The claim
If you haven’t done so, I’d urge you to read Adam Price’s trenchant and provocative blog post of Thursday. In it, he compares Labour’s proposed part-privatisation of Royal Mail with the Conservatives’ approach to the Miners’ Strike of 1984-5.
I could dwell upon the claim that that the Conservative government of the early 1980s set out to “annihilate the Trade Unions”, a subject about which a great deal has been written of late. So instead, I want to examine the allegation that:
To me, the end [of the Labour Party] came back in 1984 when Labour’s leadership chose to please Rupert Murdoch’s papers rather than support the miners who were fighting for the future of their communities.
The evidence
Price’s is an intensely Welsh perspective. In Wales (south Wales to be more precise) support for the strike of 84-85 was immensely strong from early in the action, and remained so throughout.1 In the south Wales coalfield – as well as in others – support for the miners meant support for the miners’ decision to strike. The two were very largely indivisible.
But this was not the case in other parts of Britain, most notably in Nottinghamshire. A great deal of attention has focused on the steps taken by the Conservative government to ensure success when the confrontation occurred. These included stockpiling,2 reform of trade union legislation such that secondary picketing could be stopped and union funds sequestrated, and greatly enhancing the co-ordination of police force deployments. Equally as important, arguably, were the increasingly different circumstances, including wage and investment levels, in the different coalfield areas, all of which served to undermine the unity and effectiveness of GB-wide action.
Very quickly, therefore, we have arrived at the fulcrum of the dispute; NUM leader Arthur Scargill’s decision not to ballot his membership on strike action. It was a decision that handed the initiative to the government by denuding the NUM of the funds (and more controversially, the legitimacy) it needed to fight the closure programme (and thus encouraging Scargill’s catastrophic decision to approach Colonel Gaddafi for support). The decision also split the Labour Party from top to bottom3 and put its relatively new Leader Neil Kinnock in an almost unwinnable position. Although he issued a coded call for a ballot, Kinnock has since said he wished he had gone further (echoing pleas he made directly to Scargill from the early days of the strike4), describing his failure to be explicit as “the greatest regret of of my whole life”.5 Put simply, Kinnock believes that a strike without a ballot undermined the miners’ unity, prevented support from the wider trade union movement and stalled public support.
Kinnock’s actions at that time were motivated by a desire not to split the Labour movement any more than it already was by the ballot issue.6 The notion that he wished to curry favour with the Murdoch press overlooks the desperate position the strike placed Labour in, and ignores the ongoing and implacable hostility demonstrated towards the party in general and Kinnock in person by News International’s titles for several more years to come. What Kinnock wanted to do was call openly for a ballot. Had he done that it would have pleased the Murdoch press (although in probability it would have provoked accusations of weakness). That he did not demonstrates that the constraints he faced were not those of media pressure.
The conclusion: Debunked
Even for a political opponent in search of the most cutting possible criticism, the suggestion that Labour’s leadership acted as they did to cravenly win support of the right-wing press is extraordinarily one-eyed. There is a healthy and vigourous debate that continues to this day about the wisdom of Kinnock’s stance – Scargill for one maintains that full-throated support from the Labour leadership would have brought down the Thatcher government.7 In this, Kinnock is accused of betraying the miners for electoral reasons. But to suggest that this was part of Labour’s courtship of Murdoch pre-dates that initiative by several years and at least one Leader.
***
1 Although this has to be qualified somewhat; the antecedent ballot on industrial action in Wales in 1983 gained only 68% approval and – in keeping with the way the strike was triggered – there was a great deal of initial confusion about the applicability of the existing mandate, or whether either a new area ballot or a national one would be required. Some 18 of south Wales’s 28 pits initially voted against action. Once reversed, however, support for the strike remained solid. See Francis, H, History on our side, (2009), Iconau
2 Though the role of this can be exaggerated; in March 1984 power-station coal stocks stood at 23 million tonnes, enough with additional oil-firing to maintain an uninterrupted supply of electricity for about three months without additional production. See
3 Beckett, F and Hencke, D, Marching to the Fault Line, (2009), Constable
4 ibid
5 Stuart, M, John Smith: A Life, (2005), Politico’s. See also The Guardian, 16 March 2009
6 Westlake, M, Kinnock, (2001), Little Brown
