Margaret Thatcher: The Autobiography (75 page)

Ian MacGregor took over as Chairman of the NCB on 1 September. He had been an excellent Chairman of the British Steel Corporation, turning the Corporation around after the damaging three-month steel strike in 1980. Unlike the militant miners’ leaders, Ian MacGregor genuinely wanted to see a thriving coal industry making good use of investment, technology and human resources. Perhaps his greatest quality was courage. Within the NCB itself he often found himself surrounded by people who had made their careers in an atmosphere of appeasement and collaboration with the NUM and who greatly resented the changed atmosphere he brought with him. Yet it transpired that Ian MacGregor was strangely lacking in guile. He was quite used to dealing with financial difficulties and hard bargaining. But he had no experience of dealing with trade union leaders intent on using the process of negotiation to score political points. Time and again he and his colleagues were outmanoeuvred by Arthur Scargill and the NUM leadership.

On Friday 21 October 1983 an NUM delegate conference voted for a ban on overtime in protest at the Board’s 5.2 per cent pay offer and at
prospective pit closures. In itself, an overtime ban was unlikely to have much effect. It probably had an ulterior purpose: to increase tension among the miners and so make them more prepared for a strike when the NUM leadership thought that one could successfully be engineered. We always knew that it was pit closures that were more likely to ignite a strike than a dispute about pay. The case for closures on economic grounds remained overwhelming. Even Labour had acknowledged it: thirty-two pits had been closed under the Labour Government between 1974 and 1979. Mr Scargill’s line was that no pit should be closed unless it was physically exhausted. In his view a pit that made a loss – and there were many – simply required further investment. Called to give evidence before a Select Committee, he had been asked whether there was any level of loss that he would deem intolerable. He replied memorably: ‘As far as I am concerned, the loss is without limit.’

The Monopolies and Mergers Commission had produced a report on the coal industry in 1983 which showed that some 75 per cent of the pits were making a loss. In September 1983 Mr MacGregor told Government that he intended to cut the workforce by some 64,000 over three years, reducing capacity by 25 million tons. There was, though, never any secret ‘hit list’ of pits due for closure: decisions as to which pits were to be closed would be made on a pit-by-pit basis. He came back to us in December 1983 indicating that he had decided to accelerate the programme, aiming to cut the workforce by 44,000 over the next two years; to achieve this he urged us to extend the existing redundancy scheme to include miners under the age of fifty. The terms we agreed in January 1984 were extremely generous: £1,000 for each year of service, paid as a lump sum, the scheme to operate for two years only, so that a man who had been in the pits all his working life would get over £30,000. In the coming year, 1984–85, Mr MacGregor proposed 20,000 redundancies. We were confident that this figure could be achieved without anyone being forced to leave the industry against their will. Around twenty pits would close and annual capacity would be reduced by 4 million tons a year.

As discussions continued, accusations began to fly about a ‘hit list’ of pits. The rhetoric of the NUM leadership took ever greater leave of reality – in particular, of the economic reality that the industry was receiving £1.3 billion of subsidies from the taxpayer in 1983–84. At the end of February there was an early intimation of the violence which would characterize the strike when Ian MacGregor – then seventy years old – was knocked to
the ground at a Northumberland colliery by demonstrating miners. Far worse was to come.

We doubted whether the strike would happen before the end of 1984, when winter set in and the demand for coal was at its annual peak. To begin a strike in the spring would be the worst possible tactic for the NUM. But this was a point on which Mr Scargill misled his own members: in February he was making wild claims, saying that the CEGB had only eight weeks of coal stocks. In fact stocks were far higher – something that could have been deduced from figures in the public domain. However, the union had a tradition of balloting its members before strike action took place, and there was good reason to think that Mr Scargill would not get the necessary majority (55 per cent) to call a national strike at any point in the immediate future. Since he had become President the NUM membership had voted against strike action three times already. We could not have foreseen the desperate and self-destructive tactics he chose to adopt.

On Thursday 1 March the NCB announced the closure of the Yorkshire colliery Cortonwood. The announcement was not particularly well handled by the local NCB: the impression was given that the colliery review procedure was being bypassed, whereas in fact the NCB had no such intention. But the executive of the radical Yorkshire area of the NUM – Mr Scargill’s home ground – announced a strike in protest at the decision, relying on a local ballot held two years previously to provide authority for their action.

Cortonwood may have triggered the strike, but it was not the cause. Even if Cortonwood had never happened, a meeting between the NCB and the mining unions on 6 March might have had the same result. Ian MacGregor outlined his plans for the coming year and confirmed the figure of twenty closures. That same day the Scottish NUM called a strike from 12 March. Two days later, on Thursday 8 March, the national executive of the NUM met and gave official support to the Yorkshire and Scottish strikes.

Under rule 43 of the NUM constitution a national strike could only be called if the union held a national ballot and a majority of 55 per cent voted in favour. The militant majority on the executive doubted whether they could win such a national ballot, but they found a procedural way round the problem. Under rule 41 of the constitution, the national executive could give official sanction to strikes declared by the constituent
areas that made up the union. If all the areas could be pushed into action individually, this would have the effect of a national strike without the need for the national ballot. If any proved difficult, pickets could be sent from striking areas to intimidate them into joining the dispute. This ruthless strategy very nearly worked. But in the end it proved to be a disaster for its authors.

The strike began on Monday 12 March. Over the following two weeks the brutal weight of the militants’ shock troops descended on the coalfields and for a moment it seemed as if rationality and decency would go under. At the beginning of the first day of the strike 83 pits were working and 81 were out. Ten of these, I was told, were not working due to heavy picketing rather than any positive desire to join the strike. By the end of the day the number of pits not working had risen to about 100. The police were fighting a losing battle to ensure that those who wished to work could do so. I was determined that the message should go out from Government loud and clear: there would be no surrender to the mob and the right to go to work would be upheld.

