Margaret Thatcher: The Autobiography (77 page)

The most serious development, however, had been a circular issued on 15 August by the NCB to members of the National Association of Colliery Overmen, Deputies and Shotfirers (NACODS). By law, coal could only be
mined in the presence of suitably qualified safety personnel – the great majority of whom were members of NACODS. In April, NACODS members voted to strike, but the margin was less than the two-thirds required by union rules. Up to mid-August the NCB had varied in its policy towards NACODS: in some areas members were being allowed to stay away from striking pits where no work was being done, in others they were being required to cross picket lines. The NCB circular now generalized the latter policy, threatening to withhold pay from NACODS members who refused to comply.

The NCB circular played into the hands of those leaders of NACODS, particularly its president, who were strongly sympathetic to the NUM. It was easy to understand why the NCB acted as they did. But it was a major error, subsequently compounded by their failure to perceive the swing in favour of a strike among NACODS members, and it almost precipitated disaster.

September and October were always likely to be difficult months. The miners would be looking forward to the winter when demand for electricity was at its highest and power cuts most likely. At the TUC Conference in early September a majority of trade unions – strongly opposed by the electricity and power workers – pledged support for the miners, though in most cases they had no intention of giving it. When the forthright electricians’ leader Eric Hammond made a powerful speech pointing this out, he was heavily barracked. Neil Kinnock also spoke at the conference, coming as near as he ever did to outright condemnation of picket line violence, but without taking any action to expel from his party those who supported it. Meanwhile, Mr Scargill reaffirmed his view that there was no such thing as an uneconomic pit, only pits which had been starved of the necessary investment.

Negotiations between the NCB and the NUM were resumed on 9 September. I was always concerned that Ian MacGregor and the NCB team would unwittingly give away basic principles for which the strike was being fought. He was a businessman, not a politician, and thought in terms of reasonableness and reaching a deal. I suspect that Mr MacGregor’s view was that once he got the miners back to work he would be able to restructure the industry as he wished, whatever the precise terms on which a settlement had been reached. The rest of us, from long experience, understood that Arthur Scargill and his friends would exploit a fudged formula and that we should be back where we started. It was crucial that the NUM’s claim that uneconomic pits should never be
closed should be defeated, and be seen to be defeated, and the use of strikes for political purposes discredited once and for all.

It was also in September that I first met in person members of the ‘Miners’ Wives Back to Work Campaign’, whose representatives came to see me at 10 Downing Street. I was moved by the courage of these women, whose families were subject to abuse and intimidation. They said that the majority of miners still did not understand the full extent of the NCB’s pay offer and plans for investment: more needed to be done to put across the NCB’s case to striking miners, many of whom relied on the NUM for their information. They confirmed that while talks between the NCB and the NUM were going on, or were in prospect, it was extremely difficult to persuade men to return to work. They explained to me how small shops in the coalfields were being blackmailed into supplying food and goods for striking miners and withholding them from working miners. But perhaps the most shocking thing they had to say was that local NCB management in some areas were not anxious to promote a return to work and in one particular area were actively siding with the NUM to discourage it.

Of course, the vital thing for these women was that the NCB should do everything it could to protect miners who had led the return to work, if necessary transferring them to pits where there were fewer militants and giving them priority in applications for redundancies. I said that we would not let them down, and I think I kept my word. The whole country was in their debt.

One working miner’s wife, Mrs McGibbon from Kent, spoke at the Conservative Party Conference, describing the harrowing experiences which she and her family had undergone. Even her small children were targets: they were told that their parents were going to be killed. Shortly after she had spoken the
Morning Star
published her address. A week later her home was attacked.

