Bang!: A History of Britain in the 1980s (70 page)

The most calamitous expression of hatred towards those who chose to cross the picket lines took place on 30 November, when two strikers leaned
over a road bridge and
dropped a concrete slab on to a taxi carrying a miner returning to work at the Merthyr Vale colliery. Missing its intended target, the slab killed the taxi driver. When, in May 1985, a couple of
months after the strike ended, the two miners found guilty of the crime were sentenced, seven hundred of Merthyr Vale’s miners stopped work to show solidarity with them and to appeal –
successfully – for their convictions to be reduced from murder to manslaughter.
²³
On 8 November 1984, three weeks before the fatal slab was
hurled, the first miner turned back up for work at Cortonwood, the colliery where the strike had begun. He needed intensive police protection because the local community lined the route, hurling
abuse at him with an intensity that gave grounds for fearing they might actually lynch him if given the chance. How such scenes were interpreted depended, of course, on the viewer’s
perspective. Was it the brave stand of the individual against the mentality of the mob? Or was it an example of the selfishness of Thatcherite individualism rejecting obligations to a wider
society? Was it simply the philosophy of desperation, the degradation of a man reduced to betraying his class and his instincts in order to scrape a living? To the prime minister, the answer was
clear. As she put it to her party’s conference: ‘“Scabs” their former workmates call them. Scabs? They are lions!’
²⁴

While the government’s public stance was to maintain that it was a matter for the NCB and NUM, rather than the Department of Energy, to agree a settlement, there was never any doubt as to
the result Thatcher was seeking. Controversy flared over remarks she made in July to a private meeting of back-bench Tory MPs: she drew a parallel between the Argentine junta during the Falklands
War, whom she dubbed ‘the enemy without’, and the NUM leadership, who were ‘the enemy within, much more difficult to fight, [and] just as dangerous to liberty’.
²⁵
Did the prime minister really think she was dealing with an insurgency? The official historian of MI5 describes as ‘fanciful’ the accusation
that the security service tapped the phones of a wide range of NUM and other trade union officials. His research supported the contention that surveillance, for which individual Home Office
warrants were a prerequisite, was conducted in accordance with MI5’s charter and ‘limited to leading communist and Trotskyist militants and those judged to have close links with
them’. This brought active communists like Mick McGahey within the remit, and also Scargill, who was included as ‘an unaffiliated subversive’. Wider allegations of security
service ‘dirty tricks’ – including highly placed ‘moles’ within the union – have not been substantiated.
²⁶
At
the time she made it, Thatcher’s ‘enemy within’ jibe drew a furious rebuke from Neil Kinnock, who protested: ‘Any prime minister of Britain who confuses a fascist dictator
who invades British sovereign territory with British trade unions and with miners, I think is not fit to govern
this country.’
²⁷
A more elegiac response came from one of her predecessors when in November the ninety-year-old Harold Macmillan finally took up his seat in the House of Lords. Taking the
title of Earl of Stockton (the depressed constituency he had represented in the 1930s), he chose in his maiden speech in the chamber to pronounce: ‘It breaks my heart to see what is happening
in our country today. A terrible strike is being carried on by the best men in the world. They beat the Kaiser’s army and they beat Hitler’s army. They never gave in. The strike is
pointless and endless. We cannot afford action of this kind . . . I can only describe as wicked the hatred that has been introduced.’
²⁸
His
perspective was a world – or at least a couple of generations – away from that of Thatcher, whose memoirs included the observation: ‘The sheer viciousness of what was done [by
striking to non-striking miners] provides a useful antidote to some of the more romantic talk about the spirit of the mining communities.’
²⁹

