There is No Alternative (33 page)

According to Scargill's logic, the union was a federation; therefore, each region should decide independently whether to strike. He assumed that once it had begun, the strike would spread—he would see to it that it did. Defying him, nine constituent unions held a vote, and to Scargill's disgust, eight voted against the strike. In Leicestershire, 89 percent voted nay. In the Midlands, 73 percent. In Nottinghamshire, 73 percent.

It was an appalling display of false consciousness, Scargill concluded. He dispatched flying pickets from Yorkshire to close down their mines—for their own good. This, too, was an extraordinarily stupid decision. The miners of Nottinghamshire, in particular, were enraged. They took vengeance.

Scargill called at the beginning of the strike for the “total mobilization of the trade and labor movement,” and Linda Sheridan is right: Had the call been heeded—had the miners hung together,
and had the other unions come out in support of them—the strike would have been won. But the other unions demurred, and this was no accident. Thatcher made sure of it.

I say “Thatcher,” but this was not how it was presented. Officially, this was a dispute between the National Coal Board and the miners' union; Thatcher maintained the pretense throughout that it was not her role to interfere. “The government,” she said, “will leave the National Coal Board to deal with the matter as it thinks fit.”
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Unofficially, Thatcher supervised every detail of the operations. She established and chaired “Misc. 101,” the cabinet committee that debated and determined every aspect of the government's response to the strike. She met her key ministers daily to receive reports on recent developments and guide the government's response. In her memoirs, she recalls that even when she went to Switzerland on vacation, “The telex chattered constantly . . . I sometimes thought at the end of the day that I would look out the window and see a couple of Yorkshire miners striding down the Swiss slopes.”
¹⁷³

When the railway workers threatened to strike, she offered them a 7 percent raise. In September, the union of mine supervisors—responsible for the maintenance and safety of the pits—threatened to join the pickets. The supervisors had until then been reluctant to strike on the reasonable grounds that mines, when shut, can quickly flood or otherwise become so damaged that they cannot safely be reopened. Showing more foresight than the men they supervised, the supervisors had thus far argued against the strike on the grounds that prolonged closure could physically destroy the mines and put them out of jobs permanently. This is in fact what did happen to quite a number of pits.

A supervisors' strike would have meant the end for the government. “We were in danger of losing everything,” Thatcher recalls. Fortunately, this problem had been anticipated. The government
had a mole inside the supervisors' union. Thatcher knew the supervisors' bottom line. She bought them off too.

“Scargill,” Nigel Lawson says to me, expressing what is distinctly a minority view, “wasn't an imposing personality.” (Mind you, this is from one of the few men who was not intimidated by Thatcher, so it may simply be that Lawson is not particularly gifted at recognizing imposing personalities.) “I mean, his resistance to rational argument gave him a strength of a kind, but it was not he who was strong, it was the president of the National Union of Mineworkers who was strong, provided he could count on the loyalty of the mineworkers. And that was why it was very important to try and engineer a state of affairs in which he
didn't
have the complete support of the mineworkers.” That is just what Thatcher did. When Lawson was energy secretary, and against the strenuous objections of environmentalists, he had rammed through proposals to sink two new mines in “a lovely stretch of countryside” in Leicestershire.
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The miners of the Midlands had been itching to get their hands on the coal seam there, which was underneath the Vale of Belvoir.

Understandably, the Vale of Belvoir's residents did not wish to see slag heaps rising from their backyards, but Lawson persuaded Thatcher that it was more important to shore up the support of the Midlands miners than to placate a handful of eager Belvoir environmentalists. The deal, he argued, would increase the likelihood that the miners who stood to benefit would defy Scargill: If
push came to shove, Lawson reckoned, they would shovel, not push. And that is just what they did. During the strike, with the government's
very
active support, those miners broke away from Scargill's union and with miners from Nottinghamshire formed their own union—the Union of
Democratic
Mineworkers. They kept working, and thanks to their output, stockpiles remained high throughout the winter.

In August, two miners from Nottinghamshire took the National Union of Mineworkers to court for failing to hold a ballot. David Hart, one of Thatcher's friends, paid their legal costs. He organized their legal campaign from his luxury suite at Claridge's, where he met miners who wanted to return to work. When finally they did go back to work, he paid for them to be protected by former SAS bodyguards.

In September, the court ruled in the Nottinghamshire miners' favor, finding that the union had indeed breached its own constitution. The union was fined £200,000.
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The court ordered the union's assets sequestered. Other unions, observing this, came to the conclusion that strike action might be financially imprudent.

Thatcher determined that violent picketers would be met by an equally violent police force, but she feared that local authorities might be hesitant to do the needful. They would, after all, be arresting the citizens of their own hometowns, people with whom they had grown up. Appropriating Scargill's tactic of deploying flying pickets, the government took the unprecedented step of coordinating the police at a national level and bringing in forces from distant counties to confront the picketers. Over the course of the strike, 11,291 miners were arrested; an untold number injured; eleven killed.

Thatcher also had the wisdom to go no further than this. When it was suggested to her that were this America, the National
Guard would be called in with tanks, she immediately dismissed the idea as “political suicide.”
¹⁷⁶

The dockworkers were told they would be fired if they refused to handle coal.

The steelworkers, likewise.

The electricians' union was so completely co-opted that its leaders supplied the government with intelligence about the miners.

The Special Branch infiltrated a spy—codenamed Silver Fox—right into Scargill's inner circle.
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This is one of those assertions that is usually prefaced by “allegedly.” I'll let you judge for yourself:

“I rule nobody out.” Imagine the world of paranoia in which Scargill lived that year.

The strike wore on and on and on. The miners suffered desperate impoverishment. But the preparations put in place by the government, the output from the Nottinghamshire pits, and the intelligence “allegedly” provided by the Silver Fox ensured that the lights stayed on. The other unions stayed sweet. The power stations
kept running. The steel furnaces kept burning. It was a mild winter. The government, it was now clear, could last until the spring. Springtime is not a striking miner's friend.