arthur scargill

April 26, 2012

Opposite Reaction

Jack Graham arthur scargill, labour, margaret thatcher, media, miners strike, NUM, paul foot, philip sandifer, progress, thatcherism, the sun, tories 4

The TARDIS Eruditorum blog recently took the opportunity to connect ‘The Caves of Androzani‘ with the 1984-85 Miner’s Strike. In the process, Philip Sandifer (the author of the blog) writes:

…Arthur Scargill, head of the NUM, made an egregious political miscalculation. Faced with an accelerated schedule for closing the pits and afraid that he’d lose the vote, Scargill declined to submit the strike to a national vote. This was against NUM rules and allowed Thatcher to delegitimize the strike, which she wasted no time doing, comparing striking miners to Argentina in the Falklands.

and…

The propaganda war, combined with Scargill’s inept politicking, kept the strike from gaining broad support with the public, and it ended in failure a year later, leaving the mining industry and union a shadow of its former self.

Sandifer mentions police savagery and also the wholesale media propaganda assault against the NUM (though he talks about the ‘redtops’, as though it was a purely tabloid phenomenon). Ultimately, however, he seems to imply a plague upon both Thatcher’s and Scargill’s houses.

In the various permutations that this view takes, the heroic resistance of 150,000 workers and their families over a year of struggle is always deemed to have been overshadowed by the lack of a formal vote on it. Here’s a vital corrective to such apparently reasonable ‘even-handedness’, courtesy of Paul Foot in The Vote: How It was Won and How it Was Undermined:

Scargill had failed to win three strike ballots because of the divisions among miners caused by the incentive agreements that had been pushed through by the employers in spite of a ballot vote against them. The ballot results left NUM leadership with the agonizing prospect that pits could be closed piecemeal, one by one, or two by two, and that the union would be prevented by hostile ballot results from responding. This was the background to the confrontation that was started by the closure, without consultation, and in defiance of all agreements, of Cottonwood colliery in Yorkshire. Encouraged by the executive, and by a wave of flying pickets from the threatened pits, strike after strike led very quickly to a massive national confrontation, in which pretty well all the pits in Yorkshire, Scotland, Wales and most of the Midlands were on strike, leaving only traditionally less militant areas, Nottinghamshire and Leicesterhsire, at work.

To those who bleated, ‘I wish Scargill had had a ballot’, there was a prompt reply: ‘Suppose he had had a ballot and lost it – what then?’ Were the miners leaders expected to stand aside while the Government and its newly appointed Coal Board laid waste to the British coal industry? The truth was that actions spoke louder than ballots. The sheer size and breathtaking solidarity of the mass strike was the fact, and the suggestion that the action should have been put at risk by a ballot was an argument that could be sustained only by the enemies of the miners’ union. Very soon, moreover, the democratic potential of the miners’ strike was every bit as obvious as it had been in 1921 and 1926, if not more so.

…

February 28, 2012

BBC Wales

Jack Graham 70s, arthur scargill, barry letts, capitalism, class, green death, pertwee era, robert sloman, strikes, thatcherism, trade unions, wales, workers, working class 1

The patronizing use of Welsh stereotypes in ‘The Green Death’ is evidence of the employment of centuries-old imperial condecenscion. However, Welshness alone does not straightforwardly equal idiocy in this story. Rather, it is the conjunction of Welshness with membership of the proletariat which produces characters who don’t really have a clue what’s going and need everything explained to them.

Clifford Jones and ‘Nancy’ (note how she doesn’t need a surname) are allowed to be efficient and useful only because their Welshness (which entails them using cute provincialisms galore) is offset by their educated, middle-class boffinity and right-onitude. Meanwhile, Jo marvels openly at her own foolishness in caring so much about the death of a “funny little Welshman” (who kept her alive). The difference between these Welsh characters – i.e. between the ones who qualify as people and those who don’t – is down to class.

The workers in this story are belittled, peripheral figures. They are profoundly out of touch and their Welshness is but a conduit by which they can be further quaintified. They miss the big picture, even when the hippy scientists try to explain everything to them. They side with Stevens when he tries to bribe them with promises of the trickle-down effect… indeed, the validity of Stevens’s claims that profits for Global will also mean prosperity for the workers is never challenged, only qualified by the criticism that pollution will be a side-effect. There is hardly a hint of class struggle here, besides the opening scene… and even here the struggle is portrayed as over. The mine is closed, the miners all but absent. Their status seems unclear… some of them seem to still have access to the mine despite its apparent closure. The mine itself seems not to be owned by the government but by Global Chemicals.

Now, in its haphazard and accidental way, some of this is actually prescient. The UNIT stories were supposed to be ‘five minutes into the future’ (we’re not getting into UNIT dating controversies – I couldn’t care less) and, of course, by the late-90s, British mining – together with so much manufacturing industry – had been deliberately destroyed by the Tories. Huge numbers of traditional working class jobs had been annihilated. Working class communities were wrecked in the process. In many ways, the sight of a crowd of workers, made redundant, closed out of their sold-off and shut-down workplace, listening to speeches about how coal is dead, being fraudulently told that their future lies in the trickle-down effect of private profit, is a sight that predicts the result of Thatcherism (which, of course, had already begun under Heath, albeit in a less aggressive form).

Thing is, viewed in the context of the times in which it was made, this is as puzzlingly skewiff as it is prescient. ‘Anachronistic’ is the only way to properly describe it.

You see… miners were powerful in 1973, having struck in 1972 for the first time since the 20s – and won! Miners all over the country came out over piffling proposed pay rises, proposed by the Tory government in the midst of declining living standards and working conditions.…