12 MARCH 1983, Page 3

Calling their own bluff

Last October members of the National Union of Mineworkers, asked to give their national executive committee the authority to call a strike against pit closures and to reject the Coal Board's pay offer, said 'No' most emphatically, by 61 to 39 per cent. This week the miners have again been asked to give their executive authority to call a strike in opposition to pit closures; again, and emphatically, they say 'No'.

Mr Arthur Scargill has now been thrice denied by his members the opportunity he most desperately seeks, to lead them in a battle against the Government. When the record of the National Union of Mineworkers under the leadership of Lord Gormley is compared with its record under Mr Scargill, it is at once obvious that the former's reputation for moderation has brought the miners far greater rewards than the latter's militancy. Mrs Thatcher, like Mr Heath before her, had cause to fear the comfortable and reasonable Joe Gormley; the Prime Minister has no call whatever to start back in alarm at the roarings and ran- tings of Arthur Scargill, a paper tiger and a flesh-and-blood buffoon. Scargill's eve-of- ballot message to the miners was, 'This is the final chance — while we still have the strength — to save our industry', and he wrote in a special edition of the union's journal The Miner, 'Waiting in the wings, wishing to chop us to pieces, is Yankee steel butcher MacGregor'. The miners were neither impressed nor frightened by their president's noise. They chose not to be scared by the MacGregor bogey. Scargill sought to make the vote a test of the miners' loyalty and of his own credibility. The miners have answered him in the ballot box. Their loyalty is to themselves and their jobs, not to their president; by their votes, they have taken away from him his credibility as their leader.

The miners preferred to heed the words of Mr Norman Siddall, chairman of the Na- tional Coal Board, who said before the ballot this week: 'My message to the mineworkers is this: Vote "No" because the problems will not go away. A strike would only make them worse. It would lose the industry a lot of money, which it needs for the future, and it would lose the NCB a lot of present and potential customers.' Scargill sought to persuade the miners that they could win in a sharp and swift in- dustrial action. The miners were not fooled, and reckoned instead that Siddall talked more sense than Scargill, saying, 'If the mineworkers do vote for a strike, I am bound to warn them that they would have to be prepared to stay out for a very long time. It would be the height of summer before there was any noticeable effect of a

strike.' Scargill is discredited; the miners are not, except for those in South Wales who first sought a national strike, and those whose loyalty to striking comrades and gut militancy outweighed their commonsense. The original Welsh action, against the closure of a pit which should have been closed years ago, lacked all reason right from the beginning. This was a strike which the miners could not possibly win, for the Coal Board could not keep open the Ty Mawr-Lewis Merthyr mine without themselves forfeiting the confidence of the Government and the country. The strike had a stupid cause; and its timing was just as stupid. Scargill was stupid to support it and he was stupid to make it a test of his credibility and of his members' loyalty.

The Government and the country gain immeasurably from the miners' demonstra- tion of their commonsense. The miners have called their own bluff, and shown their president Mr Scargill to be a poker player fit only for the kindergarten. We are all most obliged, and especially to Mr Scargill for being so silly as to go for broke with a busted flush.

The Queen, as for many years we have come to expect of her, has accomplish- ed a very successful American tour. The weather was unreliably inclement and San Francisco's bitter and batty fringes reliably so. She had no difficulty surmounting both storms and IRA insults. She remains an in- comparable ambassador, whom we are far too ready to take for granted. No elected president could play the role of head of state and our chief visitor abroad with such a combination of authority, tact and regal grace. She is becoming something of a world institution, indeed, known virtually wherever she travels as the Queen. She is not everybody's queen, of course, and if Australia, under its new Prime Minister, Mr Hawke, should be so misguided as to seek a republican status, then that is its folly. But she elicits an overwhelmingly good and favourable response wherever she travels, and in this respect she is not unlike that other crowned head of state who also hap- pens to be travelling in America at this time.

The Pope is warmly liked and admired by those who do not share his faith or recognise his authority. His courage in ven- turing into Latin America is remarkable. He is a fighting priest, an engaged pontiff, whose authoritative message to his clergy to stay clear of politics is itself political. The wisdom of putting himself into a position where he can be heckled while saying Mass is open to question; but his devotion to the cause of the church of which he is a most shining head is not.