Calculated surrender
The haste with which the Government surrendered to the mineworkers has astonished everyone, friends and foes alike. Before the ink was dry on our advice to the Government that its duty was not to be defeated, that its strategy was to perceive that the threatened miners' strike was an attack upon itself, and that its tactics should be to leave the negotiations to the Coal Board, Mr David Howell, urged on by Mrs Thatcher, had presented the instrument of surrender to a delighted Mr Gormley. The Government, Mr Howell told the mineworkers' leaders and the Coal Board, was prepared to discuss the financial constraints on the coal industry 'with an open mind and with a view to movement'. Since the Government itself, in its Coal Industry Act 1980, had imposed financial constraints on the industry, there could be no gainsaying the nature of the turn Mrs Thatcher and Mr Howell had completed. 'I feel like a corporal in Marshal Petain's army,' said a Tory MP when he learned the news. The feeling of being let down is by no means confined to right-wing Tory MPs. The Public at large may not have looked forward to a national pit strike with any relish, but it does not enjoy Mrs Thatcher's surrender. She is entitled to argue that a head-on confrontation with the miners would not make Political sense and that a swift settlement was to be preferred to a lengthy negotiation conducted against a background of closed pits and flying pickets, but such argument will not remove popular disappointment that Mrs Thatcher declined to stand up to the miners. It looks to the country that she has been beaten by the miners. Mrs Thatcher can also point to the evident dissatisfaction of left-wing miners' leaders like Mr McGahey and Mr Scargill with the calling-off of the strike as proof of her Political acumen. Mr Scargill had recently boasted: 'We are creating the conditions to bring about an early general election to get rid of this Tory Government for once and for all.' And it was patently obvious that the militant Left was looking forward to a miners' strike, reinforced by transport Workers, as the key to a political process designed to destroy the Government. Mrs Thatcher has denied the Left this opportunity, and it is possible that the country in time will come to give her credit for the denial. Certainly, if she believed that the upshot of a long miners' strike would be the fall of her Government, a surrender made sense. Likewise, a swift surrender last week is better than a surrender at the end of a long strike. Such a view was advanced, with characteristic frankness, by Mr Norman St John Stevas, who said: 'The Government is quite right to compromise with the miners. This is the lesser of two evils. But the future is fraught with danger.'
It remains to be seen whether or not, in losing the battle, the Government has lost the war. Its ability to withstand the wage demands of the water and sewerage workers, of the firemen, of the civil servants is obviously weakened by the terms and nature of its surrender to the miners. Mr John Biffeit, the Trade Secretary, asked on television on Sunday whether the Government had given in to industrial muscle, replied 'Yes' and went on: 'What we have seen demonstrated . . is something we have long known in this country — the capacity of organised labour to exercise an extra-parliamentary authority which is almost baronial.' He can say that again. Mr Biffen added, to justify himself and his leader, 'I did not come into politics to be a kamikaze pilot. 'While acknowledging that survival is a very necessary political attribute, the public is entitled to ask Mr Biffen and his leader whether they came into parliament and high office in order to surrender to the extraparliamentary authority of the miners. '1 confess I like the centre ground,' said Lord Thorney croft a fortnight ago, singing much the same song as Mr Pym, who put it: 'Common sense tells us that changed circumstances make adjustments necessary — both tactics and timing — to meet altered circumstances.' It is pretty clear that Mrs Thatcher' and her Government are changing tactics and rhetoric and staking claim to the centre. They are already directing their policies towards the next general election. The surrender to the miners can be seen, and justified, as the first necessary step in the Tories' election campaign. This is indeed the best that can be said for it. It is not, however, enough: not for a Government which is less than two years into a term of office which began with such 'extraordinary and invigorating impact' and which has now degenerated into a calculated surrender.
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