There is No Alternative (35 page)

The miners, increasingly desperate and increasingly humiliated, grew more violent. Working miners were assaulted, their families terrorized. A taxi driver carrying a scab to work in South Wales was killed.

Reports surfaced in the papers that Scargill had taken money from Libyan agents. Not long before, a British policewoman had been murdered by gunfire emerging from the Libyan embassy in London. Scargill did not deny the reports. He argued—characteristically—that the money came from “Libyan trade unions.”

In December 1984 an interviewer remarked to the prime minister that people were literally being killed over coal. Was it not time, he asked her, to do something,
anything,
to bring the strike to an end?
No,
she replied. “As far as Government is concerned, never, never, never give in to violence.
Never.
This strike has been sustained by violence and it took a long time for certain people to condemn that violence, and that length of time should never have
occurred in a democracy. This strike is sustained by violence and by a refusal to have the democratic right to a ballot. Now, if anyone is suggesting that I appease those:
No.
”
¹⁸¹
The words echoed, as they were intended to do, Churchill's: “Never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.” By December, it was perfectly clear to the nation that no matter the cost, no matter who died, Thatcher would not break. In her rhetoric, the striking miners had now been elevated, by analogy, to Nazis. At the height of this crisis, on October 12, the Brighton Hotel was bombed. As she makes clear in her memoirs, Thatcher held the bombers and Arthur Scargill to be morally indistinguishable.
¹⁸²

The miners, desperate to feed themselves and their families, began trickling back to work. By late February, more than half the miners had returned.

On March 3, nearly a year after the announcement of the strike, the delegates of the miners' union at last defied Scargill. They voted—narrowly—to abandon the cause.

They had lost.

“It was a pivotal event,” says Charles Powell of the strike. “The Falklands were pivotal in restoring Britain's national self-confidence, and that was an important part of it, because the country again felt invigorated, proud, capable of seeing people off, capable of achieving things. That provided a very good psychological environment for subsequent battles on the domestic front. But the miners' strike, which brought us to the very brink of civil war—”

“Do you really mean that? A civil war?”

“Yes, I do, yeah, I do. I really mean that. It was close to a civil war situation, and you've got tens of thousands of police battling miners, huge confrontations, the whole trade union movement on the edge, sort of ready to go. It was a very, very fraught and tense time. And it was almost like fighting a war. If you'd been there on Downing Street at the heart of that you'd have felt that, you know, bulletins from the front, and war councils taking place late at night and all those sorts of things. It was a real crisis atmosphere.”

“Do you think that level of conflict could have been avoided with a more delicate policy, while still achieving the same ends—”

“No. Certainly not.”

“So you place the blame for the extremity of the dispute entirely on Scargill?”

“She knew there had to be a major confrontation. Scargill had to be defeated in battle. It was almost medieval, you know, this idea, a challenge, a joust, whatever it was. She knew he could only win by deploying all these miners, as many as he could, taking her on, taking on the state . . . I think it really was an exceptional situation, it
needed
to be. The symbolism was so important, namely, you had to establish this dominance over the trade unions. Finally. You can't really imagine what it was like, for people of my generation, we used to switch on the television at night, in the 1960s and '70s, and there were the trade union leaders, coming out of Number 10 Downing Street
,
night after night, having told the government what to do, what they
could
do, what they'd put up with and not put up with, and they'd got their way, time after time.”

“You say I can't imagine what it was like. But try to explain it to me.”

“It was demoralizing. Seeing this band of men, holding the whole country to ransom. Looking after the interests of their members at the expense of everything and everyone else. They had no broader view of the national interest, or anything of that sort at all, they were intent only on their narrow interest.”

“Were there any moments in the dispute when you thought, ‘We're not on the right track here, we're not going to win this'?”

“I don't recall thinking we'd ever lose. There were setbacks, there were things we got wrong, you know, there was all this business about the mine supervisors—but no, no, those were tactical errors. I think the strategy, because it had been so carefully prepared, was always bound to succeed. Now, many people will tell you that they were responsible for it as much as she was. Peter Walker, I think, would certainly argue that he was the man who won the miners' strike—”

“I spoke to him, and yes, he does argue that.”

