Arthur's seat

Richard West

Barnsley, Yorkshire

Alocal journalist told me that, during the miners' strike, now nearing the half year mark, 'Barnsley has been in the eye of the storm'. This is the home town of Arthur Scargill, the strike leader, who since becoming president of the National Union of Mineworkers, has moved the HQ from London to nearby Sheffield. Barnsley is near the centre of the immense South Yorkshire coalfields, whose 56,000 men are almost solidly on strike and have also provided most of the pickets who go each day to persuade, or terrorise, miners who want to work, especially those in the neighbouring county of Nottinghamshire. But Barnsley itself has been tranquil — or rather, has suffered no more than the usual number of brawls, knife-fights and cases of vandalism. (Some of the pubs have boun- cers, or lock the doors, in order to keep out the rougher element.) But Barnsley and all South Yorkshire had until last week avoided violence from the strike, simply because there were no men brave enough to hazard crossing a picket line. Now, some half-dozen Yorkshire miners are going to work under escort. At one pit 5,000 pickets turned out to abuse and threaten one solitary miner. Secret delegates of the back-to-work movement have crossed the border from Nottinghamshire, including Chris Butcher, the man who at first used the nom de guerre 'Silver Birch', and came to be known to reporters, because of his lachrymose outbursts, as 'Weeping Willow'.

Barnsley has also provided possibly the first fatal victim of the picketing. A middle- aged Barnsley miner, Jimmy Christie, died of a heart attack after setting out in pursuit of men who had called him a 'scab' for opposing the strike. His widow Mary said afterwards: 'Jimmy used to say he hated Arthur Scargill's guts. Whoever shouted "scab" killed him. It was the excitement that did it.' Another victim of Mr Scargill's strike is the coalfield itself. Spontaneous combustion and convergence have so far destroyed 13 of the coalfaces in Yorkshire, meaning a probable loss of £15 million- worth of equipment. For instance the Bentley Colliery, which two years ago made a profit of £1,500,000, has lost two of its three faces through fire and suffered further damage when strikers broke in and threw a five-gallon oil drum down one of the shafts. Even if Mr Scargill won his strike with assurances to preserve unecon- omic pits, the National Coal Board would still have to close much of the Yorkshire coalfield on safety grounds or because of irreparable damage.

Not having been in Barnsley since just before the coal strike, I half-expected to find the place brought to its knees by economic hardship; yet little has changed. Fewer people are going abroad on holiday, to 'Spain and all that', and many have handed in their stereos, or even their cars. But it seems that the banks and building societies have not called in their debts. The Government and local agencies such as the gas and electricity boards and the rates departments have gone out of their way to be nice to miners. Few people frequent the hideous cement shopping 'complex'; but few did even before the strike. The econ- omic health of Barnsley can only be judged, as at any time since the 14th century, from its famous market, which used to be held in the open air but is now, most of it, covered by a multi-storey car park.

Most of my favourite stalls are still doing good business. Algy (of 'Algy's Hosiery-Licensed by Scotland Yard to sell Stolen Property') said that the strike 'had not helped' but business was picking up again. Sailor Sid (of 'Sailor Sid's Sweets and Nuts. Large and Small Mouths Catered For. If you had your nuts last night, smile. If not get them at Sid's') was less optimistic, saying that things would not be all right 'until we get the miners back to work'. The manager of a certain stall selling women's clothes was not down- hearted. 'One of the joys of the job,' he said, gripping the arm of a portly house- wife, 'is that you get all the beautiful women coming here, you have a tape and you have to measure their hips, waist, and if you're lucky, the inner leg. . .'. The manager of a home brewing stall, Mr Philip Toon, told me: 'The strike's been good for our business though it sounds rotten to say it. The only danger we face is that our friend Margaret's going to slap a tax on us.' Another stallholder explained that the strike had not hit business much because 'Barnsley people, especially miners, have always been great catalogue buyers. Any- thing in the line of clothing, footwear and towelling, they get on credit, through the tally man. Barnsley people get their food here in the market. But most of our sales in things like clothing go to people outside. People come into Barnsley from many miles around to get bargains and to meet the colourful characters like myself and Sid.

