Targeted by the state:
The 1984 British Miners' Strike

Fern Lane

Twenty years ago, on March 5, 1984, the National Union of 
Mineworkers (NUM), together with the communities from which it 
drew its membership, embarked on an epic confrontation with the 
Thatcher Government.

Although superficially a struggle over proposed pit closures, in 
reality the Miners' Strike was actually about something 
transcendentally greater than that; it was a titanic clash over 
what direction British politics was to take from that moment on.

The strike was a desperate last stand by working class 
communities against a Tory machine which had, since coming to 
power in 1979, made clear its desire to destroy organised labour, 
most especially the NUM.

It had made equally clear its determination to restructure the 
British economic landscape to conform to its greedy, market-led, 
profit-driven vision in which, as Thatcher famously said, the 
thing called "society" had no place.

Almost exactly three years prior to that pivotal week in 1984, 
another strike with equally momentous and long-lasting effects 
had also been set in motion, backed by an equally politicised, 
defiant and largely working class community.

Like the Miners' Strike, the 1981 Hunger Strike had been, 
outwardly at least, about the issue of the political rights of 
(Irish) republican prisoners.

But, like the Miners' Strike that was to follow, as it progressed 
it became much greater than its core issue.

It became the struggle around which nationalist resistance to 
British occupation, with all its violations of person, property 
and human rights, became crystallised.

In both cases, as the miners' groups who visited the Six Counties 
in 1984/85 quickly learned, the Tory Government had similar 
motives — the destruction of the Republican Movement in Ireland 
on the one hand and of the Trade Union Movement in Britain on the 
other.

And in both cases it used near-identical techniques in its 
attempts to crush wider political opposition to its policies.

It waged an unfettered propaganda war; it belittled and ignored 
the legitimate grievances of those involved; it used the full 
force of its security and intelligence services in the, often 
illegal, attempt to undermine the strikes; it sought by similar 
means to discredit their leaders and; backed up by force, it set 
out to impose its will on communities fighting for their very 
survival.

Like the Hunger Strike, the Miners' Strike was presented to the 
public in its most crudely simplistic form; the latter as Siamus 
Milne has recently said, being portrayed as "an anti-democratic 
insurrection led by a ranting megalomaniac in defiance of 
economic logic".

Similarly, anyone living in Britian in 1981, who did not make 
strenuous efforts to inform themselves about the Hunger Strike, 
would have been under the impression that a small gang of 
criminals, backed by slightly bigger, but infinitely dangerous 
criminal conspiracy were attempting to blackmail a plucky British 
Government over apparently trivial issues such as the prisoners' 
(criminals') demand to wear their own clothes.

And in both cases, the government could rely on a cravenly 
obedient British press to convey, unquestioned, its propaganda to 
the public.

Smear campaign

And, as republican leaders were the subject of a determined 
campaign of demonisation in the British press at the behest of 
the government, so the miners' leader, Arthur Scargill, was 
relentlessly smeared with false allegations and portrayed as a 
villain of almost pantomime absurdity.

Although a "ferociously principled" man, his reputation has never 
really recovered from the grievous defamation it endured.

As recently as the firefighters' industrial action last year, 
Tony Blair sneeringly referred to their union representative as 
"Scargillites", hoping no doubt to send a collective shiver down 
the spines of middle England, and reminding them in a single word 
that organised labour must be resisted, whatever the cost or 
however reasonable its demands.

There are other similarities. Like the Hunger Strikers, the 
miners were forsaken by those who should have supported them, but 
who were too afraid or too unprincipled to do so, and who chose 
to turn their faces away from the enormity of what was at stake.

As the Catholic Church, the Dublin Government and middle-class 
nationalism abandoned the H-Block men, preferring instead to 
attack republicans and try to undermine the unity of the strikers 
and their families, so the Labour Party and the TUC (Trade Union 
Congress) blamed Scargill for the strike.

They insisted that he should hold a national ballot and blamed 
him and the miners, rather than the police and the government, 
for the violence that occurred on the picket lines.

Dirty tricks

Another means of attacking both strikes was to lure in weaker 
members of each respective community and set them the task of 
destroying the strikes from within.

Denis Faul was, of course, the chosen instrument in 1981, and in 
1984 the British Government refined the ploy and used it again.

It sponsored and ardently promoted the so-called Democratic Union 
of Mineworkers, courting a cabal of right-wing, strikebreaking 
miners who engineered the first cracks in the previously solid 
position of the strikers.

But the true extent of the dirty tricks the government had 
employed only really began to emerge in 1993, when five Labour 
MPs signed a Parliamentary motion accusing the head of MI5, 
Stella Rimington, of sending an agent into the heart of NUM "to 
destabilise and sabotage the union at its most critical 
juncture".

At the time of the strike Rimington had been a specialist in F2, 
the MI5 unit dedicated to the monitoring and surveillance of 
trade union officials and members.

She also had considerable prior form in the Six Counties.

The agent that she had deployed was named as Roger Windsor, the 
Chief Executive of the NUM at the time of the strike and 
Scargill's right-hand man.

