There is No Alternative (34 page)

Scargill kept telling the miners the coal stocks would run out soon.
Within weeks,
he promised.
Within weeks.
When the press started repeating Scargill's assurances, Walker arranged for journalists to be taken up in helicopters and flown over the power stations to see the size of the stocks.

Neil Kinnock remembers visiting a coal miners' lodge in his constituency: “The boys were pretty frigid at the start, and they're asking me questions, and you know, they'd never be vicious, but obviously, they'd swallowed all this crap about me not supportin' the miners and all that stuff. But nevertheless they asked their questions, and eventually I said, ‘Now listen. I wasn't going to do this, because I think you've had enough punishment. But my union, the Transport and General Workers Union, has just sent me last week's figures for coal stocks in several power stations. And I'll read 'em out to you.' And I read them out. And the guys just sort of looked at me. And I said, ‘Now, I don't know'—and there were only several hundred men there—‘I don't know how many of you
are surprised. I guess there are some of you who've been picketing the power stations who are
not
surprised, because you've looked through the fence. And you've talked to the drivers. And you've talked to the guys working in the power stations.
And you know bloody well
that when Scargill said there's three weeks left—there's three
years
left.' And the guys said—
yup.
”

“And if they
knew
that, why didn't they turn on him?”

“Because of loyalty. Because they were isolated, under attack, and they weren't gonna break ranks and turn on their own leadership—”

“So their loyalty was to the union?”

“No, the loyalty was to their own communities and their own comrades. That being said—”

“But what kind of loyalty is it to march together like lemmings off a cliff?”

“That's how wars are fought, luv. If generals couldn't get men to line abreast against machine guns, there wouldn't be any wars.”

“Yeah, I understand your point, but I'm still surprised by this—”

“No, this is the thing. Other than people who know the mining communities and miners
very
well, people will receive what I say, and they'll think, ‘Well, he doesn't have any interest in bullshitting us about this, and maybe there's some truth in it, but it can't
really
be true.'
Nobody
who comes from a coal-mining community says that. You just say, ‘Yeah, that's right. That's what it's like.' And that
is
what it's like. To some extent it's to do with the physical sociology of coal mining. You depend on all the other guys.
Including
the ones you don't like. All rivalries die the moment you go down the colliery. As far as you're concerned, whether you like someone or not, they're lookin' out for you, and you're lookin' out for them.”

Bernard Ingham, of course, sees it a bit differently. The miners “were paralyzed
.
Because they were in the hands of a military junta
,
in effect. And the discipline that they exercised, the brutality of their message, was really quite remarkable. I mean, this wasn't a democratic institution, this was a menacing institution. I don't think people really understood the depths to which the British trade union movement sank during Scargill's time. He had a private
army! The purpose of these flying pickets was to impose his will upon his union, and of course upon the police and the nation. And these flying pickets went far and wide, and I think I'm right in saying they were the only people the union paid during the strike. Those who formed his private army and fought the battle at Orgreave, against the police. Now,
that
is the nature of the man.”

Kinnock's loyalties were utterly conflicted. He loathed Scargill and knew he would bring the miners to ruin. But he represented the Labour Party—whose origins are in the trade union movement—and came from a mining town himself. He could not bring himself publicly to condemn Scargill's failure to ballot the union membership.

Walker implored Kinnock to call for a ballot. He persuaded two Labour parliamentarians—“I can't name names, for obvious reasons”—to go to Kinnock with a message:
Look, Kinnock. Obviously I can't ask you to support a Tory government in a miners' strike. All I ask you to do is say, “The miners have always had a ballot. This terrible dispute doesn't have the support of a ballot. I ask you as leader of the Labour Party to now quickly hold a ballot on this strike.” It's in your interest: If they ballot in favor of the strike, you'll be supported by the miners, not by Scargill. If they ballot against it, you will be praised for having settled the strike. As party leader, you have nothing to lose.
The envoys did their best to persuade them. “But he said no, he couldn't be seen, you know, bullying the miners' union.”

