A year ago the British government of John Major announced a massive coal mine closure plan that within months would have closed 30 pits with the loss of 30,000 jobs. The announcement produced an outcry from the broader community which culminated in a 300,000-strong march through central London.
The government's public enemy number one, National Union of Mineworkers president Arthur Scargill, became more popular than the prime minister almost overnight. For a while an air of confidence spread like a bush fire through the community; for the first time in many years, the Tories were forced on to the defensive.
Eventually, the government, forced to slow the process, opted to achieve its aims through slow strangulation rather than the preferred decapitation. This process defused public anger and left the miners isolated once again.
The government has achieved most of what it set out to do. Last October there were 50 working deep mines. Twenty have now stopped production. All but one will be privatised, and 11 others are being "market-tested". A leaked report in mid-August indicates even top quality mines will be closed, leaving only an expected six in production by 1998.
Here, Arthur Scargill, interviewed by Dave Osler for the British left paper Socialist Outlook, comments on the lessons of the struggle to save the pits and the communities that depend on them.
So the Tories have come out of the pit closure crisis with more or less everything they wanted, I ask Arthur Scargill, seated behind the formica table of a greasy spoon cafe near his London flat in the Barbican. "Yes", he replies. Stony silence. Try another tack.
What conclusions can be drawn, then? Although still hesitant over his words, Scargill is immediately more expansive: "The labour movement had the best opportunity in 50 years to transform not merely an industrial situation and win an important battle for workers in struggle, but an opportunity to change the government of the day.
"If it had decided to call upon the British people to give expression to the outrage shown on the two days of action on October 21 and 25, 1992 [London demonstrations of 100,000 and 300,000 respectively], and take part in a 24-hour stoppage, it could have reversed the pit closure program. It would at the very least have resulted in heads rolling in central government, and possibly the government itself rolling out.
"Since last October this government has had to spend Lstg450 million because of the resistance of the NUM [National Union of Mineworkers]." This calculation runs as follows. The High Court ruling that the pit closure program was unlawful and irrational meant that British Coal paid out wages and running costs for 10 collieries that did not produce any coal. Then there was the cost of two one-day strikes involving both British Coal and British Rail.
"If that money had been given to the 10 pits, it would have resulted in them being kept open for at least 50 years. That demonstrates that it's an ideological and not a financial argument. It demonstrates the lengths to which the ruling class are prepared to go to try and defeat the NUM.
"The trade unions and the Labour Party ... failed miserably. Instead of giving concrete support, and calling upon workers to take industrial action, they did nothing.
"Contrast that with the call of the Liberal Democrats in April, when they were prepared to call upon the British people to participate in a 24-hour strike. It shows how far to the right the Labour Party's gone.
"In letters from the Trade Union Congress general secretary Norman Willis and from the Labour Party leader John Smith, all I got was a negative response to my call for them to ask their affiliates to join a 24-hour strike."
During the campaign, Scargill publicly called for a South African-style one-day "stay-away" from work, a circumlocution clearly designed to skirt Tory legislation banning secondary action. But did he ever campaign for a head-on one-day general strike?
Scargill says he used a deliberately precise formulation, "a day of action which would involve a stoppage of work for 24 hours", before the TUC general council: "Those words were chosen carefully. You have to recognise that some unions would be prepared to advise members to stay away and join the demonstration for 24 hours, while other unions slavishly adhere to the Tory legislation and ballot their members. That's a matter for them. The object of the exercise was to try and get workers to stop work, and everybody understood that.
"When I talked about people power in Hyde Park [on October 25], I wasn't referring to marching around London or linking arms with the church. I was talking about bringing workers out on the streets of Britain. The trouble with the Labour Party leadership and the trade union leadership, they're quite willing to applaud millions on the streets of the Philippines or in Eastern Europe, without understanding the need to also produce millions of people on the streets of Britain. When it does happen, like in the poll tax campaign, the first thing the Labour leadership does is to condemn it.
"We marched further than Mao Zedong on his long march, we've been involved with so many churches that I've been offered the bishop of Durham's job when he retires. Yet what you need is not marches, demonstrations, rallies or wide associations, all of them are important. What you need is direct action. The sooner people understand that, the sooner we'll begin to change things."
Scargill is insistent that trade unionism will continue to be a force in the mining industry: "There's a feeling that strength is determined by the size of a union. That clearly is nonsense. When the NUM had over a million members, it was at its weakest industrially and politically. It won its greatest victories when it had less than 300,000 members, in 1972 and 1974.
"In 1984, the miners' union, which was down to about 180,000, was able to sustain a national industrial dispute for one year and four months", he argues, dating the start of action to the commencement of an overtime ban.
"Today, we've got about 30,000 mineworkers in Britain, and yet the production is heavily concentrated in one-coalface pits. One coalface operates where previously there would be eight." In some cases, Scargill points out, as much as Lstg100 million can be invested in one production unit: "If you stop that unit operating, it's the same impact as stopping 20 pits, say, 10 or 15 years ago. All too often miners, and indeed other trade unionists, underestimate the economic strength they have."
There are now major coal import terminals in Britain for the first time ever. The mining unions alone can no longer stop supply. Yet Scargill argues that the work force's hold on the industry is essentially undiminished: "If you've got an industry where you've got massive investment, it doesn't matter whether you bring in alternative supplies. You still lose the money on that industry."
Can anything be done to stop privatisation [of the pits]? "Take industrial action! If anybody can give me a better way to do things I'm prepared to listen ... If the Trade Union Congress doesn't, sooner rather than later, give a positive lead and call upon its affiliates to support workers on strike, whether they be at Timex [in Dundee], Burnsall or the NUM, then it will become increasingly irrelevant as an organisation ...
"If the leadership of the Labour Party and the Clinton clones, Mr Brown and Mr Blair [Labour front benchers], get their way, it could be the first step towards the complete disintegration of the Labour Party as we know it. You may see the emergence of a new political party from the body of the trade union movement which represents a very clear-cut socialist alternative policy and which gives expression to the views of the trade union movement in parliament."