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INTRODUCTION
The Miners' Strike has now been going on for nine months.
Tony Benn has said that it is the most important strike in Britain this century. Peter Heathfield, Secretary of the NUM, has recently said that it is a strike which will decide the future of the trade union movement for the next generation.
Nevertheless, at the end of nine months, the miners are no closer to victory. It is said by some that this is because of the intransigence of the Thatcher Government. In the light of the evidence of 1980, this is a difficult conclusion to substantiate. In 1980, when Thatcher judged that the miners were in a strong position, and indeed when Joe Gormley had the results of a strike ballot behind him, she retreated swiftly and without hesitation.
If the Thatcher Government has been intransigent in 1984, it has been able to stand firm for two reasons: firstly, there is no threat to electricity supplies because coal continues to be produced and sent to power stations; secondly, the NUM has at no time made its objectives in this strike clear. How can Thatcher sanction a compromise settlement when the NUM do not even know what they want! Compromise, after all, is only possible when both sides have a goal towards which they are aiming, and then an interim goal for which they are willing to settle.
PLAN FOR COAL
Arthur Scargill, when pressed, says that the NUM want the NCB to renew their commitment to the Plan for Coal. That sounds reasonable, and indeed it is a modest enough goal. Yet, Arthur Scargill contradicts himself, repeatedly and with great conviction, when he says that the NUM wants no more than what is in the Plan for Coal. He has also promised the miners that they are fighting to keep pits open, even when they have been judged to be uneconomic. He has promised miners that if they fight this strike to the bitter end, their jobs, and jobs for their children and grandchildren, will be safe.
There is nothing in the Plan for Coal about keeping uneconomic pits open; and there is nothing in it about safeguarding miners' jobs for perpetuity either. This is not surprising. The Plan for Coal was agreed between the Labour Government, the NUM and the NCB in 1974. What justification could the Labour Government give to the nation then for keeping uneconomic pits open when there were also uneconomic shipyards, car factories and railways which were being slimmed down and whose management were being told that they must become more efficient? Why should miners be the only workers who had full property rights over their jobs? No other workers, after all, have the right to bequeath their jobs to their sons.
An Appendix at the end of this pamphlet gives details of the Plan for Coal. It deserves careful reading. It shows that the last Labour Government was no more willing to give an open-ended commitment to underwrite the losses of uneconomic pits than this Tory one. There is certainly no socialist justification for according coalminers more privileged treatment than other workers. Socialism has always attacked aristocracy of all kinds, and supported equality and social justice. Arthur Scargill's demand that miners be accorded the right to pass on their jobs to their sons is a demand for a miners' aristocracy, i.e. where privilege is acquired by inheritance.
The Plan for Coal does, of course, provide a reasonable framework for running the mining industry. But Arthur Scargill on the one hand says that the NUM only wants a renewed commitment to that Plan, whilst on the other hand demanding jobs for miners in perpetuity. No one in the TUC or the Shadow Cabinet has so far reminded Scargill and the nation of exactly what the last Labour Government pledged itself to support in the Plan for Coal. The contradiction between the Plan for Coal and Scargill's demands has been studiously ignored for the last nine months!
There have been signs that management in the NCB, particularly Mr. Ned Smith, and Mr. Peter Walker, Energy Minister in the Tory Government, have recognised that Scargill has been equivocating over the Plan for Coal. These men have wanted to bring out into the open the fact that Scargill has been demanding aristocratic status for the miners. So far, their inclination to exploit the contradictory and aristocratic nature of the NUM case, as put by Scargill, has been blocked, probably by anti-union elements in the Tory Government (including Thatcher) and Ian McGregor.
OPPOSITION IN THE LABOUR MOVEMENT
Inside the Labour Movement, it has been left to Mr. Jimmy Reid to point out the glaring contradictions in Mr. Scargill's leadership of the strike. Why have the rest of the Movement stayed silent?
Why, if Scargill is leading the miners in a fight which is getting nowhere fast, have the rest of the Movement acquiesced? Is there a death wish which has mysteriously overtaken the trade union leaders and made them indifferent to allowing the Movement to get mixed up with a strike that is on a hiding to nowhere?
We should first look at the one union which has officially, and repeatedly, stood out against Mr. Scargill, the EETPU. The electricians' union have opposed Scargill, without hesitation, because their leaders are different to the leadership of the rest of the Movement. The EETPU leaders do not believe that they are holding trade union office for any other reason than to get the best possible deal for their members out of employers. Not surprisingly, they have viewed the miners' strike with scepticism from the beginning. They could see that Scargill was asking for something impossible: jobs in perpetuity in pits which might or might not have coal which could be usefully mined. Moreover, as union leaders for electricians, they did not understand why they should be supporting Scargill's demands for miners, which were far more than electricians get, could ever hope to get, or would ever dream of asking for.
The EETPU leaders are exceptional inside the Labour Movement in reckoning that their main job is to get the best possible deal for their members. This is because the union in the 1960's went through a protracted and bitter internal conflict over precisely this question. Those activists inside the union who argued that it should be primarily an instrument for socialist politics exposed themselves to attack by engaging in ballot-rigging and refusing to accept democratic procedure. The result was that the socialist side of the union was defeated totally by the force of members' reaction to the revelations of ballot-rigging and the abuse by left-wingers of leadership positions. The current EETPU leaders have looked at the miners' strike for what it is, because they are simply trade unionists who view the purpose of a strike as being simply to push the employers to make more concessions.
From this point of view, they can see, as can the millions of trade unionists who have followed the strike on their televisions, that Mr. Scargill has been on a hiding to nothing from the very beginning.