“Yes, and there are sort of politics in that—”

“Of course, of course—”

“Well, he did have a very important role, absolutely. But the ultimate willpower was really hers. She became a Boudicea-like figure at the forefront of the battle. That's how it seemed to people in the country, I think. I mean, it was all the Iron Lady and Battling Maggie stuff. I mean, that's how she proceeded.”

In 1985, a triumphant Thatcher addressed the Conservative Party conference:

Linger for a moment on that last line. Consider all of its emasculating, sadistic, and sexual implications. Kinnock says he didn't think it chivalrous to hit a girl. That hardly stopped Thatcher from
kicking him between the legs—even when he was already on the ground. That too is how she proceeded.

“Was Scargill a megalomaniac, or was he desperate?” I ask Bernard Ingham.

“
Megalomaniac
, in my view. I mean, it was a gamble, no doubt about it, a bad gamble, but he believed that they were
invincible
. I mean, no government that he'd come across would stand up to him, and of course he was
astounded
when Mrs. Thatcher did! I think he felt he was invincible, and that is
fair!
After all, it was a pretty close-run thing!”

“Was it?”

“Oh, yeah, it was closer than people imagined. I mean, without her resolution, they would have caved in a long time earlier.”

“Well it's interesting that you say that, because just yesterday, speaking to Lord Walker, I asked, ‘Was there ever a moment when you were in doubt that you would win?' and he said, ‘Never.'”

“That's
not
true.”

“At what point was there a doubt?”

“I mean, if power supplies had faltered, then they would have been in real trouble. And fortunately, they had Walter Marshall, at the seams, who coaxed every bolt that he could find from anything, you know, and kept us going. And also, it wasn't an excessively cold winter. Of course, if he'd have called a ballot, and won that ballot—”

“Would there have been any chance of him winning?”

“Oh, yes, I think he would, because he wouldn't have split the union. And the very act of splitting the union meant that the government had coal production moving.”

“But my understanding was that the reason he didn't call a ballot was because he knew he wouldn't win.”

“Well, that's what people say. But you never know. You never know when there's a ballot called. I honestly don't know, and I
don't think anyone who's honest does know whether he'd have won . . . But I can't agree with Peter Walker that everything was plain sailing. It wasn't.”

“He didn't say ‘plain sailing.' He said he never had a doubt that there would be victory in the end. He never believed for a second that there was a chance that Mrs. Thatcher would fail.”

“Oh, I see. Well, I never believed for a second that Mrs. Thatcher would give in. That's different.”

“How so?”

“Well, she could have been stolid to the end, but if the lights went out . . . if British industry were crippled, what do you do
then?
”

As the men trooped dejectedly back into the pits, their wives distributed carnations—the symbol of heroism—at the gates. At many mines, they marched back to the sound of brass bands. But everyone knew this was no victory.

It was the end of the mining industry in Britain. The pits had permanently lost their customers, who sought to acquire fuel sources that would not be held hostage to the manic caprices of Arthur Scargill.

It was the end of the era of widespread strikes in Britain. Six months after the end of the miners' strike, railway workers threatened to strike over the introduction of new trains that could be operated with fewer men. Union leaders put the motion to a ballot. Of course they did; they had seen what happened to Scargill. Members voted against it. Of course they did; they had seen what happened to the miners. In 1979, 29.5 million work days were lost in Britain due to strikes. Five years later, that number had plummeted a hundredfold, to 278,000. Britain now has the most efficient labor market in Europe.

It was the end of revolutionary socialism in Britain. Shortly thereafter, Kinnock triumphed over and marginalized the Trotskyite
wing of the Labour Party, transforming the party into one in which men who proclaimed that they were all Thatcherites now could and did rise to the top.

With the miners permanently neutered as a political force, the government accelerated the closure of loss-making pits. The coal industry was entirely privatized in 1994. The Nottinghamshire miners had expected their cooperation would ensure the security of their jobs, but most of their pits closed, too. When the Labour Party came back into power, in 1997, it made no attempt whatsoever to revive the coal industry. By 2005, only eight major deep mines, employing fewer than 3,000 men, remained.

Scargill had always claimed that the government intended to destroy the coal industry. He says now that he has been vindicated. But the industry was dying anyway. The strike was the
coup de grace,
and the strike was Scargill's fault.