There is No Alternative (32 page)

Thatcher ignored the pleading of the wets. The preparation continued. By 1982, trains ferrying coal to the power stations were running twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

Meanwhile, her government ushered in significant changes in the trade union law. The 1982 Employment Act made it vastly
more difficult, almost impossible, to form a closed shop, a union with mandatory membership. Unions that engaged in sympathy strikes or dispatched flying pickets could now be sued, fined, or held in contempt of court. By making unions liable to civil suits, Thatcher gave the judiciary a more prominent role in labor relations. The judges ultimately proved, as Thatcher had hoped, to be no friends of the striking miners.

In September 1983, Thatcher named Ian MacGregor chairman of the National Coal Board. MacGregor, who was half American and spoke with an American accent, had previously managed British Steel, cutting its workforce by 100,000. “Ian,” recalls Lawson, “was widely seen as an overpaid, over-aged, ruthless American whose main achievement at British Steel had been to slash the workforce.”
¹⁶⁸
What more could you want? Everything was in place.

Then Scargill was elected. “The moment that happened,” John Hoskyns remembers, “we basically said, ‘
There will be a war. Perhaps the last battle
.'”

Yet there remains a great mystery. Clearly, a
hell
of a lot of coal had been stockpiled. Equally clearly, the government was determined to win a strike. So why, given this, did Scargill call for a strike against pit closures, when no such strike had ever been called, no less won, before? And why did he call it in the springtime, in particular? By this point, Scargill could not have been ignorant of Thatcher's nature. General Galtieri had said to the American envoy, Vernon Walters, “That woman wouldn't dare” attempt to retake the Falklands. Walters raised an eyebrow. He recalled Thatcher's willingness—even eagerness, truth be told—to let the Irish hunger strikers perish. “Mr. President,” he replied, “‘that woman' has let a number of hunger strikers of her own basic ethnic origin starve themselves to death without flickering an eyelash. I wouldn't count on that if I were you.”
¹⁶⁹

Scargill had seen what happened to Galtieri. I simply cannot understand why he thought he would meet a different fate.

Hoskyns shrugs. “He did something quite crazy. I mean, he was actually, I suspect, in strategic terms, a fool. A stupid man.”

Let us return to Peter Walker, who is telling us how he discovered that Scargill was a Marxist.

Imagine that.

But before concluding that Scargill may have had a point, you should know this about Lord Walker. He is the son of a factory worker. His father was a union man—a shop steward, in fact. Walker did not emerge from the privileged class of which he is now a member. He, more than anyone, has the right to say that if equality of opportunity is present, the hardworking and talented will rise to the top.
He
did, after all.

In fact, Walker was the miners' great champion. I believe him when he says that he did everything within his power to avert a strike. Prior to the strike, Walker proposed to offer the miners an extremely conciliatory deal. It would not have forced a single miner into redundancy. He offered early retirement, on generous terms, to miners over the age of fifty. Miners working at the pits slated for closure would be offered the choice of a job at another pit or a voluntary redundancy package. Another 800 million pounds of taxpayer money would be invested in the coal industry. Given the losses the industry had been running, it is impossible to see this as anything other than a bribe.

Walker went to Thatcher, alone, to persuade her that the bribe, though costly, was essential. “Look,” he said, “I think this meets every emotional issue the miners have. And it's expensive, but not as expensive as a coal strike. And I think we should do it.”

Thatcher thought about it.

“You know,” she decided, “I agree with you.”

It is often held—it is certainly still believed widely among the miners—that Thatcher provoked the strike deliberately to punish
them for the humiliations they had inflicted on prior Conservative governments. Walker says this is a myth, and the logic is on his side. “If you'd wanted a strike,” he reasonably notes, “the last thing you'd have done was make an offer of that sort—I mean, an offer that was superb. You could have made an offer which was reasonable, and you'd have got a strike, or you might have got a strike. But we made an offer that was absolutely perfect.” Since becoming president of the union, Scargill had tried three times to convince the miners to strike; three times the union had voted no. There was no reason to imagine this time would be different: The deal was too good.

Walker was immensely gratified when Thatcher and the rest of the cabinet agreed to his proposal. The wets, he imagined, would save the day. He thought the miners would never reject such a handsome deal. And indeed, they did not.

In principle, the National Union of Mineworkers was a democratic organization. Its charter called for a ballot of all its members, and the agreement of 55 percent of its membership, before the declaration of a strike. “I presumed there was no way he could win a ballot,” Walker says, “so there wouldn't be a strike. And I was wrong.”

Upon seeing the terms of Walker's package, Scargill presumably realized that in all likelihood, the union would accept it. To Walker's astonishment, he simply decided not to hold a vote. “What he did was—with money from the Soviet Union—he paid miners to go and violently picket against miners who stayed at work. And he got a strike by brute force instead of the ballot.”

When the strike began on March 12, miners in the Midlands and Nottingham refused to join. Their pits were profitable. They were not slated for closure. They had cars, mortgages, decent salaries, pension plans—they had no desire to throw themselves on the bonfire of Scargill's vanity. Their lack of solidarity confirmed Scargill's deepest instincts about the unwisdom of the unpoliti-cized laboring classes: How easily they were tempted by baubles and trinkets! The dissenting miners demanded a national ballot.
Scargill refused. Why, he asked, should a treacherous labor aristocracy be allowed to vote other working men out of a job?