Reproduction to show the level of Journalism in UK in the 1960s and 1970
Thanks to Newstatesman
I started my career in UK in Barnsley and I was an active Labour Member.
Political "Thuga Damima" or Unlawful Force
Unlawful Law or "Political Thuga Damima" is is traditional in the East , especially in India and Ceylon.
Currently in India with 30% population who are Muslims are under considerable pressure and with Pakistan coming to the fore it is naturally reciprocal.
The government in power always exert it to the maxima and it is anit-democratic.
I want to dispense with Peratugamins, and my guess-estimation is RAW of India is financing them to destabilize our Universities and this ragging is part and parcel of that project or "Thuga Dhamima".
Ragging should be treated as a criminal offense with 5 to 10 year prison sentence without parole.
Ragging is a long standing problem and when I was in the University, I used to indentify the guys individually and the punishment was to expel them from the University.
Of course, parents were informed and one of these guys became a good lawyer. He started in the Inter-University Federation and often represented students who had legal problems. I think Rail put him in prion, I am not sure he is living or dead.
He may have emigrated with the help of his parents.
I never had contact with him once he was no longer a university student.
Our duty was to look after student interests without "Union Bala Pema".
These events are not seen in Western Countries, especially Australia.
I do not know how things in UK now with the Labour Party in ascendance.
In my time Unions were powerful and Thatcher with the help of Ronald Reagan, the union were destroyed and Arthur Scargill disappeared with the money, he invested in part of it in "International Labour Union" which is recognized by the U.N.O.
He is nearing nineties and was decade ahead of me and is living a quiet life now in Yorkshire.
Freddy Trueman and ? Brain Statham were the product of coal mining parents.
Arthur Scargill is currently the deputy leader of the Socialist Labour Party (SLP), a party he founded in 1996 and led until 2024. He was previously the President of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) from 1982 to 2002, and is known for leading the 1984-1985 miners' strike. He was born on January 11, 1938.
Arthur Scargill’s crumbling Camelot
Forty years ago, Margaret Thatcher defeated Britain’s miners.
Now their union is dissolving – and their former leader is in exile.
By Jacob Furedi
At the Miners’ Welfare club in Worsbrough Dale, Tuesday afternoons are still a sacred affair. When I visit, 60 or so women, many in their late 80s, have gathered beneath the crimson banner of the National Union of Mineworkers. “Listen lad, you’re welcome to come in,” says one. “But you’ve only got ten minutes.” Why the rush? “Trust me,” she replies, “you don’t want to get in the way of these ladies and their bingo.”
Fortunately, when I mention the name of Worsbrough’s most famous resident, the bingo is momentarily forgotten. The room erupts: everyone has something to say about Arthur Scargill and the legacy of the miners’ strike, which ended in defeat 40 years ago this month. “Once it was over, he sold us down the river,” says one woman. “I went to school with him and he was a big-headed bone even then,” adds another. A third starts to tut: “He never really cared about us here.”
For a man once hailed as “King Arthur” in these parts, it is a remarkable fall from grace. After all, if Scargill had a Camelot, it was here in Worsbrough, the sandstone pit village in the West Riding of Yorkshire where he was born and raised. But just as Britain’s mining communities have dissolved in the decades since, so too has Scargill’s reputation. King Arthur was once one of the most famous men in the country: a fearsome orator, raised on coal and cold winters, whose articulate militancy was toasted in the New Left Review and despised in the Daily Mail.
Today, aged 87, he lives a mile outside of Worsbrough.
For those in the village who remember the strike, he might as well be in exile.
If Thatcher believed “there is no such thing as society”, the Worsbrough of Scargill’s childhood was proof to the contrary. Yes, it was a place of one-up, one-down houses without gas and electricity, and only storm lamps for lighting.
But it was also a world of brass bands, bare-knuckle boxing and pigeon racing; a world where coal hung in the air and the clatter of industry echoed through the valley. It was, Scargill said in 1978, a “complete community”. Why would anyone leave?
The young Scargill never saw the need. As a child, he turned down the chance to take the 11-plus because it would’ve meant going to school in nearby Barnsley.
As a young man, too, he stayed in Worsbrough despite working in another town’s colliery. Over the next two decades, as Scargill’s charismatic trade unionism saw him ascend the ranks of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), Worsbrough remained central to his identity. In 1960, as the 22-year-old representative of the local Communist Party, he promised to make “make Worsbrough a model mining village”. That conviction never wavered. It was from here that Scargill – by then the hero of the Battle of Saltley Gate, the defining victory of the successful miners’ strike in 1972, as well as of the strike that brought down Ted Heath in 1974 – launched his campaign to become NUM president in 1982.
And it was from here, two years later, that Scargill triggered the biggest industrial dispute in post-war Britain.
“History will vindicate our action,” Scargill would later say of the miners’ courageous response to the government’s decision to close 20 mines in Britain.
The reality was often less glamourous. What followed was a year of picket lines, paramilitary police brutality and widespread poverty, as the miners, described by Thatcher as “the enemy within”, fought to protect their livelihoods.
A year later, on 3 March 1985, they were forced to concede. “SURRENDER,” gloated the front page of the Mail.
Countless autopsies have been performed in the decades since. Did Scargill split the strikers by refusing to ballot the NUM’s members beforehand, leading to accusations of anti-democratic leadership? (Probably.) Did, as Scargill insisted at the time, Thatcher lie about her intention to close 50 more pits? (Definitely.) Forgotten, meanwhile, were the strikers themselves and the communities they’d fought to protect. Forty years after being crushed, what has happened to “the enemy within”?
Visit Worsbrough today and, except for a weathered monument and the weekly bingo at the Miners’ Welfare, there is little sign of the area’s industrial heritage. Woolley Colliery, where Scargill worked, has been turned into an anaemic housing estate. Nearby Cortonwood Colliery, the first to go on strike in 1984, is now a retail park – a plaque on the wall of a Morrisons supermarket the only clue to its history. Worsbrough’s brass band didn’t even get that: its closure last year was announced with a Facebook post.
