History of England 1-6

What is more, the miners had a new weapon. Both law and tradition had long accepted the right of strikers to surround the disputed workplace and dissuade any of their fellows from entering to resume work, but Arthur Scargill, a young Marxist from Barnsley, had developed a refinement in the ‘flying picket’. If local numbers were insufficient to dissuade the potential ‘scab’, the answer was to bus in striking miners from elsewhere. Moreover, he knew that for the strike to be effective, it must not merely shut down the pits, but render the entire network of energy inoperable. He was quite frank in his aims. ‘We were out to defeat Heath and Heath’s policies … We had to declare war on them and the only way you could declare war was to attack the vulnerable points … we wished to paralyse the nation’s economy.’

It was one of the many tragedies of Heath’s tenure that he was obliged to combat a group that he greatly admired. He had been heard to proclaim that the trouble with the unions was that they were not ‘too strong, but too weak’, but such scruples gained him little sympathy in this struggle. So the coal pits lay idle, and the nation began to suffer. An unofficial three-day week began. Candles disappeared from shop shelves and the mood among the public grew darker. But the miners could count, for the time being, on its support. For its part, the government was bewildered and desperate. Robert Carr, employment secretary, confessed that ‘there was no doubt about it, our intelligence about the strength of opinion within the miners’ union generally was not as good as it should have been. We just didn’t know the miners.’

There was one vast coke plant in Saltley, a suburb of Birmingham, which still held out. Here the lorries defied the strike, passing through the gates every day unhindered, and Arthur Scargill saw his opportunity. The police were there, of course, but it was not long before they were hopelessly outnumbered. Yet the so-called ‘Battle of Saltley’ on 10 February 1972 was in most respects a peaceable affair, with what violence there was emerging from scuffles between miners and lorry drivers.

Scargill still lacked the numbers he needed, however. He addressed the workers of Birmingham itself with the appeal that ‘We don’t want your pound notes … Will you go down in history as the working class in Birmingham who stood by while the miners were battered, or will you become immortal?’ The call reached deep and far. What happened next began with a banner appearing on the top of a hill. Behind it was a mass of people. And then a ‘roar’ was heard from the other side of the hill. They had come in their thousands. In the crowd were last-minute reinforcements, the weak fired with the passion of warriors. As a result, the Battle of Saltley seemed a peasants’ revolt bedecked with the colours of chivalry; indeed, it was as ‘King Arthur’ that Scargill was to be commemorated.

It is idle to observe that the victory was largely a symbolic one; as so often happens, the symbol had become a sacred ritual which struck those who did not observe it. ‘We looked absolutely into the abyss,’ said Willie Whitelaw. Thus a strike that most thought would die within days paralysed the nation. A council of state announced a third state of emergency. Victoria Graham caught the mood of many of her generation when she observed to a friend: ‘When we were suffering for the nation’s survival during the war the task was easy, but now we seem to be silently suffering, as we watch the country brought to its knees.’ For her, as for many others, the miners’ struggle evoked tyranny. Douglas Hurd expressed the prevailing mood in government from the standpoint of the defeated: ‘The government was now wandering vainly over the battlefield looking for someone to surrender to – and being massacred all the time.’

A new blackout seemed to beckon. The sombre truth was that the nation needed fuel and could no longer afford oil. The stocks of coal could not be used, and power stations were running at 25 per cent capacity. Nurses were forced to care for their patients by candlelight. A nation without electricity was, it was said, only weeks away. It was time to lay down arms and sue for peace. The truce, for such it was, was ignominious. Lord Wilberforce, who presided over an inquiry into the strike, gave the miners almost everything they wanted; and, where he did not, Heath himself obliged, sullenly and desperately. On 19 February, he granted everything the NUM demanded, conceding more than even the Wilberforce Report had suggested.