Throughout this 40th anniversary year of the miners’ strike, Left Horizons will publish regular bulletins on important issues and developments that occurred during the strike “as it happened”. This update covers events between 2 November and 14 December 1984.
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As winter and Christmas approached, the full force of the legal system was used against the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), with injunctions and fines related to the recent Tory anti-union laws, designed to financially ruin the union and some individual officers. The laws were used against other unions, too and the key issue became how the whole trade union movement would respond to these attacks on its independence.
The government also intensified their campaign to persuade or drive strikers “back to work” while the miners’ and their supporters were desperate for solidarity action from other workers and for the winter to bring the long-awaited power cuts.
The battle against Tory laws
The Courts had already issued an order, back on 26 October, to sequester (ie seize) the NUM funds and had made individual members of the NUM Executive personally liable for the £200,000 fine. Yet the NUM Executive held firm.
The sequestrator obtained an injunction from a Dublin Court on 4 November to freeze NUM funds, £2.75 million, which had been deposited in the Irish Republic. On 7 November, the NUM resisted an attempt to have these given to the sequestrator but they remained frozen. Later, on 9December, the government tried to seize £4.6 million of NUM funds in Luxembourg, with the same result; the NUM account was frozen, but the sequestrator could not get their hands on the money [National Justice for Mineworkers campaign – NJFM]
An attempt was made on 5 November to deprive Yorkshire NUM officers of the use of their funds. Action was also taken against Derbyshire NUM officials to bankrupt them for “unlawfully” using NUM funds in an “unofficial” strike – according to Tory anti-union laws. [Militant 14 December and the NJFM]
Back in the summer, the South Wales NUM had funds seized due to a legal case brought by owners of a lorry-transport firm seeking an injunction preventing the NUM from taking action against them – again claiming that the strike was unofficial – and now a string of scab miners (organised and funded of course by the National Coal Board and the government) were lined up to seek similar injunctions to prevent the NUM from picketing or applying pressure to them.
Unprecedented attack on trade unions
On 30 November, frustrated in their attempts to seize the NUM’s overseas assets, the government actually appointed an Official Receiver to take complete control of NUM assets and funds. He was, incredibly, a Tory Party official from Derbyshire – one Mr Brewer! This was an absolutely unprecedented attack on trade unions, and needed a forceful response from the entire trade union movement [NJFM]
It was not just the NUM who had been targeted by the Courts. A dispute at the Austin-Rover car plant had led to another £200,000 fine for the Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU) for refusing to co-operate with a High Court injunction to either hold a secret ballot or call off the strike. In that case the state managed to find the occupant of a post invented in the year 1211, the “Queen’s Remembrancer”, no less, who was originally responsible for collecting taxes on land in the City of London!
[Militant 7 December]
If the unions did not resist these laws, any effective strike action would be severely limited, under threat of the use of sweeping powers to seize the assets of the unions and destroy their apparatus.
A united approach, led by the TUC and involving all unions could have easily swept away such nonsense. It was essential that a 24-hour general strike was called the first time such measures were used, back in July. By December, some were even to considering an all-out general strike. But the trade union movement was anything but united.
The official policy of the TUC was not to co-operate with the Tory laws, but right-wing unions such as the Engineering Union (AUEW) and the Electricians and Plumbers (EEPTU) flouted this. They even accepted government money to fund the new compulsory ballots laid down in the legislation.
To its credit, the TGWU (now part of UNITE) refused to take the money or co-operate but their leaders interpreted this as sitting back and passively defying the laws. The Austin-Rover strike itself ended after two and a half weeks as, in the absence of a wider struggle and a clear lead, workers voted to return to work.
Scargill calls for massive industrial action
The NUM openly called for widespread industrial action in solidarity. In Labour Weekly [7 December], Scargill appealed to the whole movement for “industrial action – the most massive industrial action our movement has ever known – and we must have it now!”