Soon, all we be joined the most symbolic scalp of all. The NUM, which boasted 250,000 members when Scargill was elected president, now represents fewer than 90. And Chris Kitchen, its current general secretary, believes it will be forced to close before it can commemorate the strike’s 50th anniversary. “Just looking at the age of membership and the cost of being a trade union, it’s not sustainable,” he tells me. Now, he explains, with every major coal mine shut and new mining licences banned, the NUM’s membership is largely made up of administrative staff, health and safety officers and legacy members. It still campaigns for improved pensions and compensation for its former members, but that won’t sustain it. “We may turn into some sort of association or charity to preserve the NUM’s legacy,” Kitchen explains. In fact, he tells me that plans for that transition are already underway, the final dissolution of a union that, in 1922, numbered over a million strong.
A former miner at Kellingley, the last deep pit to shut in 2015, Kitchen delivers the news of the NUM’s looming demise – and with it the symbolic end of Britain’s industrial era – with pragmatic resignation. As Kitchen observes, with the crises in the Middle East and Ukraine, the UK’s energy independence has never seemed so important. “Yet the government insists on pushing nuclear, which is more expensive than coal, or things like Drax [a power station largely powered by imported wood pellets], which is worse for the environment.” He’s quick to point out that the UK continues to import millions of tonnes of coal from abroad – much of it from the US and Australia – when Britain has around 80 million tons of it in shallow deposits. “But I can’t see Labour listening to us on this.”
Across the former coalfields of South Yorkshire, the fall-out from all this can be measured in two ways. First, on paper: in reports about its high rates of deprivation, poor mental health due to “post-mining woes”, and low life expectancy. But it can also be witnessed in the towns and villages themselves – in the cracks appearing on their surfaces.
In Worsbrough, what now passes for a high street is the antithesis to Scargill’s “complete community”: there is a tanning salon, a vape shop, a nail bar and an Asda – but not a single café or communal space. On one side, a community notice board advertises a scheme that offers discounted groceries for residents. Just up the road, the entrance to a derelict nursing home, closed since 2022 for health and safety breaches, still promises “a home away from home”.
“This place is horrible,” says Ann, who lives next door to the house owned by Scargill during the strike. It seems an ungenerous characterisation, given Worsbrough’s sweeping Pennine views and occasional chocolate-box charm. “It’s the crime,” she explains. “I can’t even leave potted plants in the garden – a few weeks ago, some kids stole my gnome!”
Along with a third of the Barnsley South constituency that contains Worsbrough, Ann voted for Reform in last year’s general election – and blames the Labour government, along with the Labour MP who won, for the area’s decline. Most locals I speak to share her concern about crime, but not her diagnosis. Roy Bowser, a Labour councillor in the ward, agrees there is “a real problem with drugs and crime” in the area, but blames the Conservative government that, after the strike, “ripped out the heart of this community and put nothing back”.
“It’s all Thatcher’s fault,” nods one woman who lives on Pantry Hill, next to where Scargill’s childhood home once stood (it has since been knocked down and rebuilt). She wishes to stay anonymous because “there’s still tension in the area about the strike”. She describes how one neighbour, a local ex-miner, is still called a “scab” for crossing a picket line 40 years ago. “The adults here still have to live with it,” she says. “It’s their children who are able to move on.” But on to what?
Jamie, 23, is supposed to be one of those children. I meet him on his way home from a job centre in Barnsley. “I’m looking for something in retail,” he explains, “but there isn’t much around. Most people my age just want to leave.” He goes on to describe how his father used to help with the machinery at the nearby mines, but when I ask about Scargill, he replies: “Who’s that?”
It’s a surprising but forgivable response. After all, Scargill had stood down as the leader of the NUM by the time Jamie was born. And even among ex-miners in Worsbrough, there’s a sense of unease about how Scargill should be remembered: as the local hero who went to war with Thatcher, or as the traitor who turned them and their community into collateral.
In September 1985, six months after the strike ended, Scargill decided to cash out. As Worsbrough’s unemployed miners reckoned with a year of poverty and mounting debt, King Arthur purchased the most glamorous property in the area, Treelands – a four-bedroom detached house described at the time by estate agents as a “monument to elegance”. The optics weren’t lost on Worsbrough’s locals: Scargill, the grumble began, had “started the strike with a big union and a small house, and ended it with a big house and a small union”.
The reality was even more unedifying. As well as buying Treelands, reportedly with a loan from a separate miners’ organisation, Scargill also held on to an apartment in London’s Barbican estate that he had rented – using NUM funds – since becoming leader. Unaware or uncaring of the irony, in 1993 he tried and failed to purchase it under Thatcher’s right-to-buy scheme. Kitchen, who has since fought various legal battles with Scargill over his expenses and the flat (which he eventually succeeded in buying), refused to be drawn on the subject. Yet he has previously said that he doesn’t “see much difference between the way Arthur has lived his life and the capitalist system he built a reputation for fighting”.
Meanwhile, with his property portfolio secured, Scargill turned his attention to more pressing matters. In 1996, with New Labour in ascendance, he founded the rival Socialist Labour Party, and stood against Peter Mandelson in Hartlepool in the 2001 general election. On that balmy June night, Scargill, then 63, walked away with a measly 2.4 per cent of the vote, as well as one of his campaigners who, she says, he later seduced and persuaded to have a threesome. Whatever the truth, around the same time, Scargill and his wife Anne, the Barnsley-born co-founder of the National Women Against Pit Closures movement, divorced after four decades of marriage, having separated in 1998.
The following year, he stepped down as leader of the NUM.
And what of Scargill today?
In 2024, he stepped down from the leadership of the Socialist Labour Party, and now makes only very rare public appearances.