On 11 September the National Working Miners’ Committee was formed. This was an important development in the history of the working miners’ movement. Meanwhile the threat from NACODS crept up on us. A strike ballot was to be held on 28 September. At first the NCB was optimistic about the result of the ballot, but ominously, as the days went by, their assessments grew less and less hopeful and it was clear that a NACODS strike would make it even more difficult to bring about a return to work by miners in the more militant areas. NACODS men were not the only NCB employees with the necessary safety qualifications.
Many members of the British Association of Colliery Managers (BACM) were also qualified, but it would be difficult to persuade them to go underground and perform these tasks in the face of NACODS hostility. And while there were some NUM members who had passed the requisite examinations, they could provide only limited cover.

On Tuesday 25 September Peter Walker told the ministerial group on coal that it now looked likely that NACODS would vote for a strike. He was right: when the result came through on Friday we discovered that 82.5 per cent had voted in favour.

This was very bad news. Some in Whitehall feared that a bandwagon might begin to roll in Mr Scargill’s favour. We were now approaching the autumn and the militants might gain new heart.

The NCB and NACODS held talks on Monday 1 October. Agreement was reached on pay and on guidelines as regards crossing picket lines. The following day there were discussions on machinery for the review of pit closures and the possibility of some form of arbitration in cases of disagreement. This was to remain the most difficult question. No matter how elaborate the process of consultation, the NCB could not concede to a third party the right of ultimate decision over pit closures. This, although generally understood, was best not set out too starkly.

All this time we were faced with hostile outside comment and pressure. The Labour Party Conference wholeheartedly backed the NUM and condemned the police. Worst of all, perhaps, was Neil Kinnock’s speech in which, under pressure from the left wing and trade unions, he retreated from the tougher line he had taken at the TUC Conference. He took refuge in a general condemnation of violence which made no distinction between the use of violence with the aim of breaking the law and the use of force to uphold it.

Towards the end of October the situation changed sharply once again. Three events within a week were particularly hopeful for us and must have come as hammerblows to Mr Scargill. First, on Tuesday 24 October the NACODS executive agreed not to strike after all. Precisely what happened is unclear. In all probability the moderates on the executive convinced the hardliners that their members simply would not act as stooges for Mr Scargill.

Second, it was at this point that the civil law at last began to bite. I have already mentioned a case which had been brought against the NUM by two Yorkshire miners: the High Court had ruled in the two
miners’ favour that the strike in Yorkshire could not be described as ‘official’. The NUM had ignored the ruling and as a result a writ had been served on an astonished Mr Scargill on the floor of the Labour Party Conference. On 10 October both he and the union had been found in contempt of court and fined £1,000 and £200,000 respectively. Mr Scargill’s fine was paid anonymously, but the NUM refused to pay and the High Court ordered its assets to be sequestrated. It soon became evident that the NUM had prepared for this event, but the financial pressure on the union was now intense and its ability to organize was greatly hampered.

Finally, on Sunday 28 October – only three days after the sequestration order – the
Sunday Times
revealed that an official of the NUM had visited Libya and made a personal appeal to Colonel Gaddafi for his support. This was astonishing news and even Mr Scargill’s friends were dismayed. At the beginning of October, Mr Scargill (travelling under an alias as ‘Mr Smith’) had visited Paris with his colleague Mr Roger Windsor to meet representatives of the French communist trade union, the CGT. Present at the meeting was a Libyan whom Mr Scargill later claimed to be a representative of Libyan trade unionists – a rare breed, in fact, since Colonel Gaddafi had dissolved all trade unions when he came to power in 1969. It seems likely that Colonel Gaddafi made a donation to the NUM, though the amount is uncertain. The sum of £150,000 has been suggested. Mr Windsor’s visit to Libya was a follow-up to the Paris meeting.

A further sum was certainly received from an equally unlikely source: the nonexistent ‘trade unions’ of Soviet-controlled Afghanistan. And in September reports had begun to surface that the NUM was receiving assistance from Soviet miners – a group whose members would have looked with envy on the freedoms, incomes and working conditions of their British equivalents. It was quite clear that these initiatives had the support of the Soviet Government. Otherwise the Soviet miners would not have had access to convertible currency. Our displeasure was made very clear to the Soviet Ambassador and I raised the matter with Mr Gorbachev when he visited Britain for the first time in December, who claimed to be unaware of it.
*

All this did the NUM’s cause great harm, not least with other trade unionists. The British people have plenty of sympathy for someone fighting
for his job, but very little for anyone who seeks help from foreign powers out to destroy his country’s freedom.

