Scargill's straw
Mr Scargill suffered a number of dis- couragements this week. So he may not have noticed the publication by the Conservative Party, a mere eight months after the dispute began, of a booklet called The Coal Industry. Its readers, who will not perhaps be very numerous, will find in it a lucid history of coal mining, no more partisan than might be expected in a party publication, and will be reminded of cer- tain facts which any commentator on the strike has, regardless of his bias, to take into account: for example, that in 1983-84 the most profitable 20 pits produced coal costing £28 a ton, the 20 least profitable coal costing £89 a ton. The significance of the booklet lies not, however, in the arguments it repeats, but in its mere
existence. It may prove to be the straw in the wind which shows that the Government is at last beginning to take the presentation of its own case as seriously as it should have done from the first.
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