He attended just a handful of the events commemorating the 40th anniversary of the start of the strike this time last year; at one in Doncaster, he was photographed alongside George Galloway, wearing a red tie and Free Palestine badge. “To be honest, he’s pretty reclusive,” says a long-time ally. “I saw him the other week in Asda,” adds one of the bingo ladies.
When I fail to find him in Asda, I drive to Treelands. You can’t miss it: a secluded grey-stone manor guarded by CCTV, conifers on two sides and the M1 on the other. Across the road, a sign points to a cattery down the lane.
Almost as soon as I knock, the door is opened by Nell Myers, the former NUM press officer and Morning Star journalist who is now Scargill’s partner. Now 82 but sharp as ever, she smiles and elegantly dances around the conversation. It won’t be possible to speak to Scargill, she says. But she’s happy to play the press officer. When I ask about Worsbrough’s decline, she talks of the strength that comes from a “continuous struggle” and how Scargill still holds the “same values and principles”; she insists the strike’s end “was clouded in misinformation”.
And then something peculiar happens. When I mention the NUM’s impending closure, a third person, hidden from view, starts to slowly close the door. It can’t be Myers, who is standing to one side of it, and there is only one car in the driveway. After Myers flashes a glance at our hidden companion, I ask if it’s Scargill, and if he might consider coming out for a chat. “No, no, no,” Myers stutters unconvincingly. “It’s somebody else.” She checks to see if I believe her. (I don’t.)
It quickly becomes clear that our conversation is over. As Myers shuffles to one side, the person behind the door starts to shut it again. Even in his castle, it seems King Arthur does not want to talk.
But should we be surprised?
What else could be expected from the man who led his army into battle, and abandoned them after defeat?
The economic consequences of the miners’ strike
The NUM’s defeat in 1985 marked the end of the social democratic era – and the creation of the market society in which government today cannot do even the simple things well.
By Robert Colls
“The choices open to women and men today – even amongst the underprivileged – may be more numerous than in the past, but what has been lost irretrievably is the choice of saying: this is the centre of the world.”
Coal used to get everywhere. Up your nose. Down your socks. Under your fingernails. This was the stuff, according to George Orwell, that was the basis of modern civilisation. Now my grandchildren don’t know what it is.
In the recent three-part Channel 4 documentary, Miners’ Strike 1984, Shirebrook men recount what “t’pit” meant to them. “It were like a mother.” “Every man for everybody.” “Maybe that were bred in me.” “Ah didn’t want anything else.” “Great pit, good colliers.” These sentiments could be 300 years old. Pitmen would speak of themselves as “true bred” in the same way that others in England would speak of themselves as “free born”.
Coal was nationalised in 1947.
Along with the NHS, the National Coal Board (NCB) stood at the heart of the new social democratic state.
Production peaked in 1913 at 287 million tonnes, but by 1960 manpower was down from well over a million men and boys to 607,000, and by 1970 it was down to 290,000.
The steepest losses happened under Harold Wilson’s Labour governments (253 pits), although Harold Macmillan before him closed 246, and Clement Attlee 101. By 1983, the NCB had improved safety, and raised output per man-shift tenfold, but the move to mechanised cutting had rendered many thin seams practicably unworkable if not strictly unprofitable. In 1951 Durham County Council planned the evacuation of 290,743 of its own people out of their own villages – mainly mining.
In 1974 the NCB’s Plan for Coal promised the accelerated closure of what it deemed inefficient collieries. Miners were used to it. They knew the drill. The leaders of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) were never keen on colliery closures, but they knew it was an inevitable part of an extractive industry.
Both sides had negotiated joint consultative frameworks and labour transference schemes to deal with it.
In the worst political crisis of the postwar era – Northern Ireland was on the boil too – Edward Heath went to the country in February 1974 asking “Who governs Britain?” and got his answer twice in the same year when Harold Wilson was returned at the head of a Labour government, albeit on knife-edge majorities.
James Callaghan replaced an exhausted Wilson in 1976, but faced the same inflationary pressures driven by the high price of energy and the low level of trust between government and trade unions. After the failure of his incomes policy (in the so called Winter of Discontent) Callaghan went to the country in May 1979 asking essentially the same question as Heath and got essentially the same answer (“Not you”).
A new chapter began with a refulgent Margaret Thatcher sweeping into Downing Street calling for peace and concord throughout the land.
On 6 March 1984, the NCB declared its intention to shut 20 pits out of 173 remaining, with the loss of 20,000 jobs. In a period of terrible haemorrhaging of industrial manufacturing – with over two million jobs lost since Thatcher had come to power in 1979, and a new Coal Board chairman, Ian MacGregor, who had already shed over 90,000 in three years at British Steel – the NUM leadership responded by calling for a national strike.
The union’s president, Arthur Scargill – a Young Communist in the 1950s, who had joined the Labour Party in 1962 – opposed calling a nationwide ballot of NUM members, concerned that the vote might go against a full-scale strike; instead he proposed that the initial strategy of members voting to strike area by area should continue.
His position was endorsed by a special delegate conference on 19 April, and the miners found they were fighting not only the government and the NCB, but also one another. Numbers fluctuate and are hard to pin down. At the union’s area level, South Wales, Northumberland and Durham, Scotland, Kent and Yorkshire had firmly voted in favour of strike action. The Nottinghamshire, West Midlands, South Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Lancashire and Cheshire areas had generally voted against. At the strike’s peak, about 50,000 working miners stood against (and thereby undermined) about 150,000 strikers.
Scargill hoped that impassioned calls for solidarity and brotherhood would roll the recalcitrant counties over, but the lack of a decisive national ballot left one shoulder of the union firmly wedged against the other.
By summer, the scrum was breaking up into violent clusters.
