Distant Voices (9 page)

There is no shortage of studies that conclude the obvious: that the cost of providing alternative employment is far greater than any subsidy to, or investment in, the mining industry. The coal reserves are there; British Coal continues to suppress the results of its bore-drilling off the Durham coast, having admitted that ‘the information is commercially valuable'.
⁴⁴
Reports by McCloskey Coal Information Services and experts at Durham and Newcastle universities show that the retention of both Easington and Vane Tempest pits makes economic sense.
⁴⁵
In one of its own glossy brochures, British Coal describes Easington as ‘one of the North-east's undersea
super pits', which two years running produced a million tons of coal in record time.
⁴⁶

Of course, all this is irrelevant to the aims of privatisation, the spirit of which is expressed in a series of national newspaper advertisements. There is a photograph of a miner, Arnie Makinson, who is lauded as ‘one of Britain's most successful businessmen'. The caption reads, ‘Meet Arnie . . . a member of a workforce that's more than doubled productivity in just five years. He may not be Sir John Harvey-Jones but, as far as we're concerned, he's got as much to offer. We're tapping the richest seam of all – the hidden talents of our workforce.'
⁴⁷

Mr Makinson has his arms folded. So you cannot see that one hand is mutilated. Last year he lost the little and index fingers of his right hand in a terrible accident at Stillingfleet Colliery in Yorkshire during the week that Stillingfleet set out to break the European production record, and succeeded. Mr Makinson was working at the coal-face and his hand was so badly crushed that it seemed amputation might be necessary on the spot. Although he has to undergo more surgery, he has returned to work at the coal-face. If he joined other injured men at the pithead, he would be paid considerably less. ‘One of Britain's most successful businessmen' is still awaiting compensation.

Under privatisation, the British coal industry is to be sold off in order to ‘compete' in a home market that is about to be decimated by the importation of cheap foreign coal. In the meantime, pits that produce the cheapest coal in Europe are to be closed. Fewer pits will mean big profits – profits at the expense of the future. Some people are about to get very rich indeed.

Last July, the miners' parliamentary group – all of them ex-miners – met the board of British Coal. Their secretary, Dennis Skinner, asked each board member to answer one question: ‘If this industry is privatised, will you give a guarantee that you personally will not benefit from the new set-up?'

‘I got an immediate response from the deputy chairman, Ken Moses,' Skinner told me. ‘He shouted that he wouldn't
give any bloody guarantee. “Not me, Skinner!” he said. After that the chairman, Neil Clarke, said, “Nobody must answer that question,” and he led them out the door.'

According to Arthur Scargill, if all the 31 pits eventually go, the number of unemployed in those industries tied to coal will be 70,000. ‘If there is anyone who thinks that this is about the mining industry,' he has said repeatedly, ‘then they don't understand the nature of the struggle.' But a great many people do understand now; and Scargill, who was right a long time ago, is respectfully listened to. His warning that the Government would reprieve enough pits to satisfy its rebellious backbenchers, then ‘quietly' close them down one by one, when the public fire had faded, is proving correct.

In the Colliery Inn, the miners' pub, John Cummings, now the local MP, sits with his little dog Grit (who appeared in his campaign pictures). His aunt, Helen Abbott, wrote the pit's obituary before she died: ‘The end of a pit; the end of a world; all too final in its premature end of a people.' Her
Requiem for a Dead Stalwart
appears as a preface to column upon column of names of miners killed in the pit, including one James Crewe and his four sons, who died in separate accidents. John has a nice turn of irony. ‘To Thatcher,' he says, ‘we were the enemy within.' He lists the establishment honours bestowed upon Murton, including a Victoria Cross, a Military Cross, Distinguished Flying Crosses and Medals, OBEs, MBEs, and so on.

