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NUM president Arthur Scargill with general secretary Peter Heathfield at a Silver Jubilee rally in Barnsley on Saturday |
Proud to follow Arthur
Ex-miner John Church champions the former president of the NUM and takes issue with Francis Beckett and David Hencke’s history of the 1984 strike
Marching To The Fault Line: The 1984 Miners’ Strike and the Death of Industrial Britain.
By Francis Beckett and David Hencke.
Constable £18.99
I had hoped Marching to the Fault Line would be a definitive history of the 1984 miners’ strike; after all, its authors have the benefit of hindsight to examine, in depth, those monumental events. Sadly, they have failed to provide anything new and have instead tried to assassinate the character of Arthur Scargill.
Let me make it quite clear: I support Arthur Scargill. I firmly believe he provided the best leadership the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) could have asked for.
It seems the authors were refused an interview with Arthur, so by rehashing the tired old accusations made against him, they have stooped to the level of the gutter press.
On March 5, 1984, I was the delegate for the Bentley NUM branch. I heard the Cortonwood delegate explain that the National Coal Board (NCB) had plans to close his pit and his impassioned plea for support. I, along with all delegates, voted to implement the 1981 ballot decision to take industrial action. This reflected the views of the Yorkshire miners.
It was the correct decision. Our choices were either to allow the government to impose its closure plan, or to stand and fight for our jobs and our communities; we chose to fight.
On March 8, having taken strike action, we looked for support. Sadly, the areas still working (in particular Nottingham) failed to respond. We tried to picket these men and were initially successful but, alas, this did not last. The deluded working miners believed their actions would save the mining industry. In fact they were a contributory factor to its decimation.
During the strike I voted consistently at conferences to oppose a national ballot, as did the majority of my fellow delegates. Arthur, as our president, had to uphold these views. The fact that he agreed was neither here nor there; he had to comply with our decision.
I still believe we were correct. The jobs in the industry were not ours to throw aside and I do not believe that any man or woman has the right to vote away another person’s right to employment.
I would not hesitate to vote for strike action again; I would be proud to fight for my industry and my community – and to support and follow Arthur again.
From the beginning of the strike, my family were committed to an NUM victory. My wife Catherine helped to establish Bentley Women’s Action Group. Within weeks, the women were providing hundreds of meals a day and were active on picket lines. Their endless support and contributions to our communities can never be underestimated or repaid. Their efforts should play a central part in any book about the strike.
My three children and the children of fellow miners suffered the deprivation forced upon them by the Tory government without complaint, and they look back fondly to a time of solidarity and hope. Their voices too should be heard in any history of the events.
The government declared war on the miners; Thatcher threw the entire state mechanism behind the NCB in her efforts to destroy the NUM and the mining communities. Several times throughout the strike, agreement was reached between the NUM and the NCB, only for government intervention to prevent a settlement.
Thatcher was intent on destroying not only the NUM, but the Labour and Trade Union Movement. She was prepared to bankrupt the country in her determination to win, and she ensured no agreement was made with the NUM. The value of the NACODS agreement (which Arthur was castigated for refusing) can be seen in the decimated heartlands of the coal fields; not one pit or cobble of coal was saved by it.
Of all of the main protagonists (including Thatcher’s government and the NCB) only Arthur retains any credibility. The authors drag up the story of the Libyan and Russian money donated and though they admit that Arthur did not benefit from this, they still point the finger of suspicion. There is not one shred of evidence against Arthur and this is reflected in the fact that he is revered in mining communities today.
Perhaps a proper history of the strike will never be written. But 25 years on we live in a country devoid of an energy programme, reliant on foreign power for our fuel needs when below the ground there are millions of tonnes of coal which could be used. We could eradicate unnecessary OAP deaths through lack of heating, by reducing the cost of fuel and increasing the prosperity of our country.
If only a fraction of the money used recently to bail out the banks had been invested in the coal industry we could have been looking at a golden future – providing our own energy needs with the help of clean coal technology. If only a fraction of the money given to former nationalised industries (gas, electricity, water, railways, etc) which were privatised in the Thatcher years, was used to help the mining industry we would be able to face the future with confidence.
There are far better, and more accurate books about the strike. There are even better ones which attack Arthur (but don’t tell him I said so!).
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Supermarkets on a landscape ‘which brought heroes to the fore’
SOMETHING has changed in Yorkshire. Until the destruction of the coal mining industry in the 1990s, mine superstructures silhouetted the rolling skyline, towering over some of the richest coal seams in Britain.
“That used to be a pit over there,” said John Church, a former National Union of Mineworkers’ representative. I followed the sweep of his hand but saw nothing but an expanse of verdant turf. “It’s a golf course now,” he added.
Actually the golf course has been a post-coal success stories. Bought for a song by miners made redundant in the closures that followed the bitter year-long 1984 strike, it was transformed into a popular course for miners suddenly jobless and with time on their hands.
John, nursing mining injuries, including a damaged back and knees, scorched lungs and vibration white finger – a paralysing condition from use of heavy drills – said he enjoys a round. “Golf was never for miners but now there are lots of us who use the course,” he said.
I stayed with John and his wife Cathy during the strike but this was the first time I had seen at first-hand the devastating impact of Thatcher’s closure of the coal mining industry.
There are few reminders of the industry which 25 years ago employed almost 70,000 miners in South Yorkshire alone, the backbone of British trade unionism. Cortonwood Colliery, a flashpoint during the strike, has been turned into a giant supermarket; others are remembered only by the names given to roundabouts on the new Dearne Valley Parkway road.
The real scars were inflicted on the mining towns where joblessness, poverty and drugs have ravaged lives. “There have been a few jobs – mostly in supermarkets, warehouses and call-centres – but nothing much really,” said John, who now works for the council as a benefits advisor. “I still see men I used to work in the pits with who’ve never been able to find a job since they closed.”
His wife Cathy, treasurer of the local Women Against Pit Closures support group during the strike, talks angrily of the impact of the closures on the mining towns. She pointed out a shaven-headed man: a Fagin-like character running a gang of drug peddlers, she said. A young addict lives a few doors away, she added.
At a rally in the NUM’s Barnsley HQ on Saturday where more than 500 former miners gathered to mark the strike’s Silver Jubilee and the death of two Yorkshire pickets, David Jones and Joe Green, former NUM president Arthur Scargill, now 71, said the strikers had been “fighting for the jobs they held in trust for their sons and daughters, their grandsons and granddaughters”.
His voice cracked as he paid tribute to the late Scottish NUM president Michael McGahey and general secretary Peter Heathfield, now seriously ill.
History, he pointed out, would not remember kindly the strike’s other protagonists: Margaret Thatcher, National Coal Board chairman Sir Ian MacGregor and Labour leader Neil Kinnock.
While Thatcher and McGregor used the media and wielded the courts, battalions of riot police and Special Branch’s “dirty tricks” to break the strike, and Kinnock secretly negotiated against the union, “the tragedy was that our own movement didn’t see it in the stark political terms the Thatcher government did,” he said. Evoking the Suffragettes and Tolpuddle Martyrs, Scargill added: “The greatest victory of the miners strike was the struggle itself which brought heroes from all corners of our union to the fore.”
I wondered whether history might have taken a very different complexion had the Iron Lady fallen. Would the strike’s devastating roll-call have read differently: thousands of miners injured on picket lines; 13,000 union members arrested; 11 killed; 1,250 NUM members sacked and hundreds of thousands since thrown onto the work scrapheap. Might New Labour have been still-born, trade unions have prospered and wars never been fought? As the rally closed to the mournful miners hymn Desford, it occurred to me the young trumpet player might have been playing a different tune.
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