Bang!: A History of Britain in the 1980s (71 page)

The visit of Norman Willis and his seven-man deputation to meet the prime minister in Downing Street on 19 February represented a rare invitation for the TUC, and a tactical defeat for Scargill
who was expected to respond to, rather than determine, the terms of the debate. Willis’s pitch was that the NUM should concede the NCB’s right to manage the coal industry but that
‘uneconomic’ was not, of itself, sufficient grounds for closing pits.
Where there was dispute over a colliery’s future, a new independent review procedure
should adjudicate. The following day the NUM held a meeting with the NCB during which MacGregor presented a final clarification (this time with the government’s choice of words) acknowledging
the independent review body’s role. Offered these terms, Scargill dismissed them out of hand.

Facts on the ground were making the NUM president’s intransigence a flight from reality. On 27 February, the NCB claimed that 93,000 miners were reporting for work, which, if true, was
more than were still out on strike. The exact figure was disputed, though evidence that support for the strike was dwindling was irrefutable, especially since even in such previously militant areas
as South Wales there was talk of a mass return to work, regardless of whether a national agreement was concluded. On 3 March, with angry protesters outside shouting ‘We’re not going
back! We’re not going back!’, the NUM executive met at Congress House, the TUC’s headquarters, to look again at the terms that had been offered. Efforts to contact the government
in the hope of extracting further concessions were thwarted. Neither Peter Walker nor anyone else in a position of authority at the NCB would answer the telephone.

Having run out of options, the union’s executive decided to vote on whether to call off the strike, only to divide eleven for, eleven against. Despite finding himself with the casting
vote, Scargill abstained. Always determined to assert his leadership during the fifty-one weeks of conflict, the president chose to abdicate – to avoid responsibility at the vital hour of
defeat. It fell to the NUM’s delegates’ conference to break the executive’s impasse. With Scargill refusing to make clear where he stood on a solution, but still insisting he
would not sign the document the TUC had negotiated, the options were reduced to voting either to maintain the strike or else to call it off without accepting any negotiated terms. It was a sign of
the state of mind moulded by the struggle that returning to work without an agreement was deemed more honourable than accepting the concessions that were on the table. The delegates voted by 170 to
nineteen against staying out on strike, and by ninety-eight to ninety-one to return to work without an agreement. With this declaration, the strike was over and the victory for the NCB, and the
government, overwhelming – a reality Scargill rhetorically circumvented by announcing that ‘the greatest achievement is the struggle itself’. Then he walked up to Willis’s
office in Congress House where John Monks was on hand to offer him tea and sympathy. ‘How are you feeling, Arthur?’ asked Monks. With Robespierrean incorruptibility, Scargill replied:
‘Pure. I feel pure.’
³⁷

The strike’s costs were colossal. Around ten thousand individuals had been arrested and twenty thousand people – strikers, strike-breakers and
police –
sustained injuries. The expense of policing the dispute was put at £20 million, while the direct cost to the country of the strike was estimated at £2.75 billion. If the overall effect
on national output were included, the figure probably exceeded £5 billion.
³⁸
Many of the miners did their best to return to work on 5 March
with their heads held high, banners unfurled, brass bands playing, though there was no question that they were a beaten army, marching towards oblivion. The NUM could hardly expect to label its
members in Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and Leicestershire ‘scabs’ and expect to regain their loyalty. As a result, the NUM’s ability to represent every miner in the country was
lost, its monopoly challenged by the new Midlands-based rival, the Union of Democratic Mineworkers. Even without this schism, eleven months of fruitless struggle had drained what power the NUM
might conceivably have had to resist a far swifter dissolution of the collieries in the years ahead.

That there would be far more pit closures than the number announced in March 1984 was the one prediction Scargill got right. The damage done to mines which became unsafe through lying idle for
the strike’s duration widened the hit list – one more example of how the NUM’s strategy had proved counterproductive. But in most cases, the safety of the seams was not the
principal factor. Much of the country’s market for coal was secure only for so long as the Central Electricity Generating Board remained a nationalized entity. In 1990, the process of its
privatization began and it was no longer required to buy the fuel it needed to fire up its power plants from British coal mines at more than the market rate. The consequence was a new round of pit
closures. With this contraction, much of the rationale for keeping British coal mining as a nationalized industry disappeared. By the time of its privatization in 1994, its workforce stood at a
mere 25,000 with only fifteen deep mines still in operation. By 2011, five deep mines remained.