At Orgreave coke works near Rotherham on 18 June, mass picketing met mass policing in the traditional one-great-shove style – only this time, the shove was followed by battlefield tactics with mounted police, flailing batons, random arrests, false charges and much, much anxiety.
Three Bobbies fighting with the lad from across the road in your own front garden gave a whole new meaning to community policing.
The only difference was that under the 1875 Conspiracy and Protection of Property Act, NUM intimidation was illegal and police intimidation was not.
In a sense, rough-house policing was expected and could be faced down. Less easy to cope with for Midlands mining communities were the incursions of “flying pickets” – striking miners who travelled to pits in other parts of the country to reinforce the picket lines – who were not shy in telling local working miners and their families what they thought of them: “F***ING SCAB.”
Women’s strike support groups sprang up across the country and waded in. Local miners’ clubs became nerve centres. As well as hubs for food banks and soup kitchens, nurseries, adult education and somewhere to get warm, it was here that strike tactics were planned and families dug in to come together emotionally.
By the autumn, fear and loathing were joined by legal injunctions, sequestrations and inter-union wrangling in the courts.
By Christmas, despite widespread public support for the strike (including two giant much-loved teddies, bravely handed over by our daughters), enthusiasm for the strike was running low.
Neil Kinnock, elected leader of the Labour Party after the disastrous trouncing of Michael Foot in 1983, came from classic mining origins. Kinnock was born in Tredegar – Nye Bevan’s birthplace – the son of a miner and a nurse; he was member for Bedwellty (later Islwyn) mining constituency, a great speaker in the Welsh tradition and firmly on the decent communitarian left of the party. Everything had seemed primed for Kinnock’s entry into the field. Except that it was impossible for him to unambiguously endorse a national strike without a national ballot.
After all, Labour lived or died by national ballots.
There were other reasons too: the violence and the division.
Kinnock continued making “the case for coal” but kept his pleas for a national ballot private while stepping warily round the picket line. Picketing was an instrument of industrial relations that had always been contested – nowhere more so than in the miners’ and builders’ resort to mass picketing in the 1970s.
For Kinnock, if it was a question of Arthur Scargill’s jabbing finger or Labour’s electoral chances, it could never be the finger.
On 3 March 1985 the NUM declared an end.
Many miners had gone back to work already. Some marched back under their banners. Some, unbelievably, still manned the picket lines and called the marchers scabs. Once back at work, many men were victimised.
The miners had taken their deepest loyalties into battle and lost.
“Save our pits and communities” was essentially a moral call. There were economic arguments to be made, of course – among them fortifying Britain’s energy security, and ensuring communities’ survival through self-help (which would have been cheaper than supporting them via the dole) – but deep down the miners believed pits and communities were their business and nobody else’s. This was their land, not Thatcher’s or MacGregor’s.
They used to call their unions “mutual confident associations”.
Note the words.
If they believed in anybody, they believed in each other.
Thatcher’s government claimed the moral high ground too. It wasn’t that they were against subsidies. Not at all.
They were in favour of subsidies.
Indeed, they were about to give Nissan subsidies to build its new Sunderland car plant in the old Durham coalfield, where there was no shortage of ex-miners ready and able to make it the most productive of its kind in Europe. It was more that the prime minister and her key ideologue, Keith Joseph, believed that too many subsidies were awarded according to political opportunism, not market strength.
In a 1980 ministerial briefing, Joseph said the government was against “all obstructions” to the free play of the market – “obstructions” he defined as “institutional, psychological, cultural, economic and legislative”; “obstructions” which, in other contexts, might be said to constitute a whole way of life.
No matter. Parliament wanted utmost adaptability in the supply of labour and passed a string of trade union and employment acts (1980, 1982, 1984, 1988) to ensure they/we got it. Shirebrook Colliery in Derbyshire, for instance, was in time replaced by 1.8 million square feet of Sports Direct – a company so adaptable that, according to a 2015 parliamentary inquiry, it did not treat its workers as human beings. On the other hand, the old Orgreave coking plant at Rotherham was replaced by Sheffield University Advanced Manufacturing Centre – a research outfit so advanced (“We can take an assembly process down from 60 minutes to 60 seconds”) it might seem reluctant to treat its human beings as workers.
With the NUM out of the picture and the other unions cowed – and coal imports, as well as North Sea Oil and Gas, growing as market options – the way was clear for the privatisation of nationally owned industries and public services. Everything went, from British Telecom and British Gas to health and prisons.
Privatisation happened across all Western democracies and (it could be argued) might have happened anyway, but the miners’ defeat in 1985 was the signal, the flare, that allowed Thatcherism to go on the offensive. From now on, the government’s embattled economics began to look exemplary. From now on Thatcher was a “conviction politician”.
The new economic dispensation broke capital and labour into global fragments.
Andrew Marr has written in this journal that capitalism integrates people.
In fact, it’s the opposite.
Why is my local NHS GP surgery owned by an American conglomerate?
How come my children’s state school is privately owned?
Who allowed universities to dive into global markets instead of local adult education?
Who is lobbying against the Lobbying Act?
Who is answerable for HS2?
Who owns Thames Water?
Or the Post Office? (Don’t ask.)
Or Southern Railway? (Which is itself a brand name of Govia Thameslink, which is a subsidiary of Govia, which is a joint venture between the British Go-Ahead group and French Keolis, itself jointly owned by SNCF and CDPQ.)
Divided and confused?
You should be.
Nearer the national knuckle, why have we not been able to field a full armoured division since 1991?
Why are our two aircraft carriers out of service?
I say “we” and I say “our”.
The point is, the products or services people once believed somehow belonged to them – or were being delivered for them, or by them – have now been outsourced across various lines of contract and consultancy to distant third parties.
They might range, in hospitals, say, from security and car parking to nursing agencies and private health insurance.
Not only that. Government itself was privatised and marketised from 1986 in the Next Steps initiative to reform the civil service. Not only that, but the Stock Exchange was also reprivatised and globalised with the so-called Big Bang from 27 October 1986.