Geordie Maitland, whom I met in 1974, seems as chipper as then. He tells me matter of factly that, days after I saw him, he was dragged along a conveyor belt into machinery and his foot was crushed. It has since been crushed again. ‘Where's Bill Williams?' I asked. ‘The bloke who took me down, who chewed tobacco.' Bill is dead. And Ron Sugden, who had the Dust? He is alive: indestructible is Ron. ‘None of the lads you've known ever scabbed,' someone says. ‘Good lads.' Scabs are not allowed in the Colliery Inn.

The mood in the town is strange and uneasy. Some call it apathy; others say it is tinged with guilt, because perhaps a third of the men who transferred to other pits, like Easington,
want to take redundancy. They are exhausted. They also know that even if they wanted to fight openly, they would lose their redundancies. Above all, they know they cannot stand alone again; and neither should they be expected to do so.

The women put this well. Mary Parry, who with Jan Smith carried the banner on the return to work in 1985, says the rest of the country has to lead now. ‘We'll be there,' she says, ‘but it's only fair we're with others . . .' In their 24-hour vigils the Women Against Pit Closures exemplify the spirit that has seen scorned and brutalised working-class organisations re-establish basic liberties in Britain: from Peterloo in 1819 to the turn-of-the-century struggle against laws hostile to trade union rights.

On the bitter March morning in 1985 when the Murton miners went back to the pit, their prize brass band emerged from the mist with the women marching first. This had not happened before. What their long and heroic action meant, at the very least, was that ordinary men and women had once again stood and fought back. And that, for me, is Britain at its best. The shadow that has since lengthened over them – that of the centralised state progressively shorn of all countervailing power – is now the shadow over most of us.

January 30, 1993

ON THE DAY
Prince Charles made a speech on ‘declining standards' in education, there was another news item. It was a report warning that nuclear warheads for British Polaris and Trident submarines and for RAF bombs were unsafe and could explode accidentally, dispersing radioactive material over a wide area, and putting cities at risk. Glasgow, especially, is vulnerable. The report's authors, the authoritative British American Security Information Council (BASIC), called on the Government to halt ‘the handling and transportation of all UK nuclear weapons until a full safety review is carried out, overseen by an independent panel'.
⁴⁸

What is most alarming about the report's conclusions is that they are drawn mainly from an official study commissioned by the US House of Representatives Armed Services Committee. Known as the ‘Drell Report', this warned that certain nuclear weapons could explode if involved in an accident or exposed to fire. ‘For a while we were worried that these things might go off if they fell off the back of a truck,' a Pentagon official was quoted as saying in the
Washington Post
, whose investigation and disclosures triggered the committee's inquiry.
⁴⁹

The Pentagon has since hastily withdrawn two types of nuclear weapons from deployment. One is the SRAM-A air-launched missile, which was fitted to Fill and B52 bombers; the other is the W79 nuclear artillery shell, which has been in Europe since the mid-1980s and apparently could go off if struck ‘in the wrong place'.

According to the BASIC report, the American concern
arose ‘as a result of more powerful computer modelling techniques recently developed'. That is to say, computers are now able to simulate almost precisely the causes and conditions of nuclear accidents. This has led to enhanced safety provision in the United States; but there are no equivalent measures in this country, leaving certain British nuclear weapons without up-to-date safety features. The British WE177 ‘tactical freefall bomb', deployed by the RAF for the past twenty-five years, fails the new tests completely.

‘These are not academic concerns,' says the BASIC report. These bombs are ‘regularly transported around the UK'. The authors estimate that there is, on average, approximately one convoy carrying these warheads on Britain's roads every week; one left RAF Honington in Suffolk on Monday of last week. Convoys carrying WE177s have been involved in two known traffic accidents.

The British Polaris/Chevaline programme, a legacy of the Callaghan years, was developed in such secrecy that the Cabinet meetings at which it was discussed were not numbered. Drawing on an American design that, says the BASIC report, had ‘serious corrosion problems', Chevaline was ‘a system produced under pressure . . . that far outstretched British knowledge and technology'. Chevaline also fails to meet the new safety criteria. Chevaline's warheads are transported by road between Coulport in Scotland and the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Burghfield in Berkshire, a journey of more than 600 miles.

