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THE STRIKE

A major strike can either be an industrial strike on a sound economic issue or it can be a political strike on some issue of general interest to the trade union movement - even if it is only breaking a wages freeze. Scargill's strike is neither. It falls between every stool there is. Its only demand is that no economic consideration be applied to the mining industry. And he has demonstrated that this is not an initial bargaining programme - but his final demand. (And, as we go to print, Scargill has declared that an end to pit closures for economic reasons would not now be sufficient to end the strike: there would have to be a four day week, a 20% wage increase and early retirement as well.)

Scargill's position in the seventies was that the miners were in a very strong position in the market, due to a sudden increase in demand for coal, and that they should let no political considerations deter them from exploiting their economic position to the full. His position today is the opposite of that. The demand for coal has slackened, so he demands that no heed whatever should be taken of the market, that grossly uneconomic pits should remain in production regardless of cost, and that total coal output should be expanded regardless of market demand. Since the coal industry is being treated much more favourably than any other industry, the demand that it should be completely exempted from economic criteria is not seen as a reasonable demand even by the miners themselves. That is why Scargill has been afraid to ballot his members. The Areas which have held ballots have all voted against a strike.

The one issue which enlisted some public sympathy is the effect of pit closures on small, close-knit communities. Scargill might have got public opinion on his side if he had singled out this as the basic issue, and subordinated the rest of his programme to it. That would have harmonised with the view that coal should be treasured as a national resource. A case could certainly be made for working these uneconomic pits, which are the economic basis of communities, to the point of exhaustion, and not letting the coal in them go to waste. The reduced demand for coal could be met from existing pits, at an acceptable social cost, if no new pits were opened for the time being. But no case can be made for preserving very unproductive pits on the one hand while opening up new and very highly productive pits (at a high capital cost) on the other. And such a policy knocks the bottom out of the national resource argument, since it involves producing coal in ever-increasing quantities, regardless of need as well as of cost.

For many years now industries have been closing down all over Britain, and workers have been losing their jobs. Striking miners who appear on the media find it impossible not to talk as if the issue was job losses. This is not because they are deceptive, but because their position is novel. They are guaranteed against job losses. The only job losses will be voluntary redundancies on better terms than are given in other industries. At the beginning of the strike Scargill maintained that the NCB intended to inaugurate compulsory redundancies. Whether or not that is true, it could not be made an issue in a strike called before it became NCB policy. The NCB position is that the jobs of all miners who do not wish for redundancy are guaranteed. The only job-losses are those of the children of miners who go for voluntary redundancy - and in the present economic situation that appears as an airy-fairy sort of job loss.

NATURE OF THE NUM

"...the NUM is really a national federation. Each Area, for instance, has quite considerable funds of its own, and in all Areas the contributions which members make to Area funds are in fact larger than they make to the national fund" (Gormley, p.51). A number of mining unions came together in 1945 to form the NUM, but within the NUM they retained many regional practices and traditions. The national ballot has been a condition of existence of the NUM, as rigorous observance of the Constitution has of the United States. It has nothing to do with recent legislation on union ballots.

Scargill failed to get support for a strike in two national ballots. He therefore tried to get a national strike by devious means. Areas in which the Area Executives supported him called local strikes without a ballot, and then tried to picket out the other Areas. Some of those other Areas held local ballots, in which the vote went against a strike. And some of the Areas which voted against a strike observed the pickets, while others were infuriated by the attempt to use pickets to subvert the democracy of the union, and they disregarded the pickets sent in from other areas as a matter of principle. Scargill responded by sending in massive pickets to physically prevent the "blacklegs" from going to work. Then the police were sent in to prevent pitched battles between the working miners and the massed pickets.

INTERFERENCE OF THE LAW

Scargill, of course, denounced the application of the law in industrial relations. He has conveniently forgotten that it was he, as the slick whizz-kid of the trade union movement in the seventies, who first tried to bring about legal interference in the affairs of the NUM. He tried repeatedly over a number of years to get a legal injunction to prevent the Executive negotiating an incentive scheme in furtherance of a Conference decision. Here is Gormley's account of the first attempt, in 1974, at a Special Conference:

"That Conference...was one of the mast vitriolic meetings I can remember. It began with Arthur Scargill trying to raise procedural points... I told him that, under our Rules, he couldn't raise them. He then said that he had taken legal advice - which made me bloody angry. As I said: 'You have to have all the Rules or not, and if this Union ever gets into the position when you have to go to law to decide how we are going to run our own damn Union, then we have no right to question the authority of the Government to introduce legal matters affecting the Union... We have been running this Union over the years not as a legal ruling but by custom and practice'" (p.l49) .

Scargill set the precedent, and has no legitimate grounds for complaint when the Nottingham miners go to court to prevent him from blackguarding them.

Having failed to bring out the whole of his own Union by devious means, Scargill tried to strengthen his hand by causing general economic mayhem through use of mass picketing. His biggest operation was the attempt to stop the steel industry regardless of the fact that it would have caused a loss of jobs in steel. He failed, but the fact that the attempt was made has altered the industrial landscape.

The deep fund of goodwill which has existed towards the miners, and which has certainly been of some use to them, has not just resulted from the unpleasantness of the job. There has also been a residual feeling of guilt over 1926, when the miners were left unsupported for eight or nine months after the General Strike, and then had to crawl back on humiliating terms. Scargill's handling of the NUM this year has undoubtedly cancelled out those feelings. Henceforward the NUM will be just another Union.

The battle for elementary rights was won long ago in the British mining industry. The strike is a complex affair which has been hopelessly mishandled by a leader who is trying to be revolutionary. And it occurs in a social situation whose main features result from the refusal of a powerful Labour movement to take a decisive step forward into political and economic hegemony in the 1970s.