In place of home-hewn coal, Russian gas and Middle Eastern oil helped fuel Britain’s power plants. These sources did not require subsidy from British taxpayers, though whether they would
always prove more politically reliable than the NUM remained to be seen. However, the contraction and privatization of Britain’s coal industry did not end the call on the taxpayer to
subsidize energy generation. Nuclear power brought relatively low running costs along with the considerable expense of eventually decommissioning the plants. This required Treasury grants, as did
the spread of wind-farms and other green technologies. Ultimately, if Thatcher and her free-market economics had not confronted the NUM in the eighties, environmental pressure groups – many
of them decidedly anti-free market – would have done so in the 1990s and early 2000s. Instead of Ian MacGregor and Peter Walker tolling the mining industry’s death knell in 1984, the
Labour government of
Tony Blair would have been forced to do so because of its determination to sign the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. The international agreement signed at Kyoto
committed Britain to reduce its fossil-fuel emissions – and hence its coal-fired power plants – in the belief that doing so would help combat climate change, a decree wholly at odds
with maintaining a sizeable mining industry. If Scargill had triumphed in 1984, he would have humbled and perhaps destroyed Thatcher’s reputation. But he would not have secured a long-term
future for British coal mining.

The End of the Street – Revolution at Wapping

The defeat of the miners’ strike broke ‘not just a strike, but a spell’.
³⁹
The verdict of Norman Tebbit was
shared by Margaret Thatcher, who concluded in her memoirs that ‘from 1982 to 1985 the conventional wisdom was that Britain could only be governed with the consent of the trade unions. No
government could really resist, still less defeat a major strike; in particular a strike by the miners’ union . . . That day had now come and gone.’
⁴⁰
Scargill’s humbling certainly came to be associated with a turning point in industrial relations after which the trade unions never again enjoyed the same
self-confidence or engendered comparable loyalty or loathing. The reality was less clear-cut and was certainly not apparent to many on the left at the time. Ever optimistic about the course of
historical determinism, Tony Benn believed the forces of conservatism had suffered a pyrrhic victory: ‘The miners’ strike was the greatest piece of radicalization I’ve
seen,’ he declared, ‘there have never been as many socialists in the country in my lifetime. We’re only halfway between Dunkirk and D-Day.’
⁴¹
It was certainly true that the miners’ return to work in March 1985 had not reduced British syndicalism to a sullen acquiescence towards the Tories and the free
market. A violent 51-week strike by the miners was quickly followed by a vicious 54-week disruption by print workers.

In some respects, the two disputes were very different in character. One concerned a nationalized industry, the other a trade that had always been in private ownership. The miners’
strategy was to bring the government either to its knees or to the negotiating table by turning off Britain’s power supply; the ambition of the printers was merely to shut down
Britain’s most popular newspapers and hurt the media proprietor Rupert Murdoch in the pocket. The miners were fighting to prevent pits from closing and irrevocably ending an entire way of
life. Less far-sightedly, the printers were campaigning to ensure their industry continued to use outdated technology and inefficient practices in order to maximize the numbers employed in it. Yet
while the two disputes were certainly different in motivation, they were similar in the character of their prosecution. Both were critical to British society. For
while the
fate of the miners’ strike cleared the way for the privatization of coal and other major ‘old’ industries, the printers’ strike determined what role the unions would play in
the ‘new’ technology-driven enterprises, of which the media hoped to become a shining example.