Now you see who is responsible for what you need. Now you don’t. In any case, the website doesn’t give a number, and even if it did, the enquiry would be pinged to some other company, perhaps some other country.
Economists talk about the “moral hazards” of global interconnected financial risk-taking. With mass immigration and the export of manufacturing jobs (down since 1982 from 21 per cent to 8 per cent of the UK workforce) labour was subject to its own forms of global interconnected risk-taking too. And labour was never just a factor of production. “Labour” lived somewhere. “Labour” had families. “Labour” was full of obstructions.
For the men and women of the coalfields, the economic consequences of the strike were horrible. The government got its 20 closures by 1985, plus three. The NCB was dissolved in 1987, with a further 97 closures up to full privatisation in 1994. Kellingley in North Yorkshire, the “Big K”, was the last deep mine in the UK, closed in 2015. The closures’ economic results were ambivalent:
UK GDP per capita 11th in Europe in the 1980s; 13th now. UK debt as a proportion of GDP 30 per cent in 1998; 98 per cent now.
For the mining communities, what should have been a simple question – “Whose side are you on?” – became mired in a civil war fought on the street, in the club, at home. For the British people, what should have been obvious – “We are all in this together” – got lost in the economic consequences of the strike.
The labour movement was founded to take back control from an Industrial Revolution that had broken customary restraints. Fifty years a miner at Harton Colliery, South Shields, Tommy Turnbull remembered being brought up in “what was really just a tiny hovel owned by a colliery that could put us out at a moment’s notice”, and he compared that with all that he and his family had achieved on the eve of his retirement in 1968. They lived in a council house with bathroom and garden. He could walk home from work “in clean clothes like anybody else”. His daughters were healthy with free healthcare and education up to university. They had good food, good teeth, good clothes, and shoes that fit. They went to Butlin’s every other year. For Tommy, as quoted in Joe Robinson’s 1996 account A Miner’s Life, “there was little else I could ask for. I only wish my mother and father could have had some of it… But recently my chest had been giving me quite a bit of bother.”
The point is: Tommy knew where all this came from (including the chest), and he was grateful. There were no mysteries about who or what was responsible for their good house, his decent wages, their free dentistry and the like. This was the life he wanted, only a bit better and more secure. South Shields, on Tyneside, was Red Wall but never fell to the Tories. On the other hand, it lost its mines and shipyards years ago.
In the battle for the Falklands, Thatcher called the Royal Marines heroes.
But miners and marines were the same sort of men: same grit, same loyalty, same physical risk, same black humour, often the same mothers and fathers.
Both fought trying to defend a national identity based on belonging: belonging to the regiment or the pit – a politics not unknown to the Tory philosopher Michael Oakeshott or to the Ruskin College Marxist historian Raphael Samuel.
Samuel described the strikers’ disposition – one they were willing to fight for – with the same words that Oakeshott used to explain the Tory: “a defence of the known against the unknown, the familiar against the alien, the local and the human against the anonymous and the gigantesque”. The hard left may have provided the soundtrack to the strike, and Scargill hinted at a great northern rising, but the miners wanted nothing new.
Harold Macmillan (Eton, Balliol, Grenadier Guards, Loos, Ypres, the Somme) remembered the miners as “the best men in the world”. Each in their own way, old left and old right saw mining folk as the backbone of the nation – a people who were to the British what peasants were to the French: the country unthinkable without them.
What is Labour?
The strike destroyed the conditions that made this question credible. “Labour” in the old class-in-itself sense, in the old industrial-pride sense, drained away down the dole queue.
Who are the Conservatives?
“Conservatism” in the old Oakeshott sense, if it ever existed, was lost forever in a world of infinite adaptability free from “obstruction”.
Nobody knows what either party stands for these days, least of all the parties themselves.
We live in a time when our social democracy is being stretched to breaking point, and the very shape of our national life has been (is being) rendered untraceable.
Government can’t do even the simplest things well.
You don’t need examples from me, as you’ll have your own.
If Keir Starmer wants a slogan, he can forget all that giving our future back stuff and simply promise to get things working.
Robert Colls is on the advisory board for the Durham Miners’ Association project at Redhills
When the lights went out
Fifty years ago, Harold Wilson’s Labour took power in a snap election called to resolve the 1974 miners’ strike.
But had the Tories won, would Britain have avoided the worst excesses of Thatcherism?
By Colin Kidd
Received wisdom holds that the decisive turning point in late-20th-century British politics was the election of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives in 1979.
It was followed a year and a half later by Ronald Reagan’s victory over Jimmy Carter in the American presidential election.
These two events marked the rise of the New Right.
The failures of its supposedly wimpish predecessors – respectively, a paternalistic One Nation Toryism and a liberal country-club Republicanism – had led to the emergence on both sides of the Atlantic of a harsher, more doctrinaire conservatism committed to free markets.
That’s the accepted version of history, cherished by Thatcherites, but equally compelling on the left as an account of how and when things went wrong.
The folklore in my own family was different. An abiding memory of an Ayrshire childhood was my parents’ fixation with the “Who governs Britain?” election of late February 1974. That was when the British people were asked to choose between supporting the democratically elected Conservative government of Ted Heath in its battle with the trade unions, or caving in to those unions that had the muscle or expertise to turn off the lights. Literally. Among my recollections from the early Seventies are eerie evenings in candlelight during power cuts, and, when our electricity was off, the exquisite flavour that my mother’s cooking with methylated spirit on a Primus stove gave even my least favourite foods; the tang of meth-enhanced custard remains an enchanting Proustian memory.
Heath did not win his desired mandate from the public, much to the regret of my late father, who worked in a declining sector of heavy industry and would find himself made redundant three times during the Eighties and Nineties.