The American study is sharply critical of the warheads fitted to D5 Trident submarines. Britain has ordered four Tridents at a cost of more than £9 billion. Using the new computer techniques, it has been discovered that the design of the Trident missiles' W88 warheads – which are shaped to surround the propellant – makes them vulnerable to detonation if the missile is involved in collision or it literally falls off the back of a lorry.

The US Navy is now studying a complete redesign of the Trident warhead. Hitherto unpublished Ministry of Defence evidence to the Commons Defence Select Committee has
confirmed that the British warhead is the same as the American, and that a redesign has been rejected as ‘too expensive'.

The Ministry of Defence has ‘dismissed Trident fears', according to the
Guardian
's defence correspondent, David Fairhall. He wrote that officials ‘point out that the [Trident] missiles are never moved around with the warheads inside, so the proximity of the propellant only affects their safety while on board the submarine'.
⁵⁰

This is not so. Polaris missiles are moved, with their warheads, from the jetty at Coulport up a winding road to their bunkers. Trident's missiles will be stored on top of the hill, for which special armoured carriers are being designed so that the missiles, with their warheads, do not slip off the back of their particular lorry. Glasgow is just thirty miles away as the wind blows.

The official ‘dismissal' makes no mention of the other British weapons referred to in the report as unsafe. The armed services minister, Archie Hamilton, gave assurances to Parliament that British nuclear weapons were constantly safety-tested and scrutinised with ‘the most sophisticated computer modelling'. William Peden, principal author of the BASIC report, told me, ‘There are only certain ways you can use the computer. The question is: how could the minister
not
be aware of the American findings?'

There seem to be two pressing issues here. The first is the public's absolute right to know about potential catastrophe, no matter how ‘infinitesimal' the danger. The widely held view in Whitehall, and the media, that people are not concerned with such matters was addressed in a Gallup poll commissioned by BASIC. The results were offered to several Sunday newspapers, but appeared in none. They are: 58 per cent of the British people believe all transporting of nuclear weapons should stop immediately; 79 per cent believe Parliament should have the same access to information on nuclear weapons as the US Congress.

The second issue is the policy of the Opposition. Rather, what Opposition? Labour is for Trident; but what is Trident for? It is not a defensive weapon. So at whom is it aimed?
Baghdad? Tripoli? The £10.5 billion cost is the ‘official' figure. This takes no account of construction and operational costs, as well as the running of the weapons factory at Aldermaston. According to a Greenpeace study, the Government has underestimated the total cost of the Trident programme by £22,567 million.
⁵¹
What this money would otherwise buy requires just a little imagination. Here's a scribbled shopping list:

Ending homelessness and restoring a national housing programme: £3.8 billion

Restoring the transport system: £2.4 billion

Stopping the haemorrhage of teachers from our schools by raising salaries in education to a decent level: £1.5 billion

Paying every outstanding bill in the National Health Service and ensuring that people no longer die waiting for operations or because of the scarcity of equipment: £7 billion

Research and development that would catch up with the best in Europe: £3 billion
⁵²

Spread over twenty years, this would still leave billions of pounds in the Exchequer. No Labour leader, let alone a prime minister, has ever laid out these choices to the British people, who are constantly said to be ‘pro-nuclear'. During the election campaign the ‘peace dividend', like so much else, was not an issue and the Trident farce was hardly mentioned. Yet less than a third of the public say they want to keep Trident.
⁵³

‘They who put out the people's eyes', wrote Milton, ‘reproach them of their blindness'. Yes; but it's not the people who have been blinded.

April 1991 to May 1992

TRIUMPHANT CLICHÉS THAT
the ‘West has won' in Eastern Europe are incessant in the British media. They echo Margaret Thatcher's pronouncement that ‘our values' have been adopted: a theme ordained by liberal commentators as received truth. With honourable exceptions, the coverage of Europe's upheaval has been so beset by jingoism, from the bellicose to the insidious, that the nature of change, and the emerging hopes and alternatives, have been obscured.