There is No Alternative (30 page)

During the strike, Scargill visited the Soviet embassy in London regularly. The Soviets donated a million-odd pounds' worth of cash, food, and clothing to the miners' union.
¹⁵²
As the strike wore on, miners and their families vacationed on the Black Sea; the USSR picked up the tab. When the details of this Soviet largesse were reported in the news, Scargill didn't deny it: He declared insouciantly that Soviet miners had taken up a collection for their comrades. “And he got away with it, really,” Walker marvels. “The public said, ‘Ah, you know, that's very nice of these Russian miners—.'”

Walker claims that the Soviet Union delivered cash to a pub in Yorkshire in cases of ten-pound notes. Scargill has been accused of pocketing a great deal of Russian money for his own use. Many column inches have been devoted to the latter charge and to Scargill's denials, but in the end the question is not particularly important. What is important—and a matter of indisputable public record—are Scargill's declared economic and political objectives. During the strike, when asked by a parliamentary committee just how much of a financial loss a pit must run to warrant closure, Scargill replied, “As far as I can see, the loss is without limits.” No pit, he argued, should
ever
be closed because it wasn't making
enough money. It should be closed only when there was no coal left in it, even if you had to tunnel to the center of the earth to get it. There could be no compromise.

Bernard Ingham was characteristically expansive when he recalled Scargill's declaration:

Likewise, Scargill made no secret of his desire to bring down the Thatcher government, by any means necessary. “Direct action,” he declared in 1981 to a union rally—on the hard Left, “direct action” is another important euphemism; it means “violence”—“is the only language the government will listen to.”
¹⁵³
The forthcoming battle, he stressed, “will not be won in the House of Commons. It will be won on the streets of Britain.” After the 1974 miners' strike, he had explained the strategy of dispatching flying pickets to the scene of the conflict thus: Trade union members “had a contractual obligation with the working class, and if they didn't honor [it] we'd make sure, physically, that they did.”
¹⁵⁴

The outcome of the 1983 general election, Thatcher writes in her memoirs, was a devastating rebuke to socialism. She is justified in saying this. As she put it, fairly, the Labour Party had campaigned “on a manifesto that was the most candid statement of socialist aims ever made in this country.”
¹⁵⁵
The voters had made their opinions perfectly clear: They didn't want what the Labour Party was offering. Thatcher won a landslide victory. Within a month of
the election, however, Scargill announced that he did not “accept that we are landed for the next four years with this government.”
¹⁵⁶

In other words, to hell with the voters.

Since Scargill refused to meet me, I cannot say what he is like in person. I have heard that he is funny and sharp-witted—although no one has recounted to me a story about his wit that actually made me laugh
¹⁵⁷
—and I have heard that he is a powerful, passionate orator. Like Thatcher, he has a reputation for extraordinary industry and personal discipline. Like Thatcher, he is said to have needed little sleep. Photographs of the epoch show a man with a weak chin, thinning red hair, a comb-over, and last-days-of-disco sideburns.

Peter Walker describes him to me as a man who knew how to have a good time: “He loved living the capitalist life, I mean, his suits were made in Savile Row, several thousand pounds at a time. He always had a chauffeur-driven car, and he dined and wined well, so he loved the joys of a wealthy standard of living himself.” This, I suspect, is a bit of an exaggeration, perhaps even one of those famous Tory smears. It is true that Scargill had a driver, and others to whom I spoke agreed that the man enjoyed his food, but I have looked at hundreds of photographs of Scargill and can say with confidence that if he paid a thousand pounds for those suits, he was had.

Scargill and Neil Kinnock loathed each other. Kinnock first met Scargill in the late 1960s. “Did you take an instant dislike to him?” I ask.

“
Immédiatement.
”

“Why, what was he like?”

“Poseur. Arrogant. Kind of guy that you knew, if anybody would let him, he would bully them.”

“Is there anything specific, anything that he said that made you feel, ‘This guy, I just don't like him?'”

“No, you only have to look at him
walking
to hate him.”

“How did he walk?”

“Well, he's a
strutter
. He
struts
. He
struts
. And you can take a visceral dislike to someone simply on the basis of that, or the color of their tie, or the way they part their hair.” I am not sure whether he meant that he
did
take a dislike to Scargill based on the way he parted his hair, but if so, it would have been understandable. “But the whole character of Scargill
extruded
, you know, I felt, ‘
Christ
, I don't like this guy.' And quite a lot of the fellows I was mixing with among those South Wales miners—including communists—thought that Scargill was, quote, ‘too big for his bloody boots.' That kind of attitude.”

“Right.”

“And quite a few of these were guys whose judgment I valued, because they were gutsy men with a lot of wisdom, whose basic motivation was to try to help people. I mean, they would have liked to have overthrown the existing order, but the main reason they'd taken on responsibilities in the union or in politics or both was that they wanted to help people.”

I am struck by the way Kinnock casually dismisses the eagerness of these men to overthrow the existing order. Such an ambition is, he seems to be suggesting, just a harmless political folly, like an obsession with wind farms. This is one reason he never became prime minister. Too many people wondered about his judgment. They just couldn't be sure that Thatcher was dead wrong about his crypto-communism.

“How did Scargill manage to rise so high?” I ask him.

“Well, he
is
a clever man—”

I am not so sure of that. The strike began on March 12. Calling a coal strike with summer coming is like invading Russia as winter approaches. “How clever could he have been to call a coal strike in the
spring?”

“Oh no,” says Kinnock, “that was idiotic and stupid. And treacherous. I'm not saying that—I'm not saying that clever people can't be stupid.”

“So when you heard that he'd been elected to the presidency of the NUM, what was your reaction? Did you say to yourself, ‘We're on a collision course,' or did you think there was some way it could be finessed?”

“Well, I'll tell you the funny thing. I was talking to the leading officials of the miners in Durham, who were fairly, sort of, by Labour movement standards, on the right wing. I mean, people outside the movement wouldn't think of them like that, but you know, they were moderates. And they'd never voted for the Left candidate in any miners' election. Not since the 1930s. So I was chatting to them, and taking it for granted that they hadn't voted for Scargill. And when they said they had, I said, ‘What in the bloody hell did you do
that
for?'”

Kinnock mimics Pitmatic as perfectly as he does Margaret Thatcher.
¹⁵⁸
“Oh, he's a canny lad!” they said to him.

“
Canny?
The man's bloody
crazy!
He's mad as a
hatter!
” Kinnock replied.

“Well, yer know, we need a bit o' push.”

“Yeah, I know, but he will push the miners to
destruction.
”

They tried to reassure him: “Well, when he goes down to London he'll cool down. He'll get more mature.”

Kinnock said, “Hey, wait a minute. You're not telling me that you're relying on this guy going to the fleshpots of London to make him a suitable union leader?”

“No, well it's not like that,” they mumbled sheepishly.

“That's exactly what you're saying! Well, I hope you don't live to weep over this.”

Kinnock's voice returns to the present. “And they did live to weep over it. I mean, the last coal mine in that coal field was closed in the wake of the 1984 strike. Every single pit.”

I offered Scargill the chance to reply to Kinnock's characterization of him, but he didn't take me up on it. Linda Sheridan, however, held forth with gusto.