Had the people given their wholehearted support to Ted Heath’s beleaguered Conservative government in 1974, my father felt, Britain might have avoided the callously applied rigours of Thatcherism.
Unlike Thatcher, Heath did not set out to inflict a bloody defeat on the unions, which he recognised as essential pillars of a decent modern society. Notorious for frosty relations with many of his own Conservative colleagues, Heath enjoyed surprisingly warm personal contacts with trade union leaders. Sympathetic as an undergraduate to the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War, Heath had gone out to Spain, where he formed an unlikely but enduring friendship with Jack Jones, later the leader of the Transport and General Workers’ Union.
A similar fondness marked Heath’s dealings with his supposed nemesis, Joe Gormley, the president of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). On one celebrated occasion when Heath, as opposition leader in the late Sixties, had invited an assortment of trade union leaders round for a private evening in his flat, they prevailed on the Tory leader – who was a fine musician – to play “The Red Flag” on his Steinway. Heath sincerely desired corporatist accommodation among government, business and unions in the national interest.
A progressive Conservative, he had no truck with the uncaring Conservatism of the Thirties, when high unemployment, as he saw it, was deployed as a deliberate instrument of policy.
In stark contrast, Thatcher’s view of the unions – not least after the election of February 1974, when it appeared as though the NUM had brought down the Tories – was resolutely negative and darkly vindictive. Nevertheless, the eventual turn to rigid laissez-faire prescriptions came at the end of the decade when it seemed as though all other options – Heathite corporatism; prices and incomes policies; Labour’s concordat with the unions – had conspicuously failed.
But today the 50th anniversary of the February 1974 election carries other resonances.
The dominant issue in the election – as never before or since, until now perhaps – was the country’s energy supply.
How was Britain in winter to be kept warm, nourished and entertained?
Factories were on a three-day week to preserve energy and the television stations were not permitted to broadcast after 10.30pm.
The pall of conflict in the Middle East – the Yom Kippur War the previous October: a surprise pincer attack on Israel by Egyptian and Syrian forces exactly half a century before the events of 7 October 2023 – still hung over proceedings.
This was because Western support for Israel had led to an Arab oil embargo and a sudden quadrupling of oil prices by the time of the election.
Nor did Britain’s own domestic energy source – coal – provide the answer; for the miners were on strike again in the early months of 1974, as they had been two years before in January and February 1972.
The discovery of oil in the North Sea offered an alternative solution, but only in the longer term, as the industry was not yet set up to bring the oil onshore on a commercial basis. Besides, North Sea oil was no uncomplicated panacea. Rather, it threatened the break-up of Britain by way of the enormous boost it gave to the Scottish National Party. Previously a fringe concern that had only ever won one seat in a general election – the Western Isles in 1970 – the SNP won a by-election in the safe Labour seat of Govan in November 1973, and now campaigned successfully on the very plausible slogan “It’s Scotland’s oil”, winning seven seats in February 1974.
These portents of our present situation serve to remind us of opportunities squandered.
How seriously have we taken the question of energy provision in the subsequent half-century?
Why has something as fundamental been so marginal in political debate in the decades before the climate crisis and the Russian invasion of Ukraine?
Except, of course, in Scotland, where the SNP spent almost 50 years promoting a vision of prosperous, oil-based independent nationhood, until in the past decade it pivoted away from fossil fuels to renewables and eventually entered into a governing coalition with the Greens in 2021.
But we might also ask how the UK mismanaged this North Sea windfall.
Not only did the Norwegians set up a sovereign wealth fund for the long-term benefit of their population, they also managed – incredibly – to extract three times as much public revenue as the UK per barrel of crude.
That the miners brought down Heath is only a half-truth, for he was under no necessity to call an election in February 1974.
Although his government was floundering in what we would now call a polycrisis – strikes and energy worries compounded by rising inflation and the bloodiest years of the Troubles in Northern Ireland – he possessed a healthy majority in a parliament, elected in June 1970, which had a year and a half still to run.
But in the enveloping crisis, Heath saw that a new mandate would give him enhanced legitimacy in tackling the problems with which he was confronted.
From November 1973 the miners had staged an overtime ban, which exacerbated the effects of the Arab oil embargo. From the start of 1974 power was rationed, and industry went on a three-day week to conserve coal stocks.
When the NUM raised the stakes still further in early February by going on an all-out strike,
Heath called an election for 28 February.
In another weird foreshadowing of recent experience, contemporaries felt that democracy itself was under threat, though as much from the left as the right. Were the miners in the vanguard of radical revolution? It was hard to tell.
The placidly pragmatic Gormley was a non-ideological champion of his members’ material interests, wishing only – as he later recorded – that every miner could have his own house with “a Jaguar at the front door… and a Mini at the side to take the wife shopping”. But the vice-president of the NUM, Mick McGahey, was a communist who called for “agitation in the streets of this country to remove the government”.
In late January Heath’s closest collaborator, the head of the civil service, William Armstrong, began to show serious signs of stress, ranting about the imminence of a communist coup. Rumours abounded that the government would deploy the army to maintain coal supplies. McGahey urged the troops to mutiny if ordered to interfere in an industrial dispute. Geoffrey Rippon, Heath’s environment secretary, feared that the UK was “on the same course as the Weimar government”: runaway inflation would lead to insupportable levels of unemployment, and then what?
Throughout the February 1974 campaign, the polls gave Heath’s Conservatives a consistent lead, and at the election itself they narrowly won the popular vote. The Conservatives took 11.87 million votes to Labour’s 11.65 million. However, in a rare hung parliament, Labour had won 301 seats, edging out the Conservatives on 297 MPs.
Heath tried to knit together a deal with the Liberals, who had won six million votes and a mere 14 seats, but was unable to agree to their understandable demands for proportional representation.
