Lord Tebbit on Today this morning explaining that the Thatcher govt could not be brought down in the way that the Heath and Callaghan govts had been. Quite right. Later, some Scottish Labour MP (one of a couple of dozen who have signed a motion praising the lion-hearted strikers - yuk, back into comfort zone) saying that the fight was to do with preserving communities. Also quite right. Arthur Scargill declined to appear on the programme.It's easy now to say that this was the last gasp of muscle-flexing by the unions - and the only time that govts since have looked even slightly shaky was during the fuel protests in 2000 and, to a lesser extent, during the Grangemouth thing last year - same kind of idea. However, the 1984-85 dispute was appallingly devisive, of families and nationally, and one's sympathy remains with those many miners who, materially, lost everything: those scenes in Brassed Off of homes being cleared of furniture by bailiffs and bullies weren't made up.
Scargill went for a series of rolling strikes knowing he could not get a national ballot to back him. He must have realised that he was beaten when other unions refused to come out and when the whole business of the NUM sending an emissary to Libya to receive some of Gaddafi's money became public. One can only assume that he was hoping for a repeat of the scenes from 1972 when thousands (reports between 3,000 and 25,000) of strikers marched on the Saltley Coke Depot, a frightening display of power that threatened to deprive the Midlands of fuel and concentrated minds towards a settlement. The closest comparison to that was at Orgreave, another coke depot, this time outside Rotherham, where the miners clashed with the forces of law and order on June 18, 1984 - 100 days into the strike.
Additionally, whereas in the 1970s strike that did for Heath, Scargill had had intelligence from inside the power stations to the effect that coal stocks were limited, no such intelligence was available in 1984 and, in fact, the coal was heaped up. The question, then, that remains unanswered and intriguing is why he launched the dispute in the spring, when demand for power was dropping. This was the biggest blunder of all - apart from the police excesses in handling the thing (see picture), which were brutal and disgusting.
An excellent post, squire!
ReplyDeleteDuring the miner's strike in the eighties, the BBC showed what was to become one of the many famous scenes from that era (so famous you can't get hold of it...strange that, isn't it?). The footage showed miners at Orgreave in South Yorkshire attacking the police and throwing missiles, and then, the police rushing the miners to subdue them. In actual fact, as I know from people who were there and in Tony Benn's dairies, the NUJ had been ordered by "officials" to reverse the sequence of events, and it was the police (and dozens of army reserves) who had charged the miners, laid into them with batons, and then the miners had retaliated. As quoted by one of the miners on the Sheffield Hallam University website:
"I saw things that day at Orgreave that I never thought I'd see in this country. When you get grown men who are virtually cowering under a mounted policeman who's trying to thump them with a baton and he pisses himself, then that's game, set and match for me. That's fear."
Although the oil refinery strikes this year were peaceful, the strikers got similar treatment from the BBC, and in particular my favourite useless c**t, Nick Robinson. From the Telegraph:
"The 10 o'clock news bulletin on Monday night carried a voiceover by the BBC's political editor, Nick Robinson, who said : "Beneath the anger, ministers fear, lies straightforward xenophobia." Viewers then heard a worker tell a BBC reporter: "These Portuguese and Eyeties – we can't work alongside of them."
But when the same interview with the same worker was shown on Newsnight later that night, he was quoted more fully, changing the meaning of his words. Viewers heard the worker state: "These Portuguese and eyeties – we can't work alongside of them: we're segregated from them. They're coming in full companies."
Apologies for writing at length. :)
Yes, in fact the BBC had to apologise to that guy for misrepresenting him.
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