The NUM issued a call for an emergency meeting of the TUC General Council and asked that it “mobilises industrial action to stop this most vicious threat in our history, to the freedom and independence of British Trade Unions.” [Militant 7 December]
Of course, the timid TUC leaders would never show any kind of lead in that direction. The miners’ leaders could have issued a call to other unions themselves for a 24-hour general strike, as a start, and, crucially, named the day, but they did not do so. No widespread solidarity action of this kind took place and the trade union movement left the NUM to valiantly defy the laws alone.
On 28 November, the TUC had asked for more negotiations with the government! Two days later, the Receiver was appointed. Ian MacGregor, of the NCB, had insisted that the starting point of any negotiations would be the acceptance of the pit closures by the NUM. And then, on 5 December, he announced plans to privatise even those pits that remained after the closure programme! But the pointless talks dragged on in the face of these obvious provocations [NJFM].
As well as pressurising the union, the government was tightening the screws on ordinary miners and their families. Since the beginning of the dispute the DHSS (now DWP) had “assumed” that miners were receiving £15 per week strike pay, even though they knew this was not the case and the government had seized the union’s asserts in any case. This figure was deducted from any benefits claimed by miners’ families. On 21 November they raised the “assumed amount” to £16, making life even harder, just as winter was approaching. The benefits for miners who were single with no children was actually cut.
Stormy scenes in Parliament
These cuts led to stormy scenes in the House of Commons, sadly not televised back then. Thirty MPs, mostly from the Campaign Group, surrounded the Tory minister who announced the measures, Norman Fowler. Dave Nellist, the Labour MP from Coventry South West and a Militant supporter, took his speech notes and ripped them up while Ernie Roberts (Hackney North and Stoke Newington) threw a £1 note at him!
Earlier, on 19 November, Nellist had made a House of Commons speech in which he answered the lies about the strike “crumbling”. He pointed out that even by official Coal Board figures, 90.5% of miners in Scotland were still out, 97% in Yorkshire and 99.6% in South Wales! And this was after almost nine months on strike.
He said
“Tory Members of Parliament, as shown by their peals of laughter, have no chance of understanding the sacrifice of the last nine months, when families have sold cars, houses, furniture, televisions and videos, and told children, “There are no birthdays this year. There is no Christmas coming up, and there will be no holidays.” The sacrifice that those families have made on behalf of themselves and their class is something that Tory MPs with their salaries and their family background would never understand.”
He paid special tribute to the
“heroic role played by women in the coal-mining areas…They have learnt what it is to struggle, to sacrifice and to organise, and they will put those talents to use when the strike is over by coming into the organised labour and trade union movement.”
[Militant 30 November]
Nellist’s comments on the “return to work” were echoed by local activists. Stan Pierce, from Wearmouth NUM in Co Durham, pointed out that in the Northumberland and Durham coalfields, the NCB claim that 706 men were at work, out of 23,000. That is just 3.06%. And even that 706 figure included miners who were on long-term sick leave. Many of the scabs were not actually direct production workers, and little or no coal was actually being produced. In Stan’s own pit, just 86 miners were working, out of 2,450, and of those, only 20 were NUM members [Militant 23 November]
140,000 still on strike
The Tory press and the broadcast media were full of accounts of how many miners were working – 51, 372 in early December (NCB figures) – but they didn’t report on the 140,000 miners (at least) who were still on strike. Nor did they report the numbers of miners who come back out on strike once they saw the way the pits were run during the dispute, such as nine men did in Bold in Lancashire. In Snowdown colliery, in Kent, the number of scabs fell in early December from 13 to 8 [Militant 7 December]
The Tories also tried other tactics to get miners to return. Personal letters were sent to strikers, and even phone calls or home visits were tried. The cynical offer was made of a “Christmas bonus” of £650 if they returned by 19 December. Given the government plans to close the pits, this was sarcastically described by Dave Nellist MP in his speech as “a lump-sum social security benefit”. £650 was barely a week’s wages for a Metropolitan Police officer on picket duty. However, small numbers of miners, with all the pressure of Christmas and the winter, were fooled into taking this bribe. [Militant 23 November]
Reports from Bilston Glen in Midlothian talked of fights underground between different hostile groups of scabs – “super scabs” who worked from the beginning; “intermediate scabs” who drifted back over the months of the dispute; and “Santa Claus” scabs who went back just for the Christmas bonus, who didn’t think they were scabs at all [Militant 7 December].