Scarcely any sector of the economy endured poorer industrial relations than ‘Fleet Street’, as the country’s national newspapers were collectively known – the term
deriving from the proximity of their operations to the central London street where presses had clattered out books, broadsheets, handbills and periodicals since the time of Caxton. Indeed, Fleet
Street was central London’s last remaining manufacturing industry of any size. A closed shop effectively prevented non-union members from working in the print halls, and by the early eighties
two unions, the National Graphical Association (NGA) and the Society of Graphical and Allied Trades (SOGAT), predominated. The former largely comprised those engaged in typesetting and printing the
newspapers, the latter represented those distributing the papers or in clerical and ancillary roles. In turn, the two unions boasted sub-divisions known as ‘chapels’, presided over by a
shop steward rejoicing in the paternalistic title of ‘Father of the Chapel’. The implied deference was appropriate, since most employees could expect him (the concept of chapel mothers
did not exist) to be their daily contact point on terms and conditions. In this way, chapel fathers operated as a parallel chain of command to management. Indeed, the print hall was effectively
rendered out of bounds for many of those nominally running the newspaper from the office upstairs. During the early eighties, the future editor of
The Times
, Peter Stothard, only once took
the lift from the journalists’ floor to the print floor. ‘I was greeted by grown men pretending to be monkeys in a zoo. I did not go back. Many managers, I discovered, had rarely
entered the alien territory which they were vainly charged to control.’
⁴²

For those it embraced, the benefits of this set-up were overwhelming. Since the employers could not select anyone to whom the union denied a membership card, a career printing national
newspapers became almost a hereditary occupation through which favoured (biological) fathers passed jobs on to their sons. The result was a print hall populated predominantly from the East End of
London, almost wholly white and male. Given the power of patronage in their gift, chapel fathers generally expected, and received, deference. In particular, the Byzantine complexity of the chapel
structure, each with its own demarcation rules, made management–union negotiations a protracted and tortuous exercise which successfully ground to a halt efforts at innovation and improvement
to the newspaper itself. Tellingly, the print and picture quality of most Fleet Street newspapers had only marginally improved in forty years, despite the fact that competing media, like
television, had made huge technical advances over the same
period. At Times Newspapers Ltd alone, there were fifty-four chapels, each needing consultation before a
significant proposal could be enacted and each capable of bringing production to a standstill if it did not get what it wanted. This represented serious power. If a wildcat strike stopped
production for a few hours at a car plant or shipyard, there was always the possibility of making up the shortfall in successive days without supply to the salesrooms being seriously compromised.
In contrast, a newspaper that did not hit the news-stands in the morning had no marketable value if it appeared twenty-four hours later. In this way, the chapel fathers successfully held the
newspaper managements to ransom, since it was usually cheaper to accept their demands than lose an entire edition’s revenue. Even so, in the ten years between January 1976 and January 1986,
strikes and stoppages sabotaged Fleet Street and prevented the publication of 296 million copies of
The Sun
, 104 million copies of the
Sunday Times
(an extraordinary figure given that
it only came out once per week), 96.5 million copies of
The Times
and 38 million copies of the
News of the World
.
⁴³
Other newspapers
– and their readers – suffered similar woes.

Up in the office of
The Times
in 1985, a journalist’s basic salary was £15,050 per year. Below, in the bowels of the building, the same journalist’s article would be run
off the press by a production worker on £18,000. Furthermore, salaries of up to £40,000 per year were within the grasp of skilled compositors, all NGA members, operating machinery that
appeared to be inspired, if not designed, by W. Heath Robinson. In 1978, Times Newspapers’ management had tried to replace its linotype machines (patented in 1889) with computers which would
have permitted journalists to type their articles directly into the newspaper’s database. When the unions refused to cooperate,
The Times
and
Sunday Times
were shut down for a
year, until November 1979, at which point the management conceded defeat and in 1981 sold both newspapers to Rupert Murdoch. The Australian-born owner of
The Sun
and
News of the World
was the only serious bidder to promise to keep the 196-year-old
Times
going (the other bidder, the
Daily Mail
’s owner, Lord Rothermere, indicated he wanted the
Sunday
Times
but, given its losses, would not guarantee to keep
The Times
as a viable entity).
⁴⁴
At first, Murdoch proved no more capable of
outwitting the chapel fathers than the previous owners. The NGA insisted that it would only allow the new computers if access to them was restricted to its own members. Journalists were members of
a different trade union, the National Union of Journalists. The answer was ‘double-key stroking’ – journalists would type up their articles and then hand them to NGA members who
would retype them on their computer terminals. The duplication was ludicrous and often involved additional typing errors creeping into the paper. Day in, day out, Fleet Street’s newspapers
chastised politicians and drew their readers’
attention to what was wrong with modern Britain, while being too fearful of the unions to put their own house in
order.