COMMENTS:REPORTS FROM ABROAD-England: After the Miners' Defeat
Ignatieff, Michael
LONDON — It was never just a strike, but a confrontation between two Britains: the Labour and union strongholds of the decaying industrial north and of the increasingly postindustrial...
...In a Britain looking with increasing alarm at the rundown of North Sea oil beginning in the 1990s, coal looms even larger in the energy future of the economy...
...The miners also struggled unsuccessfully to persuade the public that they were striking against government plans to privatize coal and move heavily into nuclear power...
...We don't get that in a month at our pit...
...Anyone who dares to suggest that Russia is not as overwhelming a menace as they seem to assume gets dismissed as a "closet fellow traveller...
...An industrial strategy based on the expectation of demonstrations of class solidarity from the steel, power, rail and transport workers failed miserably...
...Errors of leadership exacerbated these divisions...
...The only Englishmen they regard as sound are Paul Johnson, Hugh Thomas, and Lord Chalfont...
...Two miners were killed in the struggles that followed, and the watching public fell in with Mrs...
...Thatcher's natural constituency her government's stance on the strike was taking the politics of creative destruction a little too far...
...The miners insisted that the profitability of each pit could not be judged by the criteria of current prices alone...
...A year later, Lewis Merthyr and the whole of South Wales came out solidly for the strike, while the Nottinghamshire men stayed working...
...really determined to root out the Whitehall drones and old school boys who dominate the British establishment...
...Striking miners from Yorkshire and Kent wasted precious union funds and their own savings sneaking past police roadblocks barring their way into Nottinghamshire and then massing in front of mine gates only to shout abuse at the mesh-covered vans carrying their brothers in to work...
...Mrs...
...The miners themselves were divided by the same forces dividing their communities from the rest of England...
...These images of courage, good humor and defiance had a power to mobilize support that the images of the early summer—mass pickets surging against police lines—did not...
...Certainly, within the British trade union movement there has always been a conflict that socialist politics has to reconcile between the sovereignty of private judgment—the individualism rooted in the nonconformist tradition—and the claims of solidarity enshrined in trade unionism...
...Miners and their families passionately believed that they were making a stand on behalf of that embittered army of the victims of Mrs...
...If she has lost support after the strike, it is because many of her former supporters—not necessarily tender-hearted sentimentalists— wonder how long an economically weak and bitterly divided society can be held together by someone who holds the political arts of compromise in such obvious contempt...
...WHILE THE GROUNDS OF A COMPROMISE were obvious enough—based on the appointment of a board to arbitrate pit closures—both sides defined compromise as capitulation...
...The refusal to let mines be closed on economic grounds ended up sounding like a demand for a blank check on public subsidy...
...For most of the south of England the scenes on television of the tiny miners' cottages, crammed with meetings of women's support groups, the marches with their ancient banners, and the harsh and sometimes incomprehensible accents of the tough men stoking up the fires burning in the jerry cans in front of colliery gates— all this belonged to life on another planet, or to another age...
...Not only does the prevailing view of this highly intelligent and influential Reaganite group seem to be that "Europe is dead"—a phrase they actually use—but they also seem to think that unless the United States distances itself from "this rotting corpse" it too will run the risk of going soft on Russian communism...
...By failing to call a national vote to legitimize a national strike, and by relying on mass picketing by strikers to bring out the working miners, the leadership succeeded in turning what ought to have been a concerted national defense of their industry into a civil war among miners...
...What worries me about this lot is not so much their views as the fanatical intensity with which they are expressed and the contemptuous impatience reserved for anyone bold enough to contradict...
...q sympathy for the losers was one of the major surprises of the dispute...
...277 The miners' leadership does not seem to have understood these cleavages within its own membership...
...The strike was thus a fratricidal battle between the industry's past and its future...
...Such tactics might not have won the strike, but the miners would have at least confronted their chief problem: the immense social distance between the mining villages and the rest of the country...
...As Hywel Francis, historian of the Welsh miners, admitted afterward, this division between mining regions and between miners proved fatal for the strike: Right across the Midlands, several traditional mining constituencies had fallen to the Conservatives [in the 1983 general election...
...Striking miners from South Wales, Kent, and Durham thought they were on another planet when they descended on the Midlands...
...When the aged former Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, now Earl of Stockton, rose in the House of Lords and reminded his party that the miners had once fought and died for their country and were "the best men in the world," the old squire's words were widely taken as a reproach to the complacently aggressive certainties of the Thatcher regime...
...Thatcher crowed about "seeing off the miners," but her intransigent refusal of compromise during the dispute seems to have cost her more support than it gained...
...Yet simple enmities, like anything simple, have their costs...
...Thatcher's view that the daily battles on their television screens were a "threat to law and order" rather than a struggle on behalf of pits, jobs, and an alternative energy policy...
...Despite the fact that Britain has one of the highest percentages of unionization anywhere outside the Communist bloc, the union movement historically has been a defensive one, rarely able to achieve moral or cultural hegemony in the presentation of its claims, always vulnerable and incoherent when faced with the charge that it is holding the country to ransom...