Arthur Scargill, of the NUM, was uncompromising. At a speech in Newcastle he said, “We won’t always be poor but they’ll have to live with the label “scab” until the day they die.” . Families were split. John Cunningham, of Ellington pit in Northumberland was “disgusted” when his own father, a local NUM secretary, tried to promote a movement “back to work” in conjunction with the Coal Board and the press. In the event, only 200-odd miners went back, out of a workforce of 2,300 [Militant 23 November].
The courts target witnesses
On top of all this pressure was the routine harrassment and violence meted out by the police. At Kiveton Park in Yorkshire, police used mounted police, dogs and baton charges on pickets. One miner got one broken and three cracked ribs. At the same pit, a miner was arrested and charged with threatening behaviour and obstruction, but was cleared on the evidence of a witness. Yet not only was he bound over to keep the peace but the defence witness was as well! [Militant 7 December]
This was a true legal innovation but incredibly, a week later, the same thing happened to a miner at Bold Colliery in Lancashire and his witnesses. They were bound over for £250 for one year and banned from picketing! This was just a blatant and outrageous attempt to prevent miners from playing an active role in the strike. Miners who were arrested also faced the sack, which in some cases could lead to eviction from a house owned by the Coal Board [Militant 14 December].
The strike had become even more bitter and violent than before. In Faversham, in Kent, a miners’ picketing hut was set on fire while pickets were inside. In South Wales threats were made that some donated food had been injected with acid. In Cannock in Staffordshire, people broke in to an Unemployed Workers’ Centre to destroy sweets and toys collected for miners’ children for Christmas.
[photo – David Pearson – Militant 7 December]
There was an attack on a disabled, wheelchair using woman who supported the miners by masked men who broke into her home in Lancashire, beat her, cut her and put a noose round her neck. Also in Lancashire, miners received death threats, and their windows were smashed with bricks. Their van was attacked by working miners and the windscreen smashed [Militant 7 December].
In this febrile and desperate atmosphere an act of wild and reckless stupidity – with fatal consequences – was committed by two young miners in South Wales on 30 November. They dropped a concrete block from a bridge over a motorway in an attempt to stop a taxi which was carrying scabs to work as part of a police convoy. The block killed the taxi driver, David Wilkie, and the two miners were arrested for murder.
Speaking at a rally in Stoke on Trent, Scargill, said that the NUM were “deeply shocked” at the death and that “the NUM dissociates itself from any acts of this kind.” [Militant 7 December] However, the death was seized upon by the press and TV channels and was undoubtedly a serious blow to the support for the miners and to solidarity action from some other groups of workers. It gave ammunition to those in the movement who did not support the NUM, both trade union leaders and the Labour Party leader, Neil Kinnock, who focused his attacks on “violent extremists” in the NUM.
Power cuts
The mining communities and their wider networks of supporters were desperately hoping that winter would come to the rescue and lead to power cuts that had been long-predicted, and which would put real pressure on the government to settle the dispute. However, the government had successfully continued to build up coal stocks and to switch many power stations to use oil.
It was, therefore, essential that other workers took solidarity action stop movements of coal, especially from open-cast mines not covered by the NUM, and oil transports. It is also worth noting that imports of coal from so-called “socialist” Poland increased by 217% over the first seven months of the strike [Militant 7 December].
Three groups of workers were central to any future success. Rail workers and their unions, the NUR and ASLEF, had played an excellent role throughout the strike, refusing to move coal, often in the face of threats and victimisation.
Power station workers could win the dispute if they took solidarity action, but they had not done so, although workers in some stations had succeeded in stopping the use of scab coal or oil, at least for a time. West Thurrock power station, in Essex, had to be taken off the National Grid due to solidarity action by power workers.
A campaign to build support in power stations, including visits from miners and the women of the communities, was required, to counter the negative publicity, especially after the fake “scandal” of the alleged Libyan money and the killing od the South Wales taxi driver.