Scargill certainly worried about an enemy within, reserving especial rage for those in the Labour movement whose supportive words were not backed by decisive actions. When the TUC’s new
general secretary, Norman Willis, addressed a miners’ rally in Aberavon on 14 November, his condemnation of acts of violence was met with furious jeers. Sitting beside him on the platform,
Scargill looked on impassively while a hangman’s noose was dangled threateningly above Willis’s head. What the NUM wanted from the TUC was summed up by Mick McGahey: ‘No scab
coal. No crossing picket lines. No use of oil. Stop industry.’
³⁰
The son of a man who had been a prominent communist organizer of the 1926
General Strike, McGahey was calling for a repeat effort to paralyse the economy. However, the TUC recognized the legal dangers of calling for sympathetic action, given the likelihood that this
would involve activities that the courts could construe as illegal secondary picketing. The penalties for unions minded to ignore the law included sequestration of their assets. In August, two
Yorkshire miners (their legal fees financed by David Hart, a maverick Thatcher-admiring businessman) had taken the Yorkshire NUM to court for calling an ‘official’ strike without a
ballot, in contravention of the union’s own constitution. In October, the High Court ruled in the two miners’ favour. Reprimanded for refusing even to turn up for the court hearing,
Scargill was fined £1,000, and the NUM was fined £20,000. His own fine paid by an anonymous well-wisher, Scargill ordered that his union should not pay its fine. In the judgement of Mr
Justice Nicolls, the union thereby ‘decided to regard itself as above the law, and to make this plain repeatedly, emphatically and publicly’,
³¹
and he ordered that, being in contempt of court, it should have its nearly £11 million of assets sequestered until it recanted – which it refused to do.

In principle, the sequestration left the NUM endeavouring to sustain a strike without any money. In practice, only £8,500 of assets was initially
seized. Having
foreseen the likelihood of sequestration, the union had squirreled away the vast majority of its assets in various international bank accounts. What the sequestration did ensure was that henceforth
it would have to raise money through various ‘front’ organizations, and it was to these that campaigners and other trade unions contributed. Cash was preferred because it could be
handed covertly to NUM officials without the courts being readily able to trace and seize it. The downside of this practice was its unaccountability, fostering subsequent allegations of
misappropriation. One source of covert funding was the communist-controlled French trade union, the CGT, which handed over unmarked bags of cash (this was not just to evade the British courts but
also to circumvent the French socialist government’s exchange controls, which prevented significant sums of money leaving France). The CGT was not the only foreign fundraiser. The NUM’s
general secretary, Peter Heathfield, was given a plastic bag with $96,000 in cash which had been raised by communist Czechoslovak and Bulgarian trade unions. Another source was the Soviet Union.
Scargill secretly entered into negotiations with two Soviet diplomats at the TUC annual conference and on 12 October the Soviet Communist Party’s central committee agreed that one million
roubles (about $1.2 million), raised from Russian trade union funds, should be sent to the NUM. Unfortunately, the Soviets’ efforts to place the money in the NUM’s secret Swiss bank
account were thwarted when the bank, suspecting a money-laundering operation, refused to accept it – in the process drawing attention to the existence of this clandestine hidey-hole. With the
payment delayed, Scargill appealed again to the Soviets, on 28 December, for £10–20 million, pointing out that the strike was costing £300,000 per week to fight. On 12 February,
$1.1 million was duly channelled from the Soviet Union to an account in Dublin in the name of the Miners’ Defence and Aid Fund, which was a effectively a front for the NUM.
³²

Accepting ‘Moscow gold’ from the totalitarian regime of Konstantin Chernenko might have seemed like the sort of cheap anti-Scargill smear propagated by the more stridently
Tory-supporting newspapers. But this was no ‘Zinoviev letter’; it was true. What was particularly surprising was that the solicitations to Moscow continued even after opprobrium had
been heaped on the NUM when its covert links with Libya’s despotic regime were revealed. British–Libyan diplomatic relations had been severed in April 1984 after Yvonne Fletcher, a
young policewoman on duty during a protest, was killed by shots fired from the Libyan embassy in St James’s Square, London. Unperturbed, six months later, Scargill sent a member of the NUM
executive, Roger Windsor, to Libya surreptitiously to solicit funds from the country’s dictator, Colonel Gaddafi. Scargill was led to believe that Gaddafi–whose commitment to
international terrorism included arming the IRA
– would donate around £1 million. If the sum reportedly proffered – £163,000 in cash – was
accurate, then he may have felt short-changed.
³³
Worse, the meeting was supposed to be secret, a detail evidently not fully grasped in Tripoli,
where state-run television broadcast footage from inside the tent of the NUM’s plenipotentiary kissing Gaddafi’s cheeks. Having been hot on Roger Windsor’s trail itself, the
Sunday Times
revealed the assignation on 28 October. Scarcely more than a fortnight previously, the Provisional IRA had attempted to murder the prime minister and her Cabinet by detonating a
bomb in Brighton’s Grand Hotel, and unconnected though the two events were, the timing of the Tripoli mission was particularly unfortunate in view of Libya’s known links with
terrorism.

