History of England 1-6

Meanwhile, the comprehensive boom had acquired an unstoppable momentum, despite the efforts of the new education secretary, Margaret Thatcher, one of Heath’s many promising protégés. She found herself presiding over the creation of more comprehensives than any such minister before or since, and she showed herself willing to adopt and even extend socialist programmes when she felt the need. Her saving of the Open University was a case in point, though her decision to abolish free milk for primary school children chilled many, and earned her the sobriquet ‘Margaret Thatcher, milk snatcher’. Perhaps her gender counted against her, as it would do on future occasions. Other initiatives met with similar obloquy. When Heath decided that museums should charge visitors an entry fee, there was mass protest. The justification, that people appreciate more what they must pay for, seemed shallow beside the imperative to offer the poor opportunities for nourishment that they would otherwise be denied.

Strikes had been a feature of the Heath premiership from the beginning, but rarely had they imperilled the nation’s basic needs. In 1972 they did. The mining industry was in the last stages of senescence, with 600 miners leaving every week. Pits which at the turn of the twentieth century had dominated skylines, villages and lives were progressively abandoned. But moribund or not, the industry still provided the one fuel upon which people could safely rely. So when the government was faced with a demand for a 47 per cent rise in wages, to be spread out over the different jobs at the pit, it was in a quandary. The amount asked was surely prohibitive. But there were two factors that countered this. The people were solidly behind the miners, and secondly, coal stocks were not as high as they might have been. The resources lay with the miners.

Even as they had seen the wages of their fellow labouring groups rise inexorably throughout the Sixties while their own remained static, even as the number of pits halved during that decade, they had uttered barely a murmur. Their working conditions were abominable. The heat was such that Kentish miners frequently worked naked. Flooding claimed many lives, and the dust was not merely a daily torment but a constant cause of early death. Visibility in the mines was extremely poor and the shifts long. Miners had been hailed as heroes of the home front, renowned for their loyalty to the twin Victorian virtues of self-reliance and solidarity. For these reasons alone, they could count on a deep reservoir of support and sympathy among the general public. Until 1972, however, the true extent of their grievances was little understood.

It was the Yorkshiremen, already known as the most politicized among the miners, who raised their heads above the parapet. In July 1971, their call for an overall pay rise of 47 per cent was approved by the NUM (National Union of Mineworkers). Given their patience over the previous decade, the claim was scarcely exorbitant, but it ran directly counter to government policy. The Heath administration had committed itself to a pay ‘norm’ of 8 per cent for all manual workers. Only thus, it was felt, could inflation be kept down.

Joe Gormley, the head of the NUM, did not approve of unions attempting to guide government, let alone subvert it, and he had no time for communists, who were increasingly unabashed in proclaiming their allegiance. But the days when a union leader could count on the unqualified support of his nearest subordinates were nearing an end. The generation below Gormley had grown weary of acquiescence, and in any case he still had his members’ interests to protect. After fruitless bargaining with the Coal Board, a ban on overtime was declared, to be followed, on 8 January 1972, by a general strike.

The press, the public and the politicians were united in at least one conviction: the strike was doomed. Coal stocks were healthy and the industry was not the indispensable artery it once had been. Besides, it was argued, the nation surely had enough oil. But the optimists were taking far too much for granted. Initially, the miners had been lukewarm in their support for a strike, but once the ballots were filled the decision could not be rescinded. Although the press saw the strike as hopeless, it believed it to be just. Nor were coal stocks quite as full as many wished to believe, or the power stations as invulnerable. And as for oil, many seemed to have forgotten that it had quadrupled in price.