This Was Britain

Posted on March 5, 2009

It is 25 years since strike action at the Cortonwood and Bullcliffe Wood collieries led to the year long national strike action by the National Union of Mineworkers, which became known as ‘The Miners’ Strike’.

Spitting Image puppet, Roy Hattersley popped up on the BBC last night, accusing NUM leader Arthur Scargill of being a ‘romantic’ and ‘taking things too personally’, because the miners stood up and fought to protect their jobs and their livelihoods when the Tories moved to throw them on the slag heap. To men like Hattersley, class struggle must have seemed like a distant dream of youth, when they were engaged in the cold, hard business of selling out the miners, steelworkers and others, as the Labour Party leadership and their allies in the TUC bureaucracy were doing. In fact Hattersley’s only qualm over the pit closures appears to be the way they were carried out. Undoubtedly things would have been more pleasant for him and his friends in the shadow cabinet and the TUC leadership, if the miners had gone meekly to the dole queue. Hattersley believes the miners should have accepted the inevitable, and bowed to — what he is evidently convinced — was the irresistable force of the Tories’ anti-working class agenda, as they were, in his opinion, doomed to fail.

Thatcher’s campaign didn’t arrive out of the blue. The Tories had been planning their war on the most class conscious, tenacious and militant section of organised labour since the mid 70s, as outlined in the 1974 Ridley Plan, leaked to The Economist and published in 1978. The plan proposed that unions should be picked off one by one — steel, civil service, railways — to ensure a weakening of organised labour, before attacking the more ‘vulnerable’ (to industrial action) industries such as coal mining, energy production or the docks. The plan’s ‘confidential annex’ recommended that:

Thatcher’s election in 1979 coincided with recession — a sharp rise in interest rates, mass unemployment, and a drop in manufacturing output with the concomitant shift to financial services which has brought so much misery in the current crisis of capitalism. The Tories, in the grip of a Victorian moralist ideology, blamed the victims of recession and set out to punish the working class, slashing public spending and services. Organised labour was standing in the way of Tory policy. The Tories had backed away from pit closures in 1981, but in 1984, with coal stockpiled and power stations converted to burn oil, the National Coal Board announced pit closures.

How did the Labour Party leadership, including deputy leader Roy Hattersley, respond to the threatened loss of livelihood of tens of thousands of their constituents and people whose class interests they were supposed to represent? How did they respond to the police and army imposing virtual martial law on pit towns? How did they respond to the erosion of their traditional power base? Depite widespread public support for the miners and support from the Labour Party rank and file, the leadership did nothing. Instead, Kinnock and Hattersley opted to appear ‘reasonable and moderate’ — to roll over. Instead of supporting the workers, Kinnock and Hattersley aided the Tories by attacking Labour Councils and the left of their own party.

The miners strike was doomed by the failure of Labour Party leaders, and a class-collaborationist and increasingly weak TUC bureaucracy, to give full and unqualified support to the strikers. Instead they stood by while the Tories fomented division among the workers. It’s almost as if Kinnock and the others wanted them to lose.

For Hattersley to go on the BBC and pontificate as if his wasn’t one of the hands on the haft of the dagger is a disgrace.

OUR DAY WILL COME

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