The Brighton bombing came just as hopes of renewed talks to settle the miners’ dispute were heightening. Indeed, it was a last minute decision by the energy secretary, Peter Walker, to
remain in London to handle possible avenues for negotiation rather than to travel to Brighton for the party conference that led him to offer his hotel room to the deputy chief whip, Sir Anthony
Berry. When the bomb exploded, Berry was killed in the room. Walker’s escape was a fortunate one, as was that of the prime minister herself, who was unscathed despite the wrecking of her
bathroom. The front of the hotel was blown out, causing a partial collapse. After several hours, Norman Tebbit was painstakingly pulled from the rubble. His wife was paralysed from the neck down
for the rest of her life. The chief whip, John Wakeham, remained unconscious for days and his wife was one of the five fatalities. Thatcher’s sense of resolution and calmness in the face of
danger shone through, as did the fragile threads by which she remained prime minister (the wreckage in her bathroom was sufficient either to have killed her or to have condemned her to Margaret
Tebbit’s fate). As the IRA’s press statement put it: ‘Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.’

Throughout the autumn, the miners’ strike continued, though the slow yet continual drift back of employees to their pits encouraged the perception that momentum was slipping away from the
strikers. The NCB’s offer of financial sweeteners to coax miners to return to work, including back-pay and a Christmas bonus, began to have an effect. Opinion polls suggested that the
public’s sympathies, which in the summer had been fairly evenly balanced between the two sides, were by the winter overwhelmingly on the side of the management.
³⁴
As if oblivious, Scargill remained defiant, as was evident when his rhetorical flair was deployed to rally his men at a gathering in Porthcawl:

It was only when there were rumours of imminent peace talks that the numbers of returnees slackened off, there being little point in suffering the ostracism of being labelled a
‘scab’ if the strike was about to end anyway. Having envisaged the TUC’s role as being one of offering unquestioning support for the NUM, Scargill was uneasy at the
organization’s determination to try and broker a deal on the miners’ behalf. In the event, the TUC almost saved the day for the NUM. When, on 30 January 1985, Norman Willis led his
delegation to meet the NCB negotiators it might have looked as if the latter’s choice of venue, the Ritz Hotel, was intended to rub in how little the managers were suffering compared with the
strikers. If so, the psychological advantage was quickly squandered, for Ian MacGregor’s style of negotiating transpired to be as soft as the hotel furnishings. On 12 February, his
inattention to detail almost ensured that he agreed terms to end the dispute whereby only pits ‘deemed exhausted’ would be closed – the criterion for which Scargill had long held
out. Not only was this far removed from the previous criterion of ‘uneconomic’, the draft document failed to make clear who – the NCB, the NUM, or an outside arbitrator –
had the right to determine what level of depletion qualified as ‘exhausted’. Could the NCB chairman really have talked tough for eleven months only to concede defeat at the moment his
opponents were on their knees? It was as MacGregor was about to sign his name to the draft agreement that a copy was sent to Peter Walker at the Department of Energy. Appalled at what he read,
Walker sent a minute to MacGregor angrily protesting: ‘I would have thought that we could have been consulted on the wording of any paper which was going to form the final agreement with the
TUC and through them the NUM.’
³⁶
MacGregor was ordered to keep the cap on his pen and to stall for time while the government substituted new
terms for him to settle the dispute. This intervention demonstrated who was ultimately in charge, though the fact that MacGregor had proceeded to the brink of agreement without consulting Walker
was extraordinary – even if it was consistent with the government’s persistent, if disingenuous, protestations that settling the dispute was not its responsibility but that of the NCB
and the NUM.