By Wednesday morning only twenty-nine pits were working normally. The police were by now drafting in officers from around the country to protect the miners who wanted to work: 3,000 police officers from seventeen forces were involved. At this point the violence centred on Nottinghamshire, where the flying pickets from Yorkshire were determined to secure a quick victory. However, the Nottinghamshire men went ahead with their ballot and the result that Friday showed 73 per cent against the strike. Area ballots the following day in the Midlands, the North-West and the North-East coalfields also gave heavy majorities against strike action. Of the 70,000 miners balloted, over 50,000 voted to work.

Early though it was, this was one of the turning points of the strike. The huge police operation was highly effective and together with the moral force of the ballot results it reversed the trend towards a shutdown of the pits. The first, crucial battle had been won. On Monday morning the latest information was telephoned through to me in Brussels, where I was attending a European Council. Forty-four pits were now working, compared with just eleven on Friday. The militants knew that if it had not been for the courage and competence of the police the result would have been very different and from now on they and their mouthpieces in the Labour Party began a campaign of vilification against them.

On the day the NUM executive met, I told Cabinet that I would set up a committee of ministers under my chairmanship to monitor the strike
and to decide what action should be taken. Willie Whitelaw was a member, of course, and Peter Walker, as Energy Secretary, and Leon Brittan as Home Secretary, were crucial figures. The Chancellor, Nigel Lawson, was directly concerned as the issue was of vital importance to the economy; he also brought to bear his experience as former Energy Secretary. Norman Tebbit (Trade and Industry), Tom King (Employment) and Nick Ridley (Transport) all had obvious contributions to make. In Scotland, George Younger had responsibility both for Scottish mining and for Scotland’s police. All these ministers or their deputies regularly attended. When issues of law arose the Attorney-General, Michael Havers, also joined us. The group met about once a week, but the large membership sometimes proved unwieldy and so Peter Walker and I made some important decisions in smaller meetings, called
ad hoc
to deal with developments as they arose, particularly when notice was short.

Mob violence can only be defeated if the police have the complete moral and practical support of government. We made it clear that the politicians would not let them down. We had already given them the equipment and the training they would need, learning the lessons of the 1981 inner-city riots. More recently the police had shown themselves skilled in tackling violence masquerading as picketing when pickets from the National Graphical Association (NGA) had tried to close down Eddie Shah’s newspaper in Warrington in November 1983. On that occasion they had, for the first time, made effective use of powers to prevent a breach of the peace by turning back pickets before they arrived at their destination.

Another prerequisite of effective policing is that the law should be clear. Early in the strike Michael Havers made a lucid statement in a written answer to the Commons, setting out the scope of police powers to deal with mass picketing, including the power (mentioned above) to turn back pickets on their way to the picket line when there are reasonable grounds to expect a breach of the peace. These common law powers long predated our trade union legislation, and were matters of criminal rather than civil law. In the second week of the strike the Kent NUM challenged those powers in court, but they lost the case. The prevention of large numbers of pickets assembling to intimidate those who wished to work would be vital to the outcome of the dispute.

By the last week of March the situation was fairly clear. At the majority of pits Mr Scargill and his colleagues had a tight grip, which it would not be easy to break. But in our planning over the previous two years we had
not allowed ourselves to assume that any coal would be mined during a strike, whereas in fact a substantial section of the industry was still working. If we could move this coal to the power stations then the prospects for endurance would be transformed. But we had to act so that at any one time we did not unite against us all the unions involved in the use and distribution of coal. This consideration meant that we all had to be very careful when and where the civil law was used, and the NCB suspended – though it did not withdraw – its civil action.

Although Mr Scargill had been very anxious to avoid a ballot before the strike began, it was clear to us that he wanted to keep the possibility open. Indeed the following month an NUM Special Delegate Conference voted to reduce the majority required for a strike from 55 per cent to 50 per cent. Also at the beginning of the strike we had hopes that moderates on the NUM executive might succeed in forcing a ballot. This made it even more important to keep the balance of opinion among miners favourable to our cause because it seemed that much of the opposition to the strike came from miners angry not to have been allowed to vote. Would a ballot held during a strike, with emotions raised, produce a majority for or against Mr Scargill? I was not entirely sure.

I received weekly reports from the Department of Energy setting out the position and I read them very carefully indeed. Early in the strike the power stations were consuming coal at the rate of about 1.7 million tons a week, though the net reduction in stocks was smaller because some deliveries were getting through. The CEGB estimated endurance at about six months but this assumed a build-up to maximum oilburn – that is, using oil-fired stations at full capacity – which had not yet begun. We had to judge when this should be set in train because it would certainly be described as provocative by the NUM leadership. However, I decided on Monday 26 March that this nettle must now be grasped.

Industrial stocks were, of course, much lower than those at the power stations: the cement industry was particularly vulnerable and important. But it was BSC whose problems were most immediate. Their integrated steel plants at Redcar and Scunthorpe would have to close in the next fortnight if supplies of coke and coal were not delivered and unloaded. Port Talbot, Ravenscraig and Llanwern had stocks sufficient for no more than three to five weeks. Not surprisingly, BSC was extremely concerned as the position changed from day to day.

This was the state of uncertainty as we ended the first month of the strike.

The stalemate continued during April. In spite of continuing heavy picketing, there were some signs of a drift back to work, particularly in Lancashire. The leaders of the rail unions and the seamen promised to support the miners in their struggle: there were many declarations of this kind during the strike, but their members were less enthusiastic. The first court cases against the NUM began: two coke hauliers began legal action against the South Wales NUM picketing of Port Talbot steelworks.