Category: Trade Union Reporting
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Journalists who reported the bitter year-long confrontation between Margaret Thatcher and Arthur Scargill will find they were well and truly duped if they care to examine newly-published cabinet records for 1983 which finally reveal the true extent of secret preparations for a possible miners’ strike.
Worse still the correspondents will realise that for much of the time during the 1984-5 pit dispute they were doing the government’s bidding by speculating about the impact of falling coal stocks and the threat of power cuts.
What the news media did not know at the time was that as early as March 1983 Mrs Thatcher had been assured that so much progress had been made in secretly converting coal fired power stations to oil that the Central Electricity Generating Board was almost on the point of guaranteeing “indefinite endurance”.
Those two words – “indefinite endurance” – meant that however long the pit strike lasted the lights would not go out. Tactically it gave Mrs Thatcher immeasurable strength and helped to explain why her government was only too happy to allow the news media to carry on highlighting Scargill’s dire warnings of disruption to electricity supplies.
Striking miners were not only defeated on the picket line – as a result of unprecedented policing – but also in a highly-effective propaganda war. Journalists never like to find that their reports were based on a misconception but that was certainly the case in the pit dispute when we reported on falling coal stocks and the potential for power cuts.
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Margaret Thatcher’s demolition job on the industrial might of the British trade union movement helped to generate not only an economic revolution but has also contributed to a transformation in the way the news media reports the world of work.
Journalists who covered the big industrial disputes of the Thatcher decade ended up writing themselves out of the script and by the late 1980s financial news from the City of London had increasingly taken the place of reportage about employment issues and union affairs.
Millions of days a year were being lost through strike action during the 1970s – an era of union militancy which culminated in the so called “winter of discontent” of 1978-9 – but by the end of her Premiership stoppages were a fraction of what they had once been.
Slowly but surely the unions’ strike weapon had been emasculated. Strike ballots were required by law; walk-outs were no longer possible on a show of hands in a car park; flying pickets and secondary action had been outlawed; and most importantly of all a union’s assets were at risk if there was “unlawful” action, as the NUM President Arthur Scargill discovered to his cost in the 1984-5 pit dispute.
Scargill, like other union leaders of his era, had grown used under the previous Labour governments of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan to employers giving way but Mrs Thatcher, backed by a largely supportive national press was able to prove that the disputes of the 1980s would be won or lost not just on the picket line but also on the back of public opinion and much of the media’s coverage was turned against the unions.
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One survivor of the Thatcher decade whose voice was not heard reflecting on the death of the former Prime Minister was that of Arthur Scargill, leader of the National Union of Mineworkers during the fateful pit dispute of 1984-5.
Scargill, now 75, has refused all requests to comment on Margaret Thatcher’s Premiership and his epic struggle with her government. However hard the news media might try, the former NUM President has no intention of assisting journalists to put a post-Thatcher spin on the devastation suffered by the mining communities.
His former wife Anne Scargill had no hesitation in describing how she felt "really, really happy" on hearing the news of Lady Thatcher's death: "She has smashed our communities...she was evil...she has closed our manufacturing industry, she has closed our mines; we are short of fuel, she was intent on smashing the trade uions and she in the end smashed the country."
But from the miners' leader himself there has been no reaction. Comments on his name on Twitter were not found to have been verified and it was left to miners' leaders in the former coalfields to defend the strike.
The lack of response on Scargill's part is not unusual. In recent years he has rarely answered reporters’ questions and made a point of not talking about either himself or his health; he does appear occasionally in public at miners’ events and has also been engaged in a protracted court case over his continued use of a union owned flat in London’s Barbican.
I could not help but reflect of Scargill’s absence as I spent two hours on the BBC’s local radio circuit the morning after her death (9.4.2013), giving interviews to the local radio stations serving the former coalfields of Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire. The presenters told their listeners Scargill had rejected all requests for interviews and they asked me why.
Personally I was not at all surprised by Scargill’s response. There was no way he was going to be tempted to dance on Lady Thatcher’s grave because he knew he would be forced to try to defend the strike he led, his union’s crushing defeat and the subsequent devastation of the mining communities.
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Margaret Thatcher’s decade in power resulted in an economic revolution in the United Kingdom...and also changed the face of the British news media. So successful was she in defeating the trade union movements and in privatising the nationalised industries that a band of reporters who had once ruled the roost ended up writing themselves out of the script.
The Lost Tribe: Whatever Happened to Fleet Street’s Industrial Correspondents? is the title of the book I published in 2011 charting the demise of the journalists who had hogged the headlines for decades but who then disappeared almost without trace from the reportage of daily news.
Their downfall was not simply the result of the dramatic decline in the number of all-out strikes but also the corresponding and spectacular growth of the City of London and the emerging dominance of financial news.
Margaret Thatcher’s step-by-step assault on trade union power and the break-up of loss-making nationalised industries had terrible consequences for Britain’s industrial heartlands: empty factories, mass redundancies and an unemployment rate that topped three million left terrible scars, not least in the mining communities ravaged by pit closures.
Union membership topped twelve million in the final year of the Wilson-Callaghan government but it was the prolonged strike action of the so-called “winter of discontent” in 1978-79 which paved the way for Margaret Thatcher’s general election victory.
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Perhaps it was always going to be only a matter of time before an online insurgency combined with direct action forced the government to retreat on a key employment issue and in the process comprehensively upstage the trade union movement.
In the face of a hostile campaign which succeeded in alarming and embarrassing major employers of young people such as Tesco, Burger King, Waterstones, TK Maxx and the Arcadia group, the Minister of State for Employment Chris Grayling had no alternative but to execute a swift U-turn.
Campaigning to stop the removal of social security benefits from 16-24 year olds who dropped out of a voluntary work experience scheme was a cause which union leaders should have championed from the start but their pitiful record in recruiting youngsters employed in fast food, retailing and other service sector jobs had left the field wide open to the political activists behind groups like the Right to Work campaign.
By trying so belatedly to climb aboard the civil disobedience band wagon, Len McCluskey, general secretary of Britain’s largest union Unite, only underlined the dramatic upstaging of the union movement by a host of direct action groups which use the internet, social networking, messaging and the like to put the frighteners on major employers.
Their online campaigning – for example by accusing Tesco of taking advantage of “slave labour” – was an illustration of the way the front line for industrial action has been transformed by the ability of activists to mobilise support, whether for a Twitter campaign against Tesco or a protest sit-in at McDonald’s in Whitehall.
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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