In one small success, mechanical engineering workers employed by Aitons, stopped work on building an oil pipeline from the River Ouse to the Drax power station. This is in spite of their bosses issuing them with redundancy notices. Only 150 yards were built before the workers responded to an NUM appeal. The organised tanker drivers had refused to deliver coal and two “cowboy” firms were being used instead, but workers at Drax demanded that this was stopped. Workers at the power station had been holding regular collections for the miners throughout the strike [Militant 23 and 30 November].
Stop oil supplies
Because of the dependence on oil, strong solidarity action from transport workers to “black” (ie not work with) oil supplies would have seriously affected power stations at Drax, Fiddlers Ferry and Didcot. The rapid increase in the use of oil had led to an 18% rise in sulphur dioxide in the atmosphere!
Finally, the transport workers’ union, the TGWU, was key to the movement of oil supplies and open-cast coal. While it was true that government made extensive use of private, non-union lorry companies to scab on the miners’ strike, it was also the case that even some TGWU members were scabbing. The TGWU leaders, who were broadly on the left, needed urgently to address this issue.
There actually were some power cuts around this time, though the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB) claimed these were due to “technical difficulties”. Cwmbran in South Wales had power cuts of 3-4 hours every day between 19-23 November, and there was a 2-3 hour blackout in Chesterfield on 23 November [Militant 7 December]. But these were nowhere near enough to secure victory for the NUM.
Beyond attempts to get solidarity action from other workers, the mining communities had to organise even harder to ensure that the picketing was organised and that the miners were not starved back to work.
The slight increase in the numbers of scabs actually led to more miners becoming actively involved in the strike – picketing and fundraising. A “Picket Co-ordinating Committee” was formed in the Blyth and Ashington area in Northumberland to draw more rank and file miners into activity. A similar committee existed in Kent, too.
Inspiring efforts
The inspiring efforts to provide meals, food parcels and other essential supplies to mining families carried on, mainly run by women in the mining communities. In the Gateshead area, for example, in the North East of England, funds were partly raised by the women singling songs supporting the strike and against the Tories and bosses in local clubs. Alan Hull of the pop group, Lindisfarne offered to help them make a record. Many of the women also experienced police violence on picket lines, too, alongside the men.
One woman told Militant [7 December]: – “Nine months into the strike and our morale is as high as ever”
while another added: –
“McNasty [MacGregor] has got no chance against us lot. We care about our bairns, their needs and their futures and we know they understand this. Oh yes, our bairns won’t starve!”
In Newtongrange in Midlothian, the miners canteen, organised in a local community centre, received money from the SOGAT print union and food from a local, community-owned pub. Midlothian District Council, almost entirely Labour, suspended council house rent collection from striking miners for the duration of the strike and made a grant of £5,000 towards the kitchen [ Militant 23 November].
[LGSM archive}
In one powerful symbol of the wide range of support that the miners still enjoyed, and the connections that were being made, on 10 December, Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners held a cheekily titled “Pits and Perverts Benefit Ball” in the large Electric Ballroom in Camden, North London, attended by many miners.
The gay pop group Bronski Beat headlined alongside many other Lesbian and Gay artists and performers, alternating with speeches from miners and LGSM itself. £4,000 was raised for Swansea, Neath and Dulais Miners Support Group with whom LGSM were twinned. A bucket collection also raised £928 for Kiveton Park and £200 was donated to Hatfield Main, both in Yorkshire. South Wales miner, Dai Donovan said from the stage: –
“You have worn our badge, “Coal not Dole” and you know what harrassment means, as we do. Now we will pin your badge on us; we will support you.”
[LGSM archive]
This is just one example of the continued support for the miners in many different sections of working class people, in spite of everything that the government and bosses had thrown at them over nine hard fought, difficult months of determination, organisation and sacrifice. But what was needed was direct industrial action by other workers in solidarity with the NUM. The success of this epic struggle ultimately depended on that.
[NB – Much of the information in this article comes from Militant issues 23 November – 14 December]
