There is No Alternative (31 page)

From the eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, the world ran on coal, as George Orwell remarked in
The Road to Wigan Pier:

Deep shaft mining expanded rapidly in Britain throughout the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. The industrializing world's hunger for coal was voracious, so much so that the miners, secure that their labor was irreplaceable, formed the vanguard of the British trade union movement. The Miners' Federation of Great Britain, later to become the National Union of Mineworkers, was founded in 1889. The imperative of ensuring secure energy supplies during the two world wars ensured there could be no serious challenge to the miners' growing political power. South Yorkshire and its environs were during this era the economic and strategic equivalent of the contemporary Persian Gulf. The miners, to continue this analogy, were something like OPEC.

When the commanding heights of the British economy were nationalized in the years following the Second World War, the mines passed into the government's hands. The National Coal Board was established to manage the industry. But the second half of the century saw the emergence of competing energy sources in the form of oil, natural gas, and nuclear power. The increasing globalization of the energy market ushered in competition from coal-rich and comparatively undeveloped nations such as China, where life and labor were cheap. It is, moreover, the nature of coal pits to become progressively less profitable, for the deeper you have to dig for the coal, the more time, risk, effort, and technology it takes to get it out. At the turn of the twentieth century, 1.1 million British men earned their daily bread in the pits. By 1983, the number was only 240,000.

That year, the Monopolies and Mergers Commission reported that some 75 percent of British pits were making losses. It cost £44 to mine a metric ton of British coal. America, Australia, and South Africa were selling coal to the rest of Europe for £32 a ton. British coal was piling up in mountains, unsold. The industry was surviving because, and only because, the government was spending more than a billion pounds a year to subsidize it—and indeed still more, if you calculate the additional costs to the nationalized steel
and electricity industries, which were obliged by law to purchase British coal rather than cheaper imported coal or oil. Indirectly, the high cost of energy was passed on to everyone in Britain. It was, in effect, a completely regressive tax.
¹⁶²
Highly energy-dependent industries were heavily penalized, particularly in the export market, but so were ordinary men and women who heated their homes and turned on their lights. The coal industry had become an expensive welfare program.

And what a cruel welfare program it was.

Obviously, I do not find Scargill a sympathetic character, but it is nonetheless entirely understandable to me that coal miners so often found themselves tempted by the promises of communism. Frankly, I am surprised that any of them weren't communists. I needn't linger overmuch on the horrors of coal mining—they are well-known—but it is worth acknowledging them with a passing nod. Methane explosions. Crushing. Electric shock. Pulmonary tuberculosis, emphysema. The eternal filth, working crouched over, never seeing the light of day. Black lung, black damp, after damp, fire damp, stink damp, white damp, suffocation, drowning.

The safety standards of British mines had much improved—relatively speaking—by the mid-1980s.
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But improving safety costs money, a lot of it, which is one reason Britain could not compete with countries such as China. And still the pits were Stygian, filthy, backbreaking. If I had spent my life going up and down those mine shafts, I reckon I too would have liked the ring of the words “dictatorship of the proletariat.”

All mines close sooner or later. Either all the coal is harvested, or it becomes so difficult to get to the seam that it costs more to mine than the coal is worth—at least, if that worth is measured by the price it fetches on an open market. The National Coal Board had been closing pits steadily since its creation, and every time, miners had been laid off. Under Harold Wilson's first Labour government, a pit had closed every week. When the coal board announced, under Thatcher, that it planned to close another twenty-odd pits, it was proposing nothing more than the continuation of previous policies. Thatcher presented the argument for pit closure in characteristic terms of housewifely thrift. “You do not
go out and buy suits at four times the cheapest price merely to keep people in work. You say: ‘No! I have to use my wages and salaries to the best advantage. I must buy best value!'”
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There had never before been a strike over pit closures. Previous strikes had revolved around the issue of wages, not closures. Thus the question, at heart, was not the closure of the pits. The great miners' strike was an ideological struggle. For Thatcher, the miners' union and the bureaucrats who managed the coal industry represented everything wrong with socialism: waste, inefficiency, irresponsibility, unaccountability. To the miners, Thatcher represented everything wrong with capitalism: avarice, heartlessness, the privi-tation
of profits over human dignity. Thatcher had made her goal explicit: She sought to destroy socialism in Britain. In return, Scargill made his goal explicit: He sought to destroy Thatcher.

And so the strike began.

