[A-List] UK economy: the legacy of the miners' strike

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Perhaps the most interesting feature of this article is the implicit
criticism of the Attlee government and the bulk of the Labour left, in its
refusal to embrace full membership of the European Union since the
beginning. Otherwise it's hard to see how Feickert can justify complaining
about the absence of a European Coal and Steel Community settlement system
in Britain.

-----

Arthur was right by instinct

Two decades after the miners' strike, the full costs of the destruction of
the coal industry are only now becoming clear

Dave Feickert
Wednesday February 11, 2004
The Guardian

Never has any community of working people contributed so much to their
country and yet been so badly treated. Never has there been such a wilful
destruction of so many individual communities, of such a vast amount of
productive public capital, or of a nation's strategic energy resource.

Perhaps the real measure of the miners' sacrifice is this: since records
were first kept in 1850, more than 100,000 of them have been killed at work.
Countless others were injured or struck down by disease, with the present
generation only now being compensated for some of those diseases -
bronchitis and emphysema. Imagine what it must have been like to have had
one of those men as a son, husband or father. Now, at the point when
technology can prevent such destruction, that selfsame technology is being
removed from the few remaining pits.

On the 20th anniversary of the start of the miners' strike three key points
need to be understood. First, on energy policy: instead of being the only
European Union country that is self-sufficient in energy and a net oil
exporter, in a few years we will join the others in their energy dependency.
This time the UK will be at the end of the gas and oil pipelines from
Russia, central Asia, Algeria and the Gulf. Windfarms, however welcome, will
not save us.

Last year's energy white paper acknowledged this: "By 2020 we are likely to
be importing around three-quarters of our energy needs. And by that time
half the world's gas and oil will be coming from countries that are
currently perceived as relatively unstable, either in political or economic
terms." There are no major plans to build clean coal stations, but that is
what Spencer Abraham, the US energy secretary, advised George Bush and Tony
Blair in July 2003.

Second, the economic and social costs of destroying the British coal
industry have been huge - at least £28bn. This is nearly half of the North
Sea tax revenues of £60bn collected since 1985. Unless further support is
forthcoming, the horrendous damage to mining communities will take at least
two generations to heal, notwithstanding the work of the Coalfields
Regeneration Trust and the Coalfield Communities Campaign.

Third, the miners' strike could not have taken shape in the way it did in
any other EU country. It would have been negotiated to a settlement firmly
within the restructuring aid framework of the European Coal and Steel
Community treaty, the founding treaty of the European economic and social
model. Instead, in Britain we had the application of 19th-century industrial
relations to an industry that was at a technological watershed.

Arthur Scargill, the miners' leader, was right about two things in
particular: the huge scale of the redundancy and closure programme, and the
inability of the consultation procedures within the industry to handle the
issue. Restructuring had to be collectively bargained as well, but neither
the National Coal Board (NCB) nor the government wanted to negotiate the
substantive issues.

Scargill was right by instinct, but also because a group of us from Bradford
University had done the research. In 1982 we showed the National Union of
Mineworkers executive that automated, heavy-duty technology would produce a
productivity explosion. If the market for coal remained the same, this would
lead in the worst case to the loss of more than 165,000 jobs, or 74% of the
1981 pit workforce of 225,000. The first to go would be the coalfields of
Scotland, the north-east, Kent and south Wales, which had received little
investment. As Nelson Mandela observed with his customary frankness at an
international mineworkers' conference in Johannesburg in 1992: "Scargill and
the NUM have been vilified for trying to defend their members."

At the famous meeting of March 6 1984, James Cowan, NCB deputy chairman,
admitted only reluctantly that around 20 pits and 21,000 jobs would be hit.
Scargill's initial figure of 70,000 job losses was attacked as
scaremongering. Only in her 1993 memoirs could Mrs Thatcher admit the truth.
Ian MacGregor, NCB chairman, had told her in September 1983 that he wanted
to cut 64,000 jobs in three years and extend the redundancy scheme to
include miners under 50.

The huge hi-tech Selby coalfield is due to close by June this year. Then
there will be fewer than 5,000 miners working in Britain's pits. While the
second phase of pit closures arose in the 1990s from market displacement -
mainly by the new, privatised gas power stations - the majority of job
losses had earlier flowed from the productivity revolution. To illustrate
this point: just one hi-tech coalface, at Kellingley colliery in Yorkshire,
was producing 42,000 tonnes a week in 2003, almost as much as the 46,000
tonnes a week the whole pit was producing in 1983 from six faces, with six
times as many men.

Many have argued that the miners' strike could have been settled well before
that terrible year had run its course. This was made immensely difficult
because the NCB would not negotiate. True, the NUM was forced into tactical
options that made matters worse. And a civil war fought against the mining
communities generated such pressure that an internal civil war broke out
inside the union, at a time when members in the Midlands did not understand
that their jobs were at risk.
There was always another way. The union had tabled a draft technology
agreement in 1983. The NCB rejected it as "inappropriate". When NUM
negotiators raised this in 1984 they were accused of moving the goalposts. A
new technology agreement would have cut working hours and allowed older men
to leave, to be replaced by their unemployed sons. Anywhere else in Europe
it would have been seized upon as a basis for settlement. The October 1984
agreement with the pit deputies' union, Nacods, added an independent review
body to the colliery review procedure. But it dealt with consequences, not
causes, and was not binding.

Britain suffered a needless civil war and the mining communities were
destroyed. Many thousands of managers and breakaway UDM members lost their
jobs. And now the country is about to lose one of its founding industries,
just as it is on the point of being modernised.

· Dave Feickert was the TUC's Brussels officer from 1993-2003, and NUM
national research officer from 1983-93