The fact that the Yorkshire miners are out on strike does not of itself imply that they all admire Scargill. One striker with whom I talked at length in the company of two of his friends was bound to concede at last that Scargill was a 'pillock', which I assume to be a derogatory term in York- shire. But even if they dislike, they may not turn on him. Many people in Barnsley, including Arthur Scargill, dislike the local MP, Roy Mason, yet nevertheless they return him to Westminster with one of the largest Labour majorities in the country. Many Barnsley people dislike the local cricketer Geoffrey Boycott but neverthe- less believe he should play for Yorkshire and England. There is a lot of cussedness in this part of the world. It is inward- looking and xenophobic. The only signifi- cant immigrant group, the Irish, have taken up Yorkshire manners while keeping the national spirit of rebelliousness and grievance. They remember the 1830s and 1840s described by the South Yorkshire poet, the 'Corn Law Rhymer' Ebenezer Elliott:

But work grew scarce while bread grew dear And wages lessened too; For Irish hordes were bidden here Our half-paid work to do.

The present intransigence of the Yorkshire miners is neither new nor startling. When I worked in the late 1950s as Yorkshire correspondent of the Manchester Guar- dian, much of my time was spent reporting trouble at t'pit. Some of the mines then still had very narrow seams, so that a visit was an agonising experience. They still had pit ponies at one mine I went to near Wake- field. The miners, then as now, would not accept those of another race or even a different nationality, and flatly refused Hungarian refugees after the 1956 rebel- lion. At the time I admired this wish to preserve a sense of local identity; I still do. I also sympathised with the South York- shire miners in their distrust and dislike 01 the National Coal Board. I once went to a pit village near Doncaster and learned from miners in the pub that they were going to strike about some grievance. I was kicked out, literally, of the strike meeting by some Communists, then went to the National Coal Board in Doncaster. The PR department at first denied there was a strike and then, when I said I had been there, asked me to keep it out of the papers. The local NCB chairman, N. 11' Sales, was in about equal proportions smooth, evasive and complacent. Political life in Barnsley revolved round the Labour Party, the NUM and the Barnsley and British Co-operative Society, all three of which were the same thing three in one and one in three, to put 1,1 blasphemously. 'Where's the co-op. Every-bloody-where!', was a local joke. The BBCS, who were also the licensing magistrates, had a virtual monopoly on the trade of the town, apart from the open" market. They even held private court 00 employees caught stealing. The Labatt; Party was always divided. I can remernbe from the early Sixties drinking at one end of the bar of the Queens with Mr Mas°k and his friends, while his enemies dran and glowered at the other end. Anothe'r famous son of Barnsley, the television journalist Michael Parkinson, told me a striking example of how politics worked in one of the mining suburbs. After one election, the inconceivable happened. A councillor was elected who was not only a Tory but a woman. Before proceedings began, the chairman of the council passed round a set of documents for the informa- tion of councillors. When the new woman councillor saw these, she screamed and left the council chamber, never to reappear. The documents were a set of pornographic pictures.

From the late Fifties into the Seventies, South Yorkshire endured the disastrous mania of `development' in motorways, ring roads, tower blocks of flats and offices, shopping 'precincts' and ever more gran- diose premises for the enlarging 'public sector' of central and local government and the nationalised industries. The Labour Party leader Hugh Gaitskell visiting Pon- tefract was proud to open a high-rise block of flats which had been designed by a local architect, John Poulson. Some ten years later, thanks to the bankruptcy of Poulson, and the public hearing about his affairs, the country was able to get a glimpse into the Wholesale corruption that was permeating the public life of the country, most of all in South Yorkshire and Co Durham, another mining area. With the help of T. Dan Smith, a prominent Newcastle Labour Politician, Poulson had used corruption to Win contracts from dozens of local author- ities, schools and hospital departments, and nationalised industries. Several Labour politicians went to prison, includ- ing a former Mayor of Pontefract and Alderman Andy Cunningham, the Labour boss of Co Durham. The aforementioned head of the Yorkshire NCB, Mr Sales, was i'und guilty of having accepted gifts from 1°.111son. According to Michael Gillard and michael Tomkinson, the authors of No- thing to Declare: The Political Corruption of John Poulson: When he [Sales] worked at Doncaster he frequently used to ring up a very expensive hotel just outside the town and inquire, `What is the most expensive item you have in the menu for hors d'oeuvre, for main course, for dessert?' and order what was most expensive for the party. Eating and drinking could continue well on into the late after- noon and the NCB virtually kept this particu- lar establishment in business.