As chronicled by Siamus Milne since, this was all part of the MI5 
"Get Scargill" plan, a campaign, authorised by Margaret Thatcher, 
to destroy the NUM leader "politically and personally".

The agency set about its task with vigour. It mounted the biggest 
telephone tapping operation it had ever undertaken.

The homes of union officials were bugged. Scargill and many other 
officials were put under 24-hour surveillance, with restaurants 
and hotels they regularly used also bugged.

The telephones of sympathetic groups and members of other trade 
unions were tapped.

MI5 also infiltrated the pickets during the strike, sending in 
undercover police officers to identify particular targets for 
arrest or to provoke violent incidents that would then be served 
up to an unwitting British public as part of the propaganda war.

But, when two such police officers who had infiltrated the 
Creswell Strike Centre in Derbyshire were exposed, the national 
media conspired to ignore it.

Windsor had joined the NUM staff office as its finance officer in 
1983, quickly becoming its Chief Executive.

According to some accounts of the strike, he advised the NUM to 
transfer funds into a network of overseas trusts and accounts, 
supposedly to avoid the threat of confiscation, but all the time 
allegedly informing the security services about where the money 
was going.

Ultimately, his financial "advice" led the NUM into being placed 
into receivership; its funds were sequestrated, with the effect 
that its work was severely hampered.

It cost the union millions of pounds.

He was also responsible for one of the biggest public relations 
disasters to befall the NUM.

Without the knowledge of the union, Windsor travelled to Lybia to 
visit Colonel Gadaffi, at the time a figure of profound fear and 
loathing in a Britain, which was incessantly reminded of the 
killing of a woman PC outside the Libyan embassy six months 
earlier.

Windsor arranged to be filmed and photographed embracing Gadaffi 
with predictable results; the NUM and its leader were vilified in 
the British press.

What the public did not learn was that Scargill had been invited 
to Libya to "explain the NUM's position" but that he had declined 
the invitation, telling Gadaffi that if he wanted to help the 
miners he should stop the strike-breaking sale of oil to Britain.

Not content with this, MI5 also attempted to deposit 500,000 
pounds in a Dublin bank account, using the British intelligence 
Services "house" bank, the now discredited Bank of Credit and 
Commerce International (BCCI), to carry out the transfer.

Presumably, the idea was to subsequently "expose" Scargill as a 
fraudster who was stealing NUM funds.

The plan failed, however, when the Dublin bank involved uncovered 
the scam.

Thatcher's frontline troops

Crucial to the Thatcher Government's plan to nail Scargill was 
the role of the British media, whose members were referred to by 
the miners themselves as "Thatcher's frontline troops".

Indeed, in 1991 journalist Richard Norton-Taylor revealed the 
existence of a list of something like 500 prominent Britons, 
including around 90 in the media, who were in the employ of the 
CIA, and paid through the old friend of the intelligence 
services, the BCCI.

The Daily Mirror, in particular, much of it under the 
editorship of the now-repentant Roy Greenslade, launched a 
sustained and often demented hate-campaign against Arthur 
Scargill, a campaign which lasted long after the strike had come 
to en end in March 1985.

As late as 1990, the paper was still printing MI5-planted front-
page "exclusives" in order to smear Scargill and some of his 
associates.

The most notorious was the allegation — or rather the lie — 
that during the strike the NUM had received money from Libya.

This money, claimed Roger Windsor in the Daily Mirror, had 
been intended to bring relief to the impoverished miners, but 
Scargill, along with another official, Peter Heathfield, had 
diverted some 70,000 pounds of it in order to pay off their 
mortgages.

This story, on which, says Siamus Milne "the fingerprints of the 
intelligence services could be found like an unmistakable calling 
card", was also repeated in March 1990 on Central TV's The Cook 
Report.

An inquiry by Gavin Lightman QC subsequently found that the story 
was "entirely untrue", but unsurprisingly, the British press 
proved itself highly reluctant to set the record straight.

Indeed, it took until 2002 for Greenslade to publish a mea culpa 
piece in the (British) Guardian and apologise, far too late many 
would say, to Scargill.

Bitter aftermath

In the meantime, of course, the NUM and the trade union movement 
in Britain along with it, was virtually destroyed.

And, exactly as Arthur Scargill had predicted, in the wake of the 
defeat of the NUM, the Tory Government set about the dismantling 
of the coal industry with relish, reducing great tracts of the 
country to wasteland in the process.

Former mining communities in Britain still feel the consequences 
of the events of 1984 and many are only now beginning to recover.

The understandable bitterness felt by those who fought for their 
communities towards those who broke the strike is also still 
apparent.

A scab in 1984 is still a scab 20 years later.

The Six Counties also live with the consequences of the Hunger 
Strikes.

The difference is, of course, that despite how it appeared in 
October 1981, the Hunger Strike could not be defeated.

Thatcher's tactics, which were honed and applied with renewed 
determination three years later, actually achieved the very 
objective they were designed to prevent.

She failed utterly in her plan to destroy republicanism.

From the tragedies of 1981, a new generation of republicans was 
politicised.

And it led directly to the realisation of the British state's 
worst nightmare; the spectacular electorate rise of Sinn Fiin.

* * *

Morning Star, Britain's socialist daily