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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 182 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 182, January 1995.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
No one who lived through or fought through the Great Miners’ Strike of 1984–85 will ever forget it – the heroism of the miners and their families, the enormous well of solidarity inside the working class, the determination of the NUM leaders. And ranged against us was the cowardice and back stabbing of the TUC and Labour leadership; the lies of the media; the vicious brutality of the Tories, the courts and the police. In the course of the strike there were over 11,000 arrests, 7,000 people were injured and 11 died. Whole communities were besieged and occupied by the police. Strikers were banned from travelling and placed under house arrest.
A myth has grown up that the strike was doomed to failure, that Arthur Scargill blindly led his members to catastrophe. One of the merits of a new book by Seumas Milne, The Enemy Within, is that it confirms how close the miners were to victory.
The huge vote for strike action by the pit deputies’ union Nacods in October spelled almost certain defeat for the Tories. Lord Marshall, boss of the Central Electricity Generating Board, told Thatcher that coal stocks would run out: ‘She was worried, she was wobbly’ – and she told him she would order the army in to move coal. In which case, ‘All my guys would have gone on strike immediately.’ Marshall persuaded Thatcher to keep her nerve. Instead the CEGB managed to bribe a minority of power workers to move coal – and the Tories bought off the Nacods leaders with the promise of a new ‘review system’ to halt pit closures.
Seumas Milne focuses on this decisive stage in the strike. He relates how Margaret Thatcher – a woman ‘besotted by the security services’ according to her former chancellor Nigel Lawson – ordered the security services to target the NUM, and Arthur Scargill in particular.
At the crucial moment an elaborate trap was laid to set up the union leadership both as accomplices of Libyan ruler Colonel Gadaffi, and as using strike funds for personal gain. A trip to Libya by the NUM’s chief executive officer Roger Windsor was used as the pretext for stage one of the plot. Windsor was supposed to be seeking support from Libyan unions for a ban on oil exports to Britain, but he turned the event into a direct appeal for funds from Gadaffi. Stage two only came out into the open five years later when Windsor resigned his position at the NUM and sold his story to the Daily Mirror for £80,000.
The witch hunt which resulted outstripped anything in the strike. When Windsor’s accusations were shown to be lies, the press simply moved on to other falsehoods. The Lightman Report into the union’s affairs became the excuse for a renewed barrage of court cases which threatened once again to paralyse the union. In the end the resilience of Scargill and Peter Heathfield, the solidarity of the miners and their supporters, and a defence campaign led by Socialist Worker, cleared them of any crime or misdemeanour. Even the Inland Revenue gave them a clean bill of health. But, Seumas Milne argues, the plot had succeeded – tying the union in knots at a critical point in the struggle to defend the coal industry.
It should be no surprise to anyone who was involved in the strike that the secret services, MI5 and Special Branch, were in the front line of the attack. Windsor’s trip to Libya was highly suspect at the time, and his subsequent actions seem to have been designed to divide and weaken the NUM. There is proof that MI5 was intent on placing its agents inside the union before the strike began. Stella Rimington, then head of the MI5 branch responsible for ‘monitoring’ unions and strike activity and since promoted to the top job, has been clearly linked to Roger Windsor by Tam Dalyell MP, on the basis of information passed to him by senior civil servants.
Seumas Milne has written an important book, and a brave one. Important because it unflinchingly points the finger at those who were truly responsible for the miners’ defeat: the motley crew of Labour and trade union bosses, from Neil Kinnock downward, who first distanced themselves from the strike, then starved it of support, and finally joined in the vilification of its leaders. It’s a brave book because the author is industrial correspondent of the Guardian, and 90 percent of what he’s written will be offensive to his colleagues in the media and his contacts in the union hierarchy.
Unfortunately there are problems. The book has clearly been written over a long period, and would have benefited greatly from a good editor. And Seumas’s politics occasionally lead him to absurd conclusions. He continues to believe that Eastern Europe was somehow ‘socialist’. So he offers excuses for the Polish coal exports to Britain and denounces Solidarnosc for its failure to support the British miners and for accepting Western money. In fact, the Polish regime increased coal exports to Britain in the 1972 and 1974 strikes as well as in 1984 and, as Seumas ought to know, Solidarnosc’s activists in the mines were either victimised or in prison in 1984.
This sort of neo-Stalinism also affects Seumas’s judgement about the international trade union movement. It won’t do to describe the Western backed ICFTU bodies, such as the Miners’ International Federation, simply as right wing bodies riddled with CIA infiltration. The MIF, for example, supported the left in a number of countries. Arthur Scargill’s decision to establish a single international trade union centre – the IMO – was right in principle, but in practice it relied on the stooges of Russian bureaucracy for a large part of its support.
Despite these flaws, this book deserves to be read. It is a testimony to the bravery and defiance of the miners, and Arthur Scragill in particular, who emerged without a stain from a campaign of plots and character assassination that would have destroyed lesser men.
The Enemy Within by Seumas Milne, Verso £16.95, is available from Bookmarks.
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