In September 1979, six months after Thatcher won the first general election, John Hoskyns sent the prime minister a memorandum:
Begin your preparations now,
he warned her.
The miners are going to give you grief.
The received wisdom in the Conservative Party, he tells me over lunch, was that the miners couldn't be defeated. The attitude was “part of that whole postwar malaise, this sort of deep-down defeatist ‘we won the war but we can't win the peace, somehow—there may be some way that you can make peace with the miners, so they don't bring you down and they don't cripple the economy, but don't think that you can actually
defeat
them, because they've got the biggest guns, and they'll just bring everything to a halt.'”

In his memo, Hoskyns urged her to challenge this received wisdom. At the time, Joe Gormley was head of the miners' union. Gormley was “an honorable, old-fashioned, democratic trade unionist,” Hoskyns recalls. But he would be retiring. And it was increasingly clear that he would be replaced by Scargill. Gormley's interests, says Hoskyns, “were not ours. But there is a big difference between an old-fashioned trade unionist and a raging Marxist, there really is. One's just someone you disagree with, and the other's the enemy.”

Despite Hoskyns's warnings, nothing was done at all. Hoskyns wrote, in his memo, that it might well be possible to change the balance of power. Thatcher returned the memo to him with her reply: “Only at the margins, I fear.” Hoskyns decided it would be unwise to insist. “I didn't push her on that, because there's a lot of importance, in my view, in the handling of someone who is under enormous pressures. You cannot go on and on banging at them,
because eventually they say, you know, ‘Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?'”

Thatcher put the issue on the back burner. As a result, when the miners challenged her in 1981, the government was entirely unprepared. Thatcher was forced to capitulate. Hoskyns was disgusted, and while he was too savvy to say “I told you so” explicitly, I expect his sentiments were clear enough. Hoskyns was not invited to the urgent meeting Thatcher subsequently convened to discuss the miners. He suspects this was because she did not want to be reminded that he had, indeed, told her so. “You know, she's only human. And she knew that we'd been right on that.” Not long after this, Hoskyns resigned. “Our relationship,” he says, “was quite a difficult one. I wasn't part of her sort of feel-good factor, as it were.”

But following this humiliation, Thatcher began to prepare for war. “It was that strike threat, which, to put it bluntly, scared the shit out of her,” says Hoskyns. “Suddenly the whole of Whitehall was on a war footing.” Thatcher instructed the Civil Contingencies Unit, usually charged with preparing for national disasters, to begin studying the possibility of withstanding a strike. Plans were drawn up for stockpiling coal, training the military to drive trains in the event of a sympathy strike by the railway workers, accelerating the development of nuclear power, importing electricity by cable from France, and refurbishing coal-fired power stations to permit them to run on oil.

Thatcher asked Nigel Lawson to be her energy secretary. He too had been appalled that the government was forced to stand down. “I was determined,” he writes in his memoirs, “that, if I had anything to do with it, it would never happen again.”
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He was not seeking a strike, he stresses. “But it was clear that Arthur Scargill was, and I was determined that he should lose it when it came.”
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I believe it to be true that the government was not going out of its way to provoke a strike. But obviously, if these characteristic
words are any guide, by 1984 the mood in Downing Street had become distinctly Clint Eastwoodish.
Go ahead. Make our day.

Lawson appointed the physicist Walter Marshall to head the Coal and Electricity Generating Board. Scargill's ally Tony Benn—remember him? Wedgie?—had sacked Marshall from his position as chief scientist at the Department of Energy. Lawson was well aware of this. Marshall devoted himself with vindictive relish to developing plans to defeat Scargill; Lawson recalls Marshall's “great zest” for devising schemes to smuggle strategic chemicals into the power stations. Those that could not be smuggled would be flown in by helicopter; landing sites were identified near every power station.

Stockpiling coal is no trivial matter. It is costly, and it is tricky: In critically large quantities, coal can self-ignite. It was, moreover, viewed by many of Thatcher's advisors as a risky gambit. “Up went the great defeatist cry of the most useless civil servants,” recalls Hoskyns. “‘If we start moving coal to the power stations, that's an outright provocation!'” Thatcher's cabinet was divided; Jim Prior, in particular, considered these preparations a dangerous escalation. Hoskyns draws an analogy to the debate about Reagan's military spending: “I've been through exactly the same process that clearly he and his advisers went through about the Cold War. I mean, I felt ratcheting up economic costs and staying in the struggle was the way to destroy the economic union. I mean, the
Soviet
Union. Just the same. If you just do everything bit by bit, and try to avoid any single action that makes their alarm bells ring, there's a habituation to what's going on. I mean, thinking through the eyes of Scargill, ‘Oh, they're moving a lot of coal, aren't they, well, you know, yes, but it's not too bad,' six months later, ‘Hmmm, really a
hell
of a lot of coal . . . '”