Issue 173 of SOCIALIST REVIEW Published March 1994 Copyright © Socialist Review
I was a miner at Frickley Colliery for 19 years, and was made redundant 19 years to the day I started. I feel angry and bitter at events over the last 16 months. After reading Arthur Scargill's article 'History Distorted' (February SR) I'd like to tell a few home truths.
Scargill's article leaves one feeling that everything that could have been done was done. Not true, and Arthur Scargill and the NUM have to take some responsibility.
When the government decided to destroy the mining industry in October 1992, it faced almost total opposition from a labour movement that we had been told was dead. The two massive marches in London took everyone by surprise. The first was 150,000 strong and was billed as a mass lobby of parliament.
I remember the feeling at work. I was on the branch committee and helped organise the 20 coaches from our pit. Miners were really looking forward to it, saying things like the Tories would have to dress as road sweepers to even get in parliament, let alone vote. But instead we were dropped in Hyde Park and marched around a field. We felt robbed of the chance to vent our anger and felt we'd wasted our time. Many of us were running the risk of disciplinary action for taking the day off work.
Scargill's admission that the NUM had to accept a ticket only rally is a joke. Why did we have to accept it?
That day could have been so different. There was a mood to lobby parliament but it needed to be led. And only Scargill could have done it. Instead he was busy defending Bill Jordan. Scargill did call for strike action, but calling on the likes of Jordan and Willis was always a non-starter. To pull anything off we had to go over the heads of the leaders and appeal straight to the rank and file. But after the TUC march of over 250,000 people, we were fed a diet of small, demoralising local marches and told to wait for the end of a Commons Select Committee report, again toeing the TUC line.
One of the most disgusting things Scargill says is about the pit occupations. When he says if miners had seriously intended to occupy the pits they would have, it is an insult to all the miners who were prepared to risk the sack and maybe imprisonment. SWP miners worked hard to pull together miners from up and down the country who were prepared to go into occupation. Scargill was well aware of this.
For our pains we were attacked by Scargill in a packed meeting at Armthorpe, in front of men who until then were willing to occupy. By the new year we had men at six to eight pits ready to go into occupation.
This was no small step for us, for if things went wrong we all faced the sack, including men with families and mortgages who'd worked in the pits for 20 or 30 years. We needed at least the assurance that Scargill and the left in the NUM would come out in full support of the occupations. But we were told the time wasn't right, that we should just occupy the ten most threatened pits--none of which were in production. In pits like Frickley, where we had a good base, Scargill was against occupation. Without Scargill's approval we couldn't convince any of the non-SWP miners to go ahead. It would have been suicide for the SWP miners to go it alone.
The NUM campaign was sadly lacking on all fronts. In November and December Scargill said it would have been naive and politically incompetent to call a general strike. But if we couldn't pull anything in November, we had little chance the following spring when Scargill finally got round to calling for it.
When the TUC met in Doncaster on 25 November, the NUM refused to back a lobby. Even then many miners still turned up to tell Willis and Co what we thought of their campaign--which was leading us to the dole queue.
This wasn't just another dispute. The NUM and the mining industry were at stake. If we had thrown everything into a fight we could have beaten the government and opened the floodgates for millions of workers to do the same.
The lesson is simple. We can't trust any bureaucrat, no matter how left wing they are. But there is an alternative: rank and file organisation--and SWP miners almost pulled off the pit occupations independently of the union. If we had had five or six more members in the pits we would have had enough to sway a section of men into occupation.
It saddens me to have to write such a critical letter of Scargill, but we have to learn the lessons.
Paul Symonds
South Elmsall
No one can doubt that Arthur Scargill has been the most consistently left wing of union leaders. The admiration of many thousands of trade unionists is based on his uncompromising stand that there is the need for a fight.
However his article (February SR) dismisses any notion that he has influence in the wider working class movement by stating that he is only answerable to members of the NUM.
The Wednesday demonstration against pit closures in October 1992 illustrates the breadth of support. In my offices--in a Labour run council which has suffered years of Tory cuts--the mood was both angry and jubilant. Angry as we saw pit closures as part of a wider attack, and jubilant that we might be facing the start of a massive fightback.
The most unlikely people spoke of the need for a general strike. They said that Scargill had been right all along and voted unanimously for a walkout to go on the demo. On the demonstration the mood was the same, with chants of 'call a general strike' and 'march on parliament'. While we lacked the confidence to go for a march to parliament and take the whole demo, a call by someone with the influence of Scargill would no doubt have got it. By sticking to the 'official' route he let an opportunity go that could have changed the course of events.
Rank and file members across many industries have for years had to put up with trade union leaders' sell outs and being told that action is not the way to win. The Tories' pit closure programme unleashed an anger and sense that maybe we could at last fight back united.
No one could doubt the mood outside the NUM was more combative, but my experience on the demo was that the miners themselves gained confidence at the scale of the response. The wider working class movement had a decisive role to play calling for a fightback. Scargill should and could have broken with his official line and thrown his lot in with the millions who wanted to get rid of the Tories.
Phoebe Watkins
North London
John Chariton (January SR) made some interesting points in his TalkBack article, but I also thought he was in danger of blurring the differences between the groups of 'professionals' he mentioned.
Modern capitalism has created both a substantial white collar working class and, at the same time, what he calls the 'new middle class'. Many white collar 'professionals' have been effectively proletarianised since the war with the consequence that the vast majority of teachers and social workers can be counted as members of the working class. This fact has been reflected in their increasing unionisation and militancy from the 1970s onwards. A similar development has taken place more recently among bank workers.
In contrast the 'new middle class' (which is not actually a class) can be seen as occupying a contradictory position midway between capital and labour. It can be divided into (1) managers and supervisors and (2) semi-autonomous employees. It is the latter group which is relevant to the present discussion.
Semi-autonomous employees are wage labourers but they are not subject to the continuous surveillance and control that workers have to suffer. They are part of a career structure, so that they can expect to improve their economic and social position as individuals, by rising up a pre-existing hierarchy. Workers, on the other hand, can generally only improve their standard of living through collective organisation and action.
I would argue that at least two of the groups that John mentions, doctors and lawyers, can still be regarded as belonging to this category of semi-autonomous employees, rather than being protoworkers as he at times seems to be suggesting. Many lecturers may be in a much more precarious position.
The working conditions and job security of these groups have been hit hard by the recession and Tory attacks, especially at the lower levels. However, their contradictory class position means that they will be as likely to look to an individual solution as to collective action.
A much more realistic scenario would try to win these individuals from these groups to socialist politics. On the one hand this means getting support from them for workers' action. The increasing radicalisation of a significant minority of these groups means this can be successful. In building for the NHS march last year, our branch got a good response from doctors as well as other hospital staff for our petition at a local hospital.
On the other hand, it is often the wider political questions which draw people towards socialism. It is not just workers who want to know how to stop the war in Yugoslavia or prevent fascism over here. The Communist Party was able to build a significant anti-fascist movement amongst scientists in the 1930s even though scientists at the time were a much more elite group than they are today, and this allowed them to start to build the first scientists' union. At the same time they could offer a vision, if a flawed one, of a society where science could realise its true potential.
The greater the scale of the crisis in capitalism, the more will members of the middle class be torn between workers and bosses. The SWP will hopefully start to win over much larger numbers of these people as the struggle intensifies and as we grow, but it will be despite their contradictory class position and will require a party primarily rooted amongst the working class.
John Parrington
North London
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