At this point Heath’s fair-minded handling of the Northern Ireland crisis also contributed to his undoing. In 1972 he had imposed direct rule from London on an increasingly violent province used to devolved government by and for its Protestant majority. In a huff, most Ulster Unionist MPs at Westminster, who had traditionally taken the Tory whip, renounced their long-standing connection with the Conservatives. In the tight arithmetic of early March 1974, Heath resisted the temptation to woo the seven Ulster Unionist MPs whose support would have brought the Conservatives marginally ahead of Labour.
Instead Harold Wilson, who had not expected to fare well in the election, found himself back in Downing Street at the head of an insecure minority government. A further general election followed swiftly in October 1974 which gave Labour a bare majority of three seats.
The February 1974 election was largely decided by a Liberal surge, which took votes away from the Tories. However, the election also witnessed early stirrings of the Eurosceptic cross-party populism which eventually brought us Brexit and the Tory capture of the Red Wall – but with some ironic wrinkles.
Heath’s Conservative government had taken Britain into the European Economic Community (EEC) on 1 January 1973, and it was the Labour Party that held out the tantalising prospect of an exit from Europe.
Labour was hesitant about committing itself to a capitalist bloc known colloquially in the UK as the Common Market, and was divided on the issue, between Europhiles such as Roy Jenkins and anti-marketeers led by Tony Benn.
Labour went into the election under the wily Wilson with a carefully fudged non-solution that kept both factions on board: the offer of a future referendum on EEC membership. This bare compromise was enough to detach Heath’s most powerful Tory rival, Enoch Powell, from his own party. Powell was already a back-bench politician, having been sacked from Heath’s shadow cabinet in 1968 for his racist “Rivers of Blood” speech, and decided not to run in the election of February 1974. Although not standing as a candidate, Powell made clear in his public pronouncements that he backed Labour’s manifesto promise of a referendum on continued membership of the EEC.
Arguably, the populist Powell had brought Heath unexpectedly to power in the election of 1970, and unmade him in February 1974.
Although race and immigration played a limited part in the election itself, there were reverberations then – and now – from the antipathy of recently independent African governments to the Asian populations that had arrived during the era of colonial rule.
Indians in Kenya faced a hostile “Africanising” environment, and many, including Suella Braverman’s father, emigrated to the UK.
Things were immeasurably worse in Uganda.
In August 1972 Uganda’s dictator, Idi Amin, who had seized power the year before in a military coup, expelled the country’s Asian population, giving them a mere 90 days to leave.
In the course of 1972-73 around 40,000 Ugandan Asians – the majority of whom were British passport holders – came to the UK, including the parents of Priti Patel.
An opportunistic Powell – still at that point a Tory MP – proclaimed that “people were rightly shocked at the prospect of 50,000 Asians from Uganda being added to our population”.
Heath knew that the influx of Ugandan Asians was electorally unpopular, but – as in other areas, such as Northern Ireland policy – put duty ahead of political expediency, and set up a Uganda Resettlement Board to assist these unwanted refugees.
But the decencies of Heathite Conservatism have long since evaporated.
Douglas Hurd – Heath’s political secretary for most of his time in Downing Street, later a cabinet minister under Thatcher and Major – has bemoaned the gradual displacement of Tory concern for the less well-off by what he calls the “sour right”: tight-fisted, mean-minded, xenophobic. Such sourness is no longer – as it was in the era of Powellism – the exclusive preserve of angry white gammons.
Fifty years on, the children of the displaced Asians of Kenya and Uganda are among the loudest Conservative voices against immigration.
In retrospect, both Conservatives and Labour have been twisted out of shape in the subsequent half-century.
When Egypt and Syria launched their surprise attack on Israel in October 1973, Labour was loud in support of its fellow socialists in Israel.
Heath – the least Atlanticist of our prime ministers – was acutely aware of Europe’s energy dependence on the Arab world, and during the conflict tried to steer a middle course between the two sides. The supposed even-handedness of an arms embargo on both sides in the conflict hit Israel harder. The UK government refused to resupply the Israelis with munitions for the Centurion tanks which it had earlier sold to them. As a result, Wilson accused Heath of “dishonouring contractual obligations at the very moment of Israel’s greatest need”.
The two members of Heath’s cabinet who found it hardest to swallow his Middle Eastern policy were the Jewish politician Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher, the MP for Finchley, a London constituency with a large Jewish population.
Within a year Thatcher and Joseph – for reasons unrelated to foreign policy – were to become the most prominent opponents of Heathite corporatism. In the course of 1974 the masochistic Joseph came to regard himself and his Conservative colleagues as prime contributors to our economic malaise.
Labour was worse, but sentimental Tory paternalists like his former self, he argued, also bore heavy responsibility for the decline of Britain. This uninspiring tendency to self-laceration – combined with his outspokenness and eccentricity – ruled Joseph out as a contender for the Tory leadership.
Instead, Thatcher headed the free-market insurgency, replacing Heath as opposition leader in 1975.
However, this turn towards a more grimly – and supposedly – “realistic” political economy did not go far enough; it ignored the limits nature imposed upon growth. The most influential environmentalist of the day was, strangely perhaps, a former National Coal Board adviser, EF Schumacher.
In Small Is Beautiful (1973), Schumacher warned that, in accounting terms, it was wrong to treat fossil fuels as income, when they formed part of an irreplaceable trove of capital – something which ought to be carefully conserved for the future. Schumacher worried about resource depletion not global warming, though he also warned that ever-growing pollution was testing nature’s resilience.
The election of February 1974 served for a moment as a fire bell in the night, drawing the attention of politicians to the fundamental importance of energy in sustaining our way of life.
But that anxiety soon passed, as did Ted Heath’s vision of a progressive, corporatist Euro-Conservatism.
By Alan Johnson
If any period in our national story justifies Alan Bennett’s definition of history as “one f***ing thing after another” it must be the three years covered by David Kynaston in the latest installment of his epic history of postwar Britain, “Tales of a New Jerusalem”.
