Arthur's instinct was right

The 25th anniversary of the miner’s strike has been greeted with much head-shaking about its wrong-headed leadership and failure to compromise. This view needs to be challenged for 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 willful 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 25th anniversary 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, we have now joined 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. Wind-farms, however welcome, will not save us.

Labour’s own 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.

There are now 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 by 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 finally to lose one of its founding industries.

Equinox in Beijing

Spring in Beijing is a fascinating season. Winters are very cold and summers are very hot, but spring and autumn can be gentle seasons, with autumn winning. Spring, of course, is the time of the equinoxal winds. The spring Equinox in the Northern Hemisphere will be on March 20 and the winds are already blowing. Fine red sand is whipped up from the Gobi desert and blown through any crack in the windows, covering every surface. Biking on Beijing’s streets, in a sandstorm is no fun at all. The Equinox happens twice a year, in March and September. Night and day are of equal length, when the sun sits vertically above the earth’s equator. For me, wherever I happen to be, it also evokes a questioning of human progress towards equality. A socialist colleague once went so far as to argue that ‘The Equinox is inherently socialist!’

If physics cannot really be claimed for one politics or another, China certainly can. But which one? The last two centuries have been tumultuous in China. Movements pressing the case for equality have been in powerful evidence since the Christian working men’s movement, the Taipings, started their rebellion against the Emperor in 1850 until they were crushed in 1864. One of my boyhood heroes, the Christian General Charles Gordon was dispatched by the British Crown to lead the Emperor’s armies in putting down the Taipings. Around 20 million people died. Gordon later died at Khartoum, also a martyr. To locate this in time and place for the peoples of the Whanganui Region, my current home in New Zealand, in 1864 another British officer, General Cameron landed at the river mouth and disembarked 3,700 redcoats, having just helped to secure again the jewel in the Crown, India.

Former Chinese Premier, Zhou Enlai was born in the days before the Spring Equinox, 1898. He is often attributed as saying, in answer to a question about the impact of the French Revolution of 1789, “It is too early to say.” Premier Zhou’s studies in France no doubt included Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. What he is remembered for, however, is his diplomatic finesse. He was responsible for inviting President Richard Nixon, the first major Western leader since the end of the Second World War to visit China, in 1972. The economic reforms began in 1978 and China is well on its way to becoming the world’s largest economy, which it was up until two hundred years ago. How equal it will be, is for next week’s column.