...Thatcher's determination to smash the NUM— then the union ought to have fought a political rather than an industrial battle, leaving only a token picket around the working pits and concentrating all its energies on building alliances with the watching public, through marches and demonstrations, particularly in the south...
...The government and the coal board were throwing away usable reserves of coal that, in his view, should be mined and stockpiled if they could not be sold at current prices...
...dockworkers were unable and unwilling to stop the imports of foreign coal arriving at British ports...
...The key economic question in the strike was whether the new profitable pits should continue to subsidize the older loss-making pits in the Welsh valleys and Scotland...
...Jeane Kirkpatrick, also one of the participants, to which he invited a few English Tories assumed to be roughly of the same persuasion as the guest of honor—including Sir Keith Joseph, Sir David English, Jonathan Aitken, and myself...
...For many among Mrs...
...From a government that has made the right to work an incrbasingly abstract concept for nearly 4 million workless people, the defense of the working miners had more than a few ironies...
...Thatcher is how long she can keep running the country by running against half of its population: the north, the unemployed, the unions...
...Thatcher's policies...
...What looked like brand-new pits, enormous incentive bonuses, semidetached miners' homes located in idyllic countryside all pointed to the fact that Thatcherism had successfully splintered the NUM [the National Union of Mineworkers] long before the ballot became an issue...
...These are certainties born light years from the social world of the Earl of Stockton, above a grocer's shop in Grantham where Mrs...
...This wave of 279 The Neocons — Seen from the British Right A priceless item comes from Peregrine Worsthorne, the right-wing columnist for the English weekly the Spectator (April 20, 1985): I t is now as fashionable among the American right to be violently anti-European as it was and is among the European left to be violently anti-American...
...Class identity proved a fragile basis for political mobilization...
...It is hard to recall a Conservative prime minister who takes such positive delight in scorning both her enemies and her natural friends...
...When the men from Lewis Merthyr Colliery in South Wales went to the Nottinghamshire coalfield to persuade the men there to join their fight to save their pit from closure in 1983—a year before the national strike—the men from the Welsh valleys were stunned by the affluence of their brothers in the Nottinghamshire pits...
...Thatcher dismissed the bishops' intervention as the dotty cries of "cuckoos...
...Watched from afar, from the European continent or the United States, the strike must have seemed like a typical English battle over the pasta class fight to the finish in a dying industry...
...One of the tragedies of the strike is that these issues about energy policy were never brought into focus...
...Yet if, as 278 the NUM leadership never tired of insisting, the strike was a political strike—brought on by Mrs...
...As one of the Wales men said, shaking his head, Some of the places we stayed in Nottingham were like palaces—miners' houses worth £60,000 [$75,000] or something like that...
...They were misled by the union's glorious past, particularly by the victory of 1974 that brought down the Conservative government in which Mrs...
...If this is how she treats someone who is roughly on her side, then one dreads to think what those Third World representatives at the United Nations—with even less easily recognizable names!—have had to put up with...
...very much implying by her tone that there must be something wrong with the embassy security arrangements for such a subversive to have got in...
...In a remarkable poststrike round table sponsored by Marxism Today, a monthly that is all the life there is in the currently moribund British Communist party, three Communist miners' officials admitted that the attempt to force the nonstriking areas like Nottingham out by the mass picket was "totally counterproductive...
...During this conference the American ambassador in London gave a small lunch for Mrs...
...I stayed with a Nottingham miner and he was telling me the bonus that they earn at his pit was £24 ($30] a shift...
...In symbolic terms, it was a battle between the London of Covent Garden shops, burgeoning software and advertising companies, skyrocketing house prices and full restaurants, and the poor, closed, and proud coal-mining communities like Cortonwood in Yorkshire where the strike began in March 1984...
...Thatcher's Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson even said that the defeat of the strikers would be a "sensible investment in the future of the British economy...
...The strike also posed a key issue in the ethics of solidarity...
...Thatcher learned the simple enmities—toward unions, welfare dependents, socialists, and Tory grandees, for that matter—which serve as her substitute for political doctrine...
...It is easy to give advice after the fact...
...Forty percent of the miners worked throughout the dispute, and Mrs...
...Even when unions take up battles on behalf of the nonunionized and unprotected as, for example, when they campaign against government cuts in the health service, they are vulnerable to the charge that they are merely seeking to defend overemployment in the public sector...
...But instead of a revolutionary politics from the right, they see only a politics of resentment aimed at humiliating those like the miners who once humiliated a Conservative government...
...AT THE HEART OF THIS DEBATE about the future lay the question of what to do about the "uneconomic pits...
...Many miners had undoubtedly become bourgeoisified...
...Thatcher and her ministers did not have much trouble isolating the miners even from the rest of the trade union movement...
...Kirkpatrick talked a bit less grandiloquently about "freedom" and "democracy" because there was no agreed sense in the West as to what these terms actually meant...
