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Successful Miners' Strike

T

The Lone Centurion

Active member
Location
Deloraine, Tasmania, Australia
There was a lot bitterness left over from the defeated Miners’ Strike for many years, including bitterness that Mr Scargill hadn’t had the guts to put strike resolutions to secret ballots of miners’ union members. Preserving your democratic credentials would have helped you and your members a lot in the battle against Maggie T. for public opinion, Arfur. Instead you got your union, your members, and your movement, successfully labelled "the Enemy Within".
 
I hate to play apologist for Scargill, but it's a little great man to argue it was all his fault. I think by that point you had a government determined to destroy the unions and a public by and large on that government's side.

Even with different leaders in the unions some kind of reckoning is likely to happen because the government wanted a confrontation and the public were bloody sick of strikes.
 
This reads more like a one-sided conversation with Arthur Scargill, who I'm fairly sure isn't a member of this board, than a scenario or a PoD. The only thing that appears to be from an alternate reality here is the idea that the bitterness that still exists today is somehow aimed at him rather than the government that was determined to break the NUM regardless of the impact on mining communities or even the long-term future of the UK's energy supply.
 
The Red said:
This reads more like a one-sided conversation with Arthur Scargill, who I'm fairly sure isn't a member of this board, than a scenario or a PoD. The only thing that appears to be from an alternate reality here is the idea that the bitterness that still exists today is somehow aimed at him rather than the government that was determined to break the NUM regardless of the impact on mining communities or even the long-term future of the UK's energy supply.
Click to expand...

As a man who frequently works on coal mines, I
 
The Red said:
The only thing that appears to be from an alternate reality here is the idea that the bitterness that still exists today is somehow aimed at him rather than the government that was determined to break the NUM regardless of the impact on mining communities or even the long-term future of the UK's energy supply.
Click to expand...

As someone who grew up in a mining family, I wouldn't say there's no bitterness in those areas towards Scargill. He's seen as someone who got played and out maneuvered by the government at a huge cost to those communities. But you rarely see the standard right wing talking points about the strike resolutions not being put to secret ballot, the donations from tripoli and moscow, or the amount of money he used for his own housing needs rather than the unions, bought up, it's just the whole 'he played right into Thatcher's bloody hands' thing.

But yeah, the government are the main villains of course. Scargill still got cheered when he came to the Gala at Durham. Whereas it's difficult to imagine Thatcher getting the same reaction.
 
The Red said:
This reads more like a one-sided conversation with Arthur Scargill, who I'm fairly sure isn't a member of this board, than a scenario or a PoD. The only thing that appears to be from an alternate reality here is the idea that the bitterness that still exists today is somehow aimed at him rather than the government that was determined to break the NUM regardless of the impact on mining communities or even the long-term future of the UK's energy supply.
Click to expand...
Confession time: I'm Arthur Scargill.
 
Actually now that I think about it, I'm genuinely surprised Scargill doesn't turn up in The Churchill Memorandum as a Transvestite Serial Killer or something, with orders from Stalin himself to assassinate Enoch Powell
 
Anyway to try and actually answer the questions posed.

1) Could different union leadership have avoided the strike?

Possibly. The Government were gearing up for a fight but well so were the unions (see Scargill's quote about hitler where he promised to fight the tories in any way possible) and a less combatative union might have delayed the problem.

But well a) the government were planning more pit closures then they said they would do so even if they bought peace there, the reaction would just be worse when it actually happened and b) it wasn't scargill who started the strike, it was local guys in yorkshire, scargill was reacting to that which indicates a certain overall trend.

2) Could different union leadership have forced the government to come to terms?

Yes. Without a question, yes. McGregor has gone on record that he would have capitulated if NACODS had carried out their planned strike action as well as NUM. You just need to avoid that to get a striker victory.

3) If Scargill had held a national ballot would he have managed to get the support he needed, from NACODS if nothing else, to force the government to terms?

Possibly. I'm not convinced it's the smoking gun many think it is.

For a start, the delegates voted against having one so it'd be anti-democratic in a way to go back on that (though you'd assume that Scargill supporting it might swing some voters). And well what if he loses? He might well have done. Which rather kneecaps any response he can make.

If he had held a national ballot rather than local ballot, the strike wouldn't have been declared illegal but the strike was only declared illegal when it was forced on areas that voted against strikes by the flying picket lines not in other areas. But you'd still have the violence and the general sense that the public were tired of strikes so I'm not sure public opinion would be that different.

4) If the miners had won, what then?

It'd just delay the reckoning. You can, and should, criticise all sides for how it was handled but so much of the result was inevitable and I think if the miner's do win, there's just another day further down the line when they don't. The refusal to accept any more mines closing, after how many they'd lost already, just meant they decided to be hung together rather than seperately.
 
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