• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2967 0

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, however, denied the economic case for closure. His line was that no pit should be closed unless it was physically exhausted. Indeed, he denied the existence of ‘uneconomic pits’: 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.’

During the autumn and winter of 1983 — 4 Ian MacGregor formulated his plans. At that time manpower in the industry was 202,000. The Monopolies and Mergers Commission had produced a report into the coal industry in 1983 which showed that some 75 per cent of the pits were making a loss. Faced with this, Mr MacGregor began with the aim of bringing the industry to break-even point by 1988. In September 1983 he 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 under the existing colliery review procedure. 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 — 5, 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 — 4. It sounded as if Mr Scargill was preparing to lead his troops into battle. At the end of February there was an early intimation of the violence which would characterize the strike when Ian MacGregor — then 70 years old — was knocked to the ground at a Northumberland colliery by demonstrating miners. I was shocked and wrote to convey my sympathy. Far worse was to come.

Obviously we realized that a strike was always possible, but we doubted whether it 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.

THE STRIKE BEGINS

On Thursday 1 March the NCB announced the closure of the Yorkshire colliery of Cortonwood. The announcement was