Category: Trade Union Reporting
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After only a week of the year long pit dispute Margaret Thatcher had intervened to “stiffen the resolve” of chief constables whom she believed were failing to provide police protection for those miners who wanted to report for work.
Her cabinet papers for 1984 reveal that she demanded action after becoming “deeply disturbed” at the way the National Union of Mineworkers had resorted so quickly to unlawful mass picketing to intimidate those men who had volunteered to work normally.
Within four days of her intervention police were turning back flying pickets from Yorkshire who were heading south on the motorway to coalfields in the Midlands and Nottinghamshire. Striking miners from Kent were being turned back at the Dartford Tunnel.
In another move behind the scenes she put pressure on the government’s top law officers, the Lord Chancellor Lord Hailsham and the Attorney General Sir Michael Havers, after being told that magistrates in Rotherham and Mansfield were “dragging their feet” in dealing with cases involving pickets arrested for pit head violence.
Two secret letters from the Lord Chancellor, dated May 1984, disclose private concern within the Nottinghamshire constabulary about the “quality of the evidence” police officers were presenting to the courts.
Mrs Thatcher’s impatience at the slow process in the courts led to repeated interventions. She believed the impression had been created that the miners’ president Arthur Scargill was being allowed to operate “above the law” in pursuing the pit strike.
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South Yorkshire Police, the force that faced the most violent picketing during the 1984-5 miners’ strike, forged a close working relationship with the Prime Minister and the government’s law officers.
Four months into the strike, the South Yorkshire Chief Constable, the late Peter Wright, was given secret authorisation to go on incurring the additional cost of bringing in police reinforcements to help ensure the resumption of coke deliveries during what became known as the “Battle of Orgreave”.
Mrs Thatcher told the Home Office to give the South Yorkshire force “every support”; in the corner of one document is her hand-written note asking: “Can we provide the funds direct?”
Wright’s tactics in commanding the massive police operation to prevent mass picketing outside the British Steel Corporation’s coking plant at Orgreave had been condemned by the South Yorkshire County Council and its Labour majority on the South Yorkshire Police Authority which both supported the National Union of Mineworkers.
After the county council passed a resolution calling for the Orgreave coke depot to be closed, the police authority withdrew Wright’s discretion to spend up to £2,000 without prior authority; it said he could not incur any expenditure without authority.
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A declaration of a state of emergency and possible use of the armed forces were just two of the options considered by the government when dockers stopped work in support of mineworkers during the 1984-5 pit strike. But what gave Margaret Thatcher the greatest personal re-assurance was the elaborate and secret action taken in the generating stations to guarantee uninterrupted power supplies.
At a Downing Street meeting in late July 1984, Sir Walter Marshall, chairman of the Central Electricity Generation Board, described to the Prime Minister the type of “elaborate subterfuge” which he was confident would ensure that power supplies would be guaranteed for a year at least.
He said a safe date for endurance was June 1985 but the generating board’s target had stretched to November 1985, far in advance of Arthur Scargill’s claim that power cuts would take effect from the early winter months of 1984.
Sir Walter’s confident prediction of what almost amounted to indefinite endurance was based on the success of secret moves to increase electricity output at nuclear stations and to convert to burning oil instead of coal. His projection depended on maintaining output in the Nottinghamshire coalfield and the other pits which were still working; “very little else mattered.”
In her memoirs The Downing Street Years, Mrs Thatcher said Sir Walter’s determination to avoid power cuts “raised my spirits enormously.” She explained the significance of his calculation that June 1985 was a safe date for endurance: “We had reached what was for me a very important moment in the history of the strike, though this was something which very few people knew about at the time.”
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Margaret Thatcher must have finally got the measure of Arthur Scargill’s intransigence over pit closures when she read the management’s internal account of the first futile negotiations between the National Union of Mineworkers and the National Coal Board.
Her 1984 cabinet papers include a heavily underlined account of Scargill’s dramatic standoff with the NCB chairman Ian MacGregor eleven weeks into the year-long pit strike.
After the collapse of the talks, held on 23 May 1984, there was an immediate hardening in the advice being given to Mrs Thatcher; she was informed there was no chance of settlement with “a fanatic like Scargill”.
A week later, after the miners’ president had been arrested for obstruction during the Battle of Orgreave, the Secretary of State for Energy Peter Walker told Thatcher “Scargill was aiming at mob rule.”
The previous week Scargill had emerged from the NCB’s headquarters to tell waiting reporters the first round of talks over MacGregor’s demand for the closure of 20 pits with the loss of 20,000 jobs had been “a complete fiasco.”
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Ed Miliband’s first set-piece speech since the worsening disagreement over trade union financing of the Labour Party – and then the House of Commons’ “no” vote to military action against Syria – is likely to dominate news coverage of the annual TUC conference in Bournemouth.
But while the prospect of Miliband having to fraternise with union leaders like Len McCluskey (Unite) and Paul Kenny (GMB) will command the attention of reporters, photographers and television crews, those journalists with an interest in business and union affairs should not lose sight of looming industrial confrontation in two key public services.
News media coverage will portray the trade unionists’ annual get together (September 8-11), and Miliband’s speech (at 11.30am on September 10), as a dress rehearsal for what some commentators are predicting will be an even sterner test of his leadership later in the month at the annual Labour Party conference in Brighton.
A focus on party politics rather than employment issues will disappoint officials at Congress House. Nonetheless the TUC conference will be an important rallying point for both the Fire Brigades Union and the Communication Workers Union which are both gearing up for industrial disputes which will be fought out via a propaganda blitz in the news media and not just on the industrial front line.
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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