In November the NCB announced that miners who were back at work on Monday 19 November would qualify for a substantial Christmas bonus. The NCB mounted a direct mail campaign to draw the attention of striking miners to the offer. Combined with the growing disillusionment with Mr Scargill, this had an immediate effect. In the first week after the offer 2,203 miners returned to work, six times more than in the previous week. Our strategy was to let this trend continue without trying to take any explicit political credit for it, which could have been counterproductive.

The return to work continued. But so did the violence. Violence and intimidation well away from the pit heads were more difficult for the police to prevent and required fewer people to perpetrate: consequently it was on such tactics that the militant miners now concentrated. One incident that particularly struck me took place on Friday 23 November when Michael Fletcher, a working miner from Pontefract in Yorkshire, was attacked and beaten by a gang of miners in his own home. No fewer than nineteen men were arrested for the crime. Then a week later came one of the most appalling events of the strike: a three-foot concrete post was thrown from a motorway bridge onto a taxi carrying a South Wales miner to work. The driver, David Wilkie, was killed. I wondered whether there was any limit to the savagery of which these people were capable.

As the year ended, our main objective was to encourage a further return to work from 7 January, the first working Monday in the New Year. Though the NCB’s bonus offer had expired, there was still a strong financial incentive for strikers to return to work in the near future because they would pay little, if any, income tax on their wages if they went back before the end of the tax year on 31 March. The great strategic prize would be to get more than 50 per cent of NUM members back to work: if we could secure that, it would be equivalent in practical and presentational terms to a vote in a national ballot to end the strike. This would require the return of a further 15,000 to work, which the NCB were busily preparing a new campaign of letters and press advertising to achieve.

It was also vital that the miners and the public at large should be told that there would be no power cuts that winter, contrary to Mr Scargill’s ever more desperate and incredible predictions. We held off making such an announcement until we could be absolutely certain, but finally on 29 December Peter Walker was able to issue a statement saying that he had
been informed by the Chairman of the CEGB that at the level of coal production that had now been achieved there would be no power cuts during the whole of 1985.

By the middle of January there were almost 75,000 NUM members not on strike and the rate of return was running at about 2,500 a week.

The one thing which could be relied upon to slow down the progress was further negotiations: and so it proved. When news broke of ‘talks about talks’, which were arranged between the NCB and the NUM on Monday 21 January, the effect was to cut the rate of return to rather less than half that of the previous week.

Meanwhile, public attention increasingly focused on the attempts of the sequestrators to trace and recover NUM funds which had been transferred abroad. In early December further legal action by working miners had led to the removal of the NUM’s trustees and the appointment of an official receiver. These were, of course, principally questions for the courts. However, even with the full armoury of the law, there were such difficulties in tracing the funds that the sequestrators might not even have been able to cover their costs. Accordingly, Michael Havers told the Commons on Tuesday 11 December that the Government would indemnify them against the loss. We were also involved in trying to ensure maximum co-operation from foreign governments – Ireland and Luxemburg – in whose jurisdictions the NUM had lodged its money. Towards the end of January some £5 million was recovered.

The TUC leaders were anxious to save the militants from humiliating defeat. But Mr Scargill had no intention of budging: he had already stated publicly that he would prefer a return to work without an agreement to acceptance of the NCB’s proposals. For its part, the NCB had told the TUC that there was no basis for negotiation on the terms still demanded by the NUM. I recognized that, although their motives were decidedly mixed, the TUC leaders and particularly the General Secretary had been acting in good faith. They must have realized by now that there was no possibility of doing business with Mr Scargill. Consequently, when a delegation from the TUC asked to see me, I agreed.