Not a merry old soul

Peter Paterson

THE ENEMIES WITHIN by Ian MacGregor

Collins, f 1 5

LOSS WITHOUT LIMIT by Martin Adeney and John Lloyd

Rout/edge & Kegan Paul, £14.95

Astrange event occurred the other day. Arthur Scargill went to the headquar- ters of British Coal (a.k.a. the National Coal Board) to meet the new chairman, Sir Robert Haslam for the first time, and emerged spouting the traditional cliches of moderate trade unionism.

There had, he said, been a 'full and frank discussion' and he expected 'a con- tinuing dialogue' in the future. The puzzled industrial correspondents tried to test this new-style Arthur: had the atmosphere been so transformed by the arrival of Sir Robert? someone asked.

'We deal with the issues as professionally as we can on behalf of our members,' replied Scargill sternly. 'We don't deal in Personalities — even if they are as loopy as Mr MacGregor.' Sighs of relief all round, plus added reassurance as he announced that he refused to recognise the designa- tion British Coal — an idea dreamed up by Mr MacGregor, and explained in his book on the 1985-86 strike as getting away from the image of a 'bunch of remote old men sitting in London making the decisions'. Except for the fact that there were only two old men, MacGregor and his taciturn deputy Jimmy Cowan, that is a pretty good description of how management conducted the year-long strike. According to Mac- Gregor the pair were virtually isolated from the senior staff of the Coal Board, undermined by the serpentine manouvres of Energy Secretary Peter Walker, maligned, misunderstood and damaged by the antics of the media, and hamstrung by the bureaucratic games of the civil servants in the Department of Energy. Even Mrs Thatcher, according to Sir Ian, sometimes wavered, paying too much attention to the Iago-like campaign against him by Peter Walker. The old man's tale therefore carries overtones of paranoia, and while Mr Walker is probably unmoved by such charges, this memoir of the strike year must still make uncomfortable read- ing. Less so, probably, for a hard-glazed politician like Walker than for many who believed that they were, in their own way, effectively opposing the strike.

Some of MacGregor's strictures on his colleagues are, frankly, astonishing. To take only one episode, there was the drafting of Michael Eaton, the area direc- tor in North Yorkshire, as the public spokesman for the Board, a move which, however briefly, swung the propaganda war back in its favour. It occurred when Sir Ian had amply demonstrated that however well-trained a professional manager he might have been, one skill he lacked was any competence in the vital area of pre- sentation and public relations.

His own appearances on television had been disastrous, Scargill was winning the war of words hands down, and the arrival of Eaton brilliantly changed the terms of the confrontation, especially on the screen. We can be sure that little thanks was forthcoming from MacGregor at the time, and the hapless Eaton is rewarded in the book with a scathingly belittling descrip- tion of his role: 'In the end. . . he. . . started to believe in his own publicity'; 'He was wined and dined by politicians and ministers, until. . . the poor man came to believe that he could, and was indeed probably going to have to solve the strike single-handedly.'

Eaton's swift removal did much to dis- tract attention from Scargill's grotesque error, with which it coincided, of soliciting financial aid from Colonel Gadaffi. Given the degree of bile and jealousy of which MacGregor is undoubtedly capable, it is little wonder that Eaton's health broke down and forced him into early retirement. There were plenty of other casualties too, since Sir Ian's style has much in common with first world war generalship.

Nevertheless, despite the unpleasant tone of much of this book, MacGregor was undoubtedly the right man, at the right time, and in the right place. No British- reared manager, aware of the social and political nuances surrounding what amounted to an insurrection in the coal- fields, and facing an opponent as fierce and unrelenting as Scargill as he set out to add the scalp of another government to the battle honours of the National Union of Mineworkers, would have been up to the task of defeating him.

Sir Ian's insensitivity — in a real sense, his ignorance — on account of his removal from the British scene during his formative years as an industralist, made him the right man for the job. What the plaintive tone of his present assessment overlooks is that it is in the nature of things for the samurai warrior, or the Western hired gun, to be spurned by the people he saved. So it is unsurprising that the political establish- ment should now regard him with embar- rassment and distaste: it may be necessary in a crisis to have a general who, not content with winning the battle, wishes to go out and shoot the wounded — but it is not nice.

The very shortcomings which made Mac- Gregor such a necessary asset in winning render his book unsatisfactory as a record of the strike, of the impact it had on the social fabric of the mining industry and the pit communities, on public opinion, on the economy, on the argument over policing a modern society, or on the fortunes of Mrs Thatcher and the Conservative Party.

For this broader scene, Martin Adeney and John Lloyd's somewhat ponderous work, Loss Without Limit (the phrase is culled from a Scargill assertion on the correct economics of running a coal mining industry), offers as complete a picture of the dispute as one can expect when the dust of this historical event has certainly not yet settled.

But not even these intelligent and objec- tive observers succeed in unravelling the extraordinary enigma of Arthur Scargill, a fanatical revolutionary leader without the least idea of tactics: Trotsky's ambitions wrapped in the soul of a General Sir Redvers Buller. If you discount MacGregor's boast that he, in the words of Adeney and Lloyd, 'pulled Scargill onto the punch' by deciding the precise timing of the strike, you are bound to attribute the strike's failure to the failings of Scargill himself.

The errors were obvious and fatal, start- ing with the extraordinary timing, at the end of the winter and following an over- time ban which had already financially weakened the miners; the incredibly arro- gant tactic of depriving the miners of their right to vote — in Mick McGahey's immor- tal words, not to allow the leadership to be constitutionalised out of the strike — which was to lead to the demoralisation of the NUM, the mass desertions during the strike, and to the establishment of the breakaway Union of Democratic Minewor- kers; the repeated insistence, despite easily available evidence to the contrary, that power stations were about to run out of coal; and the Gadaffi escapade.

There may be rational excuses and valid reasons for all the blunders, but Arthur Scargill has so far chosen to remain silent. No doubt, as with MacGregor, any blame will have to be shared with his associates and subordinates when his story comes to be told.

Fortunately, this work, so essential to a full understanding of the bloodiest, the bitterest and the most costly industrial dispute of the century, is said to be in hand.

The rumour is that the author is already half way through his third volume. Unfor- tunately, however, it is believed to take his life only to the age of 11.