Beginning with the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962 and ending with the death of Churchill in January 1965, the events cascade unceasingly:
Henry Cooper floors Cassius Clay days after Profumo resigns, the Beatles’ second UK album is released on the day JFK is killed in Dallas.
The narrative teems with names – Keeler, Beeching, Philby, Rachman, Wilson, Twiggy, James Bond – and occurrences: Stephen Ward’s suicide, the Great Train Robbery, the Big Freeze, mods vs rockers.
The country is gripped by a political mood not dissimilar to today’s.
In 1963, after 13 years of Conservative rule, the Labour opposition is 20 points ahead in the polls with an election approaching.
The Tories are besieged by scandal.
As John Profumo’s affair with Christine Keeler is exposed, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan recorded wearily in his diary: “woman this time, thank God it’s not boys”. Decay and decline are in the air. A future Catholic archbishop describes the local area of his church in Stepney, east London: “dosshouses and a brothel, derelict buildings, the remains of bombed houses where meths drinkers gathered, streets full of litter and debris”. In the midst of this was a Tory poster reading: “Don’t Let Labour Ruin It.”
Race is a constant theme.
A Birmingham hotel bans “coloured people”, Bristol bus workers refuse to allow West Indians to work with them, a Conservative MP says something so shockingly racist on Any Questions that I almost lost my page, and 16.5 million watch The Black and White Minstrel Show.
The chancellor is Reginald Maudling and his “dash for growth” has led to an imports-led boom, a deteriorating balance of payments and accompanying pressure on sterling reserves. The governor of the Bank of England is advised that “devaluation of the currency… may be a necessity but only as a confession of ineptitude and irresponsibility”.
Labour’s new leader, Harold Wilson, faces a poisonous inheritance should he win power. Wilson was elected by Labour MPs following Hugh Gaitskell’s sudden death in January 1963. When Macmillan steps down because of poor health that October, his successor “emerges” from a gathering of Tory grandees who decide that the 14th Earl of Home is a good chap who deserves a turn at the crease. Alec Douglas-Home had actually played first-class cricket but, as Kynaston records, cricket’s “internal apartheid” between “gentlemen” and “players” had ended in 1962.
Wilson, sensing that the public wanted their prime minister to be a “player” rather than a “gentleman”, attacks the third Etonian in a row to occupy 10 Downing Street as representing an establishment counter-revolution.
Since his “white heat of technology” speech in September 1963 the opposition leader has been making the political weather. With his pipe, mac and Yorkshire accent, Wilson seems part of the northern moment that gives this book its title. The Conservatives are spooked. Unemployment, while generally low, is dramatically higher in the north-east of England. The pugnacious Tory minister Lord Hailsham had been dispatched there in February 1963.
In an echo of levelling-up, he described his mission as being to lift “the quality of life at all levels”. Hailsham, truly shocked by what he saw, spoilt it all by patronisingly wearing a cloth cap throughout the visit.
One of Kynaston’s heroes, Richard Hoggart, once said that “each decade we shiftily declare we have buried class; each decade the coffin stays empty”.
This book demonstrates that the Sixties were no exception.
In the NHS, 80 per cent of doctors were from the top two social classes while 80 per cent of their patients were from the bottom three.
Not far off a million houses were still classified as slums and although council housing was becoming more widely available, the people who designed the estates did not live on them.
In education, Rab Butler’s great reforms were increasingly being seen as no longer fit for purpose. There was little early years provision and three quarters of pupils left school at the first opportunity. One commentator summarised the country’s education system pithily: “Nothing until the age of five, a class of about 40 until 11, either no thought of secondary education or rejection by the eleven-plus, a class of about 30 until 15 and nothing much thereafter.”
What’s striking is how active local authorities were in seeking change with or without the support of central government. By 1963 – well before Labour took office the following year – 92 out of 129 English local education authorities had initiated plans to end selection at age 11. Labour’s commitment to comprehensive education appeared to be pushing at an open door, except that parents in general were not as displeased with the status quo as were educationalists. Wilson was even contemplating bringing private schools into the state system, but asked close allies to recognise that he was “running a Bolshevik revolution with a Tsarist shadow cabinet”.
The widespread assumption was that Wilson would win the 1964 election, but as the campaign began a national poll put the Conservatives ahead for the first time in three years. In the event Labour scraped home by four seats and there was a 7.2 per cent swing to elect the openly racist Tory candidate in Smethwick.
Of the 1,258 candidates fielded by the two main parties, only 56 were women. At the same time, the educationalist John Newsom wrote in the Observer that girls should be educated in their main social function, “which is to make for themselves… and their husbands a secure and suitable home, and to be mothers”
Thankfully, the 65-year-old economist Lionel Robbins didn’t agree. His seminal report on higher education declared that it should be open to all who qualified. The result was (eventually) a huge surge in the number of women at Britain’s universities, although perversely the social class gap in elite higher education didn’t narrow, it widened. As Kynaston observes, while “social class does not quite trump everything, more often than not it trumps most things”.
A collage of fragments interlaced with penetrating analysis, this book is always humane, often hilarious, devoid of dogma and never condescending. There are some lovely ironies. The Beatles are at the forefront of the cultural revolution – Philip Larkin famously identified 1963 as the year “sexual intercourse began”, “Between the end of the Chatterley ban/And the Beatles’ first LP” – but we learn they escape hysterical fans by ensuring the national anthem is played at the end of a concert, and slipping out while their teenage audience stands motionless for the Queen.
Churchill’s state funeral undoubtedly marks the end of an era (and the halfway stage in Kynaston’s history from Attlee to Thatcher).
It takes place on a Saturday and, incredibly, the football fixtures go ahead as normal. Stanley Matthews plays his final game at the age of 50. As Kynaston observes, “the passing of two mid-century icons” but, thankfully, not the end of this wonderful series of books.