...I had not realized the full extent of this Europhobia until attending a conference on East-West relations in London recently where some of the most prominent participants were American right-wingers, including old friends like Irving and Bea Kristol...
...Yet the American oil companies' investment in the new open-cast mines of the American West makes it clear that coal is by no means a dying industry in a world faced with the foreseeable exhaustion of oil supplies and the risks of nuclear power...
...Again the expectations underlying this strategy were out of date: the assumption that steel workers would automatically support miners, because both are workers, ignored the fact that even when steel works and mines are close together, as in Wales, the two working communities keep to themselves...
...The argument that there are no economic grounds for closure was meant to have sounded like a dignified refusal to allow the capitalist law of profit to dictate the future of working people's communities...
...But since the mines are a nationalized industry, coal that cannot be sold at a profit must be subsidized by the general taxpayer...
...281...
...Yet when Larry Gostin, the American head of the NCCL, published a report arguing that the violations of civil rights during the strike did not come only from the police side, but also from the miners— from those who intimidated working miners with threats and violence—his leadership came under bitter attack from the socialist constituency at the organization's annual meeting...
...Thatcher, her ministers, and the Tory press hailed them as heroic defenders of "the right to work...
...The National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL) raised a storm of controversy, which has continued long after the strike by insisting that the right of the working miners to work was as important as the right of miners to strike...
...If there was a current of sympathy among working people for the working miners, it was because the claims and rights of private judgment have always been valued as highly as the claims of class and union solidarity...
...Thatcher with her electoral majority...
...The academic economists advising the miners pointed out that the late autumn drop in the value of the pound, for example, made British coal prices competitive in November as they had not been in March...
...That there was a well of sympathy and support for the miners, never fully tapped, became clear when they marched back into their pits with their banners flying and their colliery bands booming out brave tunes...
...The miners' isolation, at least from the south, was already inscribed in the new facts of economic life in England...
...THE QUESTION OF WHETHER THE STRIKE was a historical watershed or just another fratricidal class battle on Britain's drift toward economic decline depends on the extent to which the issues of economic and moral principle raised by the strike are honestly faced by the trade union movement...
...The key question is whether the union movement can find a language that enables it to persuade the public that workers' claims are in the national interest...
...They would forgive, even admire, her break with the postwar social democratic consensus if they could see some fruits of the Thatcher revolution, or if they could 280 really believe that she is a revolutionary at heart...
...But the Nottingham, Leicestershire, and Derbyshire miners would not put their bonuses and their mortgages on the line for the sake of fellow miners' jobs in other regions...
...Tragically, their struggle was understood only as their own...
...and the steel workers—just recovering after the drastic reduction in their industry's capacity at the hands of Ian MacGregor, the same man in charge of the coal industry—were hardly in a mood to risk their jobs on behalf of the miners...
...While the miners' leaflets constantly sought to link the miners' case to the antinuclear lobby, the media battle of the strike was fought out on the issue of law and order and the uneconomic pit...
...The coal board's and the government's criterion of the economic situation, in the miners' view, was hopelessly shortterm...
...IN RETROSPECT, SOME MINERS' LEADERS now admit that they brought the law-and-order issue on themselves by relying on mass-picketing to bring the working miners out...
...The miners had the better economic argument, but they threw away their advantage with the public by confusions over their negotiating stance: blithe public statements that they would never allow pits to be closed on economic grounds were followed in private negotiations by tortuous recognition of the facts of economic life...
...LONDON — It was never just a strike, but a confrontation between two Britains: the Labour and union strongholds of the decaying industrial north and of the increasingly postindustrial south, which provided Mrs...
...Moreover, as the venerable Cambridge economist Lord Kaldor pointed out from his seat in the House of Lords, once "uneconomic pits" are closed, they cannot be reopened...
...Trucks bearing huge loads of coal continued to arrive at the power stations throughout the strike...
...All went well until over the coffee I mildly suggested that it might be a good idea if Mrs...
...Yet the issue—to what extent and by what means are strikers entitled to prevent fellow workers from working—was a genuine question of principle...
...The new superpits at places like Selby, which use electronically guided cutting machines first developed in the States, are highly profitable and the miners who work in them earn high bonuses...
...The key question about Mrs...
...The leadership thought that the mining regions would display the same unity on the issue of pit closures that they had displayed in past campaigns for pay...
...Thatcher was minister of education...
...Most of the Anglican bishops, for example—whom the Labour party likes to regard as the Tory party at prayer—appealed for compromise and reconciliation...
...In the frustration of this symbolic encounter between miners, violence soon replaced the traditionally robust but orderly practices of British picketing...
...The miners' strike is a classic example of the union movement's inability to make a national case...
...Instead of reacting to this tease in a friendly way, the harridan angrily asked the ambassador, "Who the hell is this guy...
...The strike was a battle between the decaying part of the industry—in the old South Wales pits—and the sunrise part of the industry in the new super coalfields of Nottingham...
Vol. 32 • July 1985 • No. 3