Kinnock told me that he tried, repeatedly, to talk sense into Scargill behind the scenes. Given how much the men loathed each other, I wondered about the tenor of those conversations. Were they acrimonious, I ask? “Did he speak to you disrespectfully, or—?”

“No, no, no, no, no, no. No, no. Nothing like that. I mean, the only time that Scargill would ever have a go at me was when he was surrounded by a couple o' thousand people. I mean, he'd never do it to my face.”

“So what was he saying to justify his actions?”

“Well, he just kept dodging around, you know, and moving the goalposts. I'd say something like, ‘It's going to be very difficult for you to get any kind of picketing support, 'cause you have no ballot. Sympathetic action is very difficult,' and he'd say, ‘Ah, but the coal stocks, there's only a fortnight left!'”

“But that's
nuts
! I mean, he
knew
it was nuts!”

“Of course it's nuts! Of course it's nuts!”

“So why weren't you insisting on a ballot?” I asked.

“Well, if I'd said at that stage, ‘Either have a ballot, or go back to work,' then two things would have happened. First of all, I would have been kicking the miners in the face. Secondly, of course, Scargill could always have blamed me for the failure of the strike. So I wasn't going to allow either of those things to happen. So that was the reason.”

“In retrospect do you regret that you made that decision?”

“Oh yeah. It was the worst decision I ever made in my life.”

“Really? You think that was the
worst
decision you ever made?”

“Oh,
Christ
, yeah. Yeah, yeah.”

When I ask Nigel Lawson about Kinnock's odd passivity during the miners' strike, he snorts derisively. “He was a very weak man. He was and is a very weak man.”

I don't agree. Kinnock was in fact courageous; it was Kinnock, after all, who after this debacle purged his party of its hard-left wing, paving the way for the rise of New Labour. But I suspect that until the very last, Kinnock, like Scargill, thought the miners would win. After all, Kinnock comes from a mining town; he is a miner's son. He hated Scargill, and he hated Thatcher, but he loved the miners. So he bet on the wrong horse.

I do not understand the miners' determination to keep the pits open. I understand their rage—a life in the pits would madden anyone, I reckon—but I don't understand its object. Why were they demanding the right to mine coal? Why were they not demanding the very opposite—that the government do something, anything, to shut every last one of those hellishly cruel pits down? The miners chanted, “Coal, not dole.” But a lifetime on the dole, it seems to me, would have been preferable to going down the mines. And the dole was the worst alternative in 1984. Unemployment would not have meant starvation, as it might have a century prior.

Peter Walker nods when I say something to this effect. “I used to go down in the valleys, and knock door-to-door on all the rather humble houses. And it was a terrible experience, because nearly always a widow would come to the door. Her husband had either died of mining illnesses, or mining accidents. Or alternatively, she'd come to the door, and you'd hear in the background an elderly man coughing . . . ”

The waiter refills Walker's wine glass. “Was there ever a moment when you doubted that the government would win?” I ask him.

“Never. No.”

“You were always completely confident? Why was that?”

“If he had found a way of closing all the pits, I would have imported coal. I mean, there's plenty of coal to be imported. And I would have put the army in charge of protecting the lorries. And I knew that in whatever I wanted to do, I was absolutely confident that if I said, ‘Look, we've got to import coal, you know, we've got to have the army monitoring the delivery of coal,' I would have had the support of the cabinet, and Margaret. But I was never anywhere near that. There was never a moment when the coal stocks went down. He tried to do other things, like stop spare parts going in to the power stations, and we found ways to smuggle them in.”

The dessert cart arrives. I order the lemongrass crème brûlée; Walker opts for the trio of homemade sorbets. I finish the last drop of wine in my glass.

“I mean,” says Walker, “it was a strike you
couldn't
lose. If you'd lost, it would have been a total disaster for democratic capitalism. It would have been unbelievable.”