Arthur Scargill

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THE LAST three harsh years in the mines have somewhat tarnished the idea that Arthur Scargill walks on water.

But he is still by a long chalk the best of the major trade union leaders.

His steadfast support for the flying pickets, and refusal to bow to the pressure for a national ballot, have been major factors in allowing the miners' strike to spread.

True, his support for Stalinism against Solidarnose,, and his infatuation with sexist pin-ups. are blots on his record. But on the other side of the record there is saltley Grunwick, the Saltley Gates, dispute of 1982, his championing of Tony Benn, and his rock-solid hatred of Thatcher and all her government stands for.

Arthur Scargill's initial political involvement was not in the National Union of Mineworkers, but in the Young Communist League, which he joined as a 15 year old. He never made any clear cut break with Communist Party politics, but, as he told the Observer some years ago, "I gradually began to be interested in the union itself because it appeared to me that irrespective of what ideas politically the Young Communist League, or any other political organisation, had, the real power lay either with the working classes or with the ruling classes. Now the working classes were obviously identified with the trade union movement, and not directly identified with the Labour party, which in my opinion had, and indeed still has, lost complete contact with the basic problems of the movement"

Bedrock

This outlook was the bedrock of the militancy of the '60s and '70s. The power lay not with political parties but with the workers' basic organisations, the trade unions. The best way to prosecute the class war was to get control of the levers of the power within the union.

Throughout the '60s Arthur Scargill saw the way to do this as building rank and file organisation against the timorous leadership of the Yorkshire Area NUM.

Links were established between the Barnsley panel, in which he was active, and those in Doncaster and South Yorkshire.

Scargill was involved in a Barnsley NUM Forum, which was open to all miners.

As he became more involved, he quit the CP. He came to see trade union militancy as sufficient and central, and political party Saltley Gates, 1972 John organisation as restrictive.

"Basically, it was because the party insisted that I should work in a certain way when I became a trade union official. They wanted me to sell the Daily Worker and promote CP ideals to the pit branch of the NUM. I resented this. It meant I wouldn't be exercising all my efforts for the men as miners".

It was the organisation from below in Yorkshire that won its spurs in the unofficial strikes of 1969 and 1970, and redeveloped militant tactics such as the flying pickets that were so successful in 1972.

Arthur Scargill was coming up in a period when the bargaining power was swinging towards the miners and militancy was strong throughout the working class.

He told New Left Review: "We took the view that we were in a class war. We were not playing cricket on the village green"

Scargill saw the necessity for organising - for not relying on the official structures, their tempo and their conceptions. If Yast and do it yourself, was his do it philosophy.

That spirit took the miners forward in' the early '70s. The fall of the Heath crystallised and confirmed Arthur's views.

In June 1972 he became fulltime compensation agent in Yorkshire, and with Owen Briscoe's election as area general secretary the following year, the Young Turks had evicted the right wing.

The problem was that, as Arthur Scargill rose to Yorkshire president and National Executive member, the open rank and file organisation that had achieved so much was allowed to decay.

With his vision focused on winning the union for the Left, and not a broader political perspective, such organisation no longer seemed vital.

Meanwhile the introduction of the divisive bonus scheme in the pits created problems in the NUM in the late '70s.

Nonetheless, the Left still looked forward to victory within the union. With the retirement of the right-wing national president, Joe Gormley, they hoped to get the entire union machine in their hands.

Arthur Scargill's landslide victory to succeed Gormley confirmed that class-conscious leadership can produce a response. In a 80% poll, he obtained 70.3% of the vote. His nearest rival got 17%.

Arthur Scargill seems to have somewhat overestimated this victory. It was a vote of confidence by the miners in a battle-tested representative of their interests, rather than a vote for an all-out struggle against the Tories. And the situation, with high unemployment, working-class defeats on the wider front, high coal stocks, big redundancy payments, and the divisive bonus scheme, made the membership hesitant about an all-out stoppage.

In hindsight, the lesson of Thatcher's U-turn on pit closures in 1981 was not that she was ready to crumple, but that she was simply biding her time.

Spadework

The 1982 strike ballot over the wage offer and pit closures was, from the NUM headquarters angle, a model exercise. The union leadership spared no effort to agitate and convince. But the campaign was inadequate to deal with the tactics of the Coal Board and the government. The strike recommendation was defeated.

This highlighted the need for a Broad Left organisation in the NUM, as in any other union. Perhaps Arthur Scargill had forgotten the intense years of spadework at the base that went into producing Many also felt that not enough was done by the leadership to build and develop the 143 registered NUM strikes in the first half of this year into a more general It is easy to criticise, but foolish not to try to understand the real weaknesses of Scargill's leadership. Like many other militants, he has not gone beyond the syndicalism of the 1970s. He has not seen a way to integrate union involvement into militant socialist political organisation. He has not taken on the job of organising across unions, at both leadership and rank and file level: he has not used his position to organise for the Left within the TUC as Alistair Graham or David Basnett use theirs to organise for the right wing.

Perhaps his days in the Communist Party have left Arthur Scargill with some of their ideas of "socialism from above', combined with his basic class combativity. His attacks on Polish workers certainly suggest that.

His leadership and politics are now under test. We can only hope he comes through victorious. '

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Socialist Organiser no.172 March 29 1984 Page 10 Television