In his catalogue of British buildings, Nikolaus Pevsner wrote of Barnsley Town Hall: 'The architecture of the 21-bay front and also the back is Classical Revival; not Grecian, rather Imperial Roman, with seMething of the Imperial Parisian style of th e Beaux Arts. But some of the motifs are early derived from the English 18th leaturY and the tower is of the bleak cubic kind which betrays a knowledge of the tli-century style but a lack of courage to dadopt it.' However, one could, in the old aYs, actually go into Barnsley Town Hall and meet the Town Clerk and all his officials, and find out what was happening in the town. The same thing applied all over the country during the 1950s. But during the Sixties, along with the corrup- tion, there came an enormous growth in the power and personnel of the civil service, the nationalised industries, the health and education services, above all in all forms of local government. With in- creased power went greater secrecy, partly to hide from the press and public the full enormity of the kind of corruption re- vealed by the Poulson case.

The power, corruption and wastefulness of our local bureaucracies, were made drastically worse by the Heath-Walker reforms of 1974, which not only destroyed or deformed our ancient counties, but brought into existence metropolitan coun- ties including that of South Yorkshire. This two-tier system means that people who live in Sheffield, Rotherham, or Barnsley, now have a duplicate army of bureaucrats and therefore a double taxation in rates in order to pay for their services. The colossal rate in Sheffield has rapidly driven out much of the business and many private householders, thus leaving still fewer peo- ple to provide an ever-increasing rates bill. As employers are driven out, so there are even more unemployed, who do not pay rates but naturally vote for the party that gives them hand-outs. Oddly enough, the man largely responsible for these metropo- litan councils, Peter Walker, is now re- sponsible for the handling of the coal strike.

The metropolitan council, known as 'the People's Republic of South Yorkshire', and most of the town councils have fallen into the power of the left-wing, Trotskyist faction of the Labour Party, predominantly middle-class teachers, social workers, race relations officials, feminist activists, most of them belonging to one of the huge bureaucratic unions like Nupe or Nalgo. In most parts of the country these parasite unions are in rivalry with the unions of people who work to provide goods or services that command a price in the market, such as steel or engineering work- ers, electricians, railwaymen and lorry drivers. At several by-elections in Co Durham, Labour has lost or come near to losing seats because the miners voted for a Conservative or a Liberal rather than one of the parasite class. Moreover the miners do not share the views of the middle-class socialist ideologues on, such things as race relations and feminism. A recent report by a doctor claimed that Barnsley has the highest incidence of wife-beating in Bri- tain. The only sociologist I have met in Barnsley came from the Shankhill.Road in Belfast and had done post-graduate re- search for a comparative study of the Northern Irish Protestants and the Apache Indians. Paki jokes abound. South African fruit is proudly displayed in Barnsley Mar- ket. I saw not a street nor a garden named after Nelson Mandela. The South York- shire pickets first appeared in their true colours outside the Grunwick factory where they could scream abuse to their hearts' content at small, terrified Asian women. And of course the NUM has a financial clash of interest with such unions as Nupe and Nalgo. Both want the tax- payer's money: the miners to subsidise the uneconomic pits„the local bureaucrats to maintain and enrich their own jobs. But just at present the two groups have a common interest and a common enemy, Margaret Thatcher. The Conservative Government wants to disband the metro- politan councils and to close uneconomic pits.

phe city of Sheffield, Mr Scargill's head- quarter, quarter, is 'twinned' in amity with the Ukrainian city of Donetsk, in the Soviet Union. About ten years ago, a Donetsk coal miner Alexei Nikitin was sent to a psychiatric hospital for having complained, with other miners, about the dangerous working conditions down the pit. He served two terms of four years and three in these hospitals. The documentary 'The KGB's Torture Hospitals' made for the 20/20 Vision series and twice shown on Channel 4, gave a harrowing picture of how systematic torture is used on perfectly sane people in order to break their resist- ance to the Soviet state. People are tor- tured by the injection of paraffin, purified sulphur, powerful tranquilisers and other substances that produce 'extreme ;physical agony. Sometimes the 'patient' is wrapped and tied in canvas, which is then drenched so that it shrinks, and the patient is left shrieking in fearful bodily and mental pain, with blood streaming from the nose, some- times till death. Other 'patients' in the Soviet psychiatric hospitals are forced to watch this torture.

