The great mining disaster

Peter Paterson

The shock waves created by the miners' decision, announced on Tuesday, to reject the Coal Board's productivity scheme are still echoing through the cages and galleries of Whitehall and Westminster. On the production face of politics the blue scars earned in previous governmental encounters with the miners are suppurating. Winter is upon us, and with it the alarming threat of a re-run of the 1973-74 show, but this time with a Labour administration having to cope with the nightmare of confrontation.

Mass picketing Oa Grunwick was born in the heat of that previous clash with miners' power. Are we facing a repetition of the great Saltley Depot siege, but refined and perfected to ensure that no electricity or gas goes down the transmission lines, and that the country —such is progress — this time will face not a three but a two, or even a one-day week?.

One doubts the nerve of the miners this time round to challenge elected government quite so boldly. It is one thing to take on an unpopular Conservative administration, with the solidarity and support and backing of nearly every other trade unionist in the country, and quite another to force a shaky but putatively successful Labour government into a mistimed general election.

Some hint of these doubts emerged from the campaign that accompanied the miners' ballot. The left was divided. Little was heard from Mr Mick McGahey, the Scottish miners' leader, who seemed to find urgent business requiring his continual presence in London while the ballot took place. The South Wales leadership was equally unobtrusive, apparently content to leave democracy and the ballot box to take their own course.

In Kent, after a despairing but properly constitutional attempt to have the ballot stopped by the High Court, the voters were scarcely badgered. On the other side, the supporters of the productivity scheme were ludicrously complacent. Mr Joe Gormley, for example, thought the moment opportune to take a trip to Australia. With his policies now in ruins, he might just as well have stayed in Broken Hill.

But one man seized the moment. With brilliant opportunism and iron . nerve Arthur Scargill, the Yorkshire miners' president, stuck his neck out and campaigned with great vigour and panache for the rejection of the Coal Board's proposals. Well, perhaps they were only nominally the Coal Board's. Given a Yes vote by the miners, the government would have heaved a sigh of relief, the TUC would have rushed in to exempt the miners from the 12-month rule, and the Board would have paid up an extra £23.50 a week to face workers, with proportionate rises for the rest, and everyone would have hoped—without counting on it— that the lamentable productivity record of the industry might — just have benefited.

Given that Yes vote, Arthur Scargill would have been finished. His (envious) critics on the left would gladly have danced on his grave, adding this fiasco to the publicity-seeking posturing on the Grunwick picket line and the farce over his runaway editor who sought asylum in East Germany.

Appreciating the odds, Scargill staked all, lashing out the Yorkshire miners funds on advertising in the capitalist Press, and conducting a black propaganda campaign against the productivity scheme that would have delighted Lord Beaverbrook or Richard Crossman.

The Yorkshire president's campaign brought a whiff of the 'thirties into corntemporary industrial politics. The voters were assailed with cartoons of wicked, cigar-smoking capitalists riding in carriages drawn by miners with the carrot of the productivity scheme dangled in front of their noses. Amazing statistics were concocted showing that incentive payments produce accidents — a 7,300 per cent higher accident rate for contract workers on paymentby-results than for ordinary miners was claimed on the shaky basis of a total of four deaths among both categories in one year. Fears were sown that many pits would never reach the scheme's output targets and that the men would therefore be not a penny better off.

By comparison, the opponents of central bargaining in British Leyland were mere amateurs in their unsuccessful efforts to oppose their management's plans. They went down heavily in a secret ballot which was widely interpreted as expressing the disgust of the ordinary workers over the high-strike, low-productivity record of the company.

But there was one essential difference between the two ballots. The car workers realised that National Enterprise Board funds might dry up if they voted down the firm's proposals, and that there was even a danger that British Leyland might be broken up, with consequent plant closures and loss of jobs.

The miners, on the other hand — and Arthur Scargill perceived this most clearly — having rejected wage rises tied to productivity, could only go on to win wage rises subject to no conditions at all. For the ballot itself was an attempt to distract the miners from their original, damaging claim for rises of up to 90 per cent from the beginning of this month, a demand so blatantly in breach both of the government's and the TUC's guidelines that it had to be headed off at all costs.

The basic rate for a face worker is currently around £91 a week. The claim they must now fall back on, enthusiastically endorsed by the miners' policy-making conference last summer, is for £135 a week for face workers, with proportionate increases for all other workers. Moreover, there is no nonsense about waiting a year since their previous increase. November 1st was the date chosen, and part of the fight to achieve the rise will be to get it paid as from this due date.

Part of the calculation of future tactics must concern the attitude of other groups of workers. Last time the miners went on the rampage, they enjoyed the goodwill and the open support of their union colleagues. Will they do so this time? One straw in the wind is the way in which the miners' spokesman in the TUC debate at Blackpool early in September was catcalled when he spoke of the hardship still existing among miners' families.

If the miners are going to act as a law unto themselves, whatever the consequences for the Labour government, they could well find themselves going it alone on this occasion. There will have to be a further ballot on industrial action if, as seems inevitable, the Coal Board and the government refuse to give way. Having gone this far, it is hard to see that a majority of the miners will now be prepared to pull back from the possibility of confrontation with the government.

But not since the 1926 General Strike, or its tragic aftermath, have the miners been Forced in fight alone. Scargill's triumph, and the smoothing of his path to succeed Joe Gormley as president of the National Union of Mineworkers, will have been expensively bought if the price is the ostracism of the miners by the rest of the trade union movement. And they will need even broader shoulders if they are to bear the blame for undermining Mr Callaghan's government and letting in the Tories.