a patsy for the trade unions; and Scargill would not waver in a lifelong commitment to refuse to accept pit closures unless coal stocks had been exhausted.
Illustrations: Morning Star (3.11.1982); London Evening Standard (2.11.1982); News Lines (3.11.1982); Daily Mail (3.11.1982).
Nicholas Jones presents "The Art of Class War", a look back at the 1984-85 miners' strike through the eyes of newspaper cartoonists, at the South Yorkshire Festival on Sunday 18 August, Unison Room, Wortley Hall, Sheffield