After two spells totalling seven years in psychiatric hospitals, Nikitin was released. He gave an interview to two western journalists in which he voiced the wish for a free trade union in the USSR, similar to the Polish Solidarity. He was re-arrested and sent again to a psychiatric hospital. A Soviet psychiatrist Dr Anatoly Koryagin, who had examined Nikitin and had pro- nounced him completely sane, was himself arrested and sent to Chistopol prison, where he has been subjected to prolonged and systematic .torture. The miner Nikitin died in prison this March, of a cancer for which he had not been receiving treatment.

During the 'preparation of 'The KGB's Torture Hospitals', the producer Geoffrey Seed learned that Nikitin had appealed for help to the British trade union movement and in particular to the NUM. The then President Joe Gormley made inquiries. In response Mr Screbny of the Soviet Coal Miners' Union wrote back a letter full of distortions and lies, suggesting among other things that Nikitin was a drunkard.

The Observer on 25 July 1982 published a story suggesting erroneously that the NUM was taking up the case of Mr Nikitin.

In fact Mr Scargill had written a non- committal letter to Mr Scribny making no demands for a full investigation. In Janu- ary 1983, Mr Seed rang up Mr Scargill, and a conversation took place of which the following are some tape-recorded extracts:

Seed: I'm doing a programme for 20/20 Vision about Soviet psychiatry. . . . Scargill: Soviet psychiatry? I'm not an expert on that.

Seed: I'm wanting to find out in connection with the case of Mr Nikitin, who has asked the National Union of Mineworkers for some assistance. . . .

Scargill: No he hasn't.

Seed: He hasn't?

Scargill: No.

Seed: I have some correspondence between you and Mr Screbny of the Soviet Coal- miners Union. . . .

Scargill: How have you got that?

Seed: Well, I have it.

Scargill: Well, you shouldn't.

Seed: It was also reported in the Observer newspaper last year. . . .

Scargill: They shouldn't have it either. Seed: What I'm trying to find out, it was reported in the Observer that you were taking up the case of Mr Nikitin. I wondered what progress had been made in the NUM's attempt to help Mr Nikitin.

Scargill: First of all the position was reported to our executive and I don't propose to add anything to what was said last year. Seed: Can I ask you why?

Scargill: You can, but I'm not going to tell you.

Seed: Is that the end of the matter then? Scargill: It's not a correspondence that should have been given to a newspaper. These are internal matters that we shall continue to deal with in the normal way. . . . Seed: What I want to find out, and I don't want to take a combative attitude on this, as you appear to be doing, is there any help that the NUM can give this man Nikitin and his colleague Klebanov?

Scargill: I have paid a lot of attention as you probably know to the appalling conditions of mineworkers in . . . Chile and Bolivia. . . . You don't seem to have concentrated very much on the viciousness of fascism as you appear to do on the socialist nations of the world. I don't know why this is. . . . One hears nothing on our television screens about how more people are dying each day in El Salvador than have died in Poland in ten years. . .

Seed: Can I say that my questions concern Mr Nikitin. . . The letter to Mr Gormley (from Mr Scribny) about Nikitin contains falsehoods, not to put too fine a point on it. . . . Nikitin was trying to help the coal miners in the Donetsk region.

Scargill: How do you know that?

Seed: I've spoken to people who know him. Scargill: Have you spoken to him?

Seed: How the hell can I? He's shut up in a mental hospital, drugged to the point of blindness.

Scargill: Is he?

Seed: Of course he is.

Scargill: Oh is he?

Although, according to Mr Seed, Mr Scar- gill was in a unique position to intervene on behalf of Nikitin, he did not do so. A fortnight ago, Pravda acclaimed Mr Scar- gill as a 'hero of labour'.