Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [222]
I went on to deal with Neil Kinnock:
The Leader of the Opposition went silent on the question of a ballot until the NUM changed its rules to reduce the required majority. Then he told the House that a national ballot of the NUM was a clearer and closer prospect. That was on 12 April — the last time that we heard from him on the subject of a ballot. But on 14 July he appeared at an NUM rally and said, ‘there is no alternative but to fight: all other roads are shut off.’ What happened to the ballot?
Answer came there none.
Neil Kinnock had succeeded Michael Foot as Leader of the Labour Party in October 1983. I faced him across the despatch box of the House of Commons for seven years. Like Michael Foot, Neil Kinnock was a gifted orator; but unlike Mr Foot he was no parliamentarian. His Commons performances were marred by verbosity, a failure to master facts and technical arguments and, above all, a lack of intellectual clarity. This last drawback reflected something deeper. Mr Kinnock was entirely a product of the modern Labour Party — left-wing, close to the unions, skilful at party management and political manipulation, basically convinced that Labour’s past defeats resulted from weaknesses of presentation rather than errors of policy. He regarded words — whether speeches or the texts of manifestos and policy documents — as a means of concealing his and the Labour Party’s socialism rather than of converting others to it. So he forcefully — and on occasion courageously — denounced Trotskyists and other left-wing troublemakers, not for their brutal tactics or their extreme revolutionary objectives but because they were an embarrassment to his and Labour’s ambitions. Being Leader of the Opposition, as I well remembered, is not an easy assignment. Leading the Labour Party in Opposition must be a nightmare. But I found it difficult to sympathize with Mr Kinnock. He was involved in what seemed to me a fundamentally discreditable enterprise, that of making himself and his party appear what they were not. The House of Commons and the electorate found him out. As Opposition Leader he was out of his depth. As Prime Minister he would have been sunk.
As we entered August we had some reason to hope that the worst of the strike was behind us. Arthur Scargill and the militants were becoming increasingly isolated and frustrated. The dock strike had collapsed. The Government’s attitude and the NCB’s stance were now generally perceived in a more sympathetic light. The Labour Party was in disarray. Although the return to work remained a trickle — about 500 during July — there was no sign of any weakening of determination at the working pits. Finally, on Tuesday 7 August two Yorkshire miners began a High Court action against the Yorkshire NUM for striking without a ballot. This proved to be a vital case and led eventually to the sequestration of the whole of the NUM’s assets.
One sign of the militants’ frustration was an increase in violence against working miners and their families. The situation appeared to be under control in Nottinghamshire, but things were getting worse in Derbyshire, partly because it was more deeply divided and also because it was closer to the Yorkshire coal fields from which the flying pickets largely came. Ian MacGregor was in touch with us in No. 10 and with the Home Office. He feared that such intimidation, appalling in itself, might also slow the return to work and could frighten miners currently working into staying away. The police thought that there might have been a change of tactics on the part of the NUM: frustrated by the failure of mass picketing, perhaps they were taking to guerilla warfare based on the intimidation of individuals and companies. The police stepped up their measures to protect the Derbyshire miners: ‘freephone’ lines to police stations were installed; detective squads set out to counter intimidation; and uniformed policemen patrolled the villages.
There was also the threat of another dock strike. A tense