THE PRESS SATURDAY, JULY 21, 1984. Miners out for 19 weeks

Press, 21 July 1984, Page 18

THE PRESS SATURDAY, JULY 21, 1984. Miners out for 19 weeks

A year after a sweeping victory in a General Election, the Conservative Government in Britain has fallen to its lowest level of popularity for years. The Labour Party might well win an election if one were held now. The Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher, must be acutely aware that striking coal miners, who broke the Conservative Government of Mr Edward Heath in 1974, are at the root of her present troubles. The miners’ strike, embracing four fifths of the country’s pits and the great majority of the 180,000 miners, has been running for 19 weeks. In a country where much of the electricity supply is generated from coal, and where an iron and steel industry is fighting for survival, the miners are crucial to the country’s economic well-being. Only a warm summer, plus large stockpiles df coal at the power stations, have prevented widespread power cuts and industrial losses so far. As the weather gets colder, supplies of coal from the few pits still working will not maintain electricity generation. For some weeks, the miners have had the backing of railway unions, which have sometimes refused to move coal when it has been mined. In the last two weeks, dock workers joined the strike, allegedly, because non-union labour was used to help unload coal from barges at a steel works in north-east England. A crack has appeared in the dockers’ unity. The port of Dover has been reopened to cross-Channel vehicle ferries. Movement of some goods between Britain and the Continent can resume. A full return to work on the docks is possible in the next two days. Dover reopened after violent threats from stranded lorry drivers. Theirs was only the latest in a long series of threats and violent incidents since the miners’ strike began in March. In spite of decisions of the Courts, the weight of the law has not yet been used against the strikers. The police have attempted to protect miners who want to work, and to prevent pickets of strikers from moving round the country to threaten people still at work. The National Coal Board and the other parties directly affected—British Rail and British Steel—have not sought injunctions against the strikers or their union funds for fear that tempers would be raised even further.

Some of the miners who have continued to work have sought and gained their own injunction against the National Union of Mineworkers to stop union penalties against strike breakers. This order has been ignored and the union and its executive may be found to be in contempt of court, provoking the confrontation between the strikers and the Courts that has so far been avoided.

As the strike has widened to transport industries, and as it has begun.to take on some of the flavour of a general strike, the original causes are being forgotten. Britain’s uneconomic coal mines cost taxpayers about $3 billion a year in subsidies and loans to keep miners in . jobs. The National Coal Board had decided to cut mine capacity by four per cent, at the cost of 20,000 jobs, in the next 12 months.

This was part of a programme over several years to close uneconomic mines and to reduce production to about 110 million tonnes a year. Such a quantity of coal would match Britain’s needs. Miners replied by demanding more money, a four-day week, extra bonuses, no closings of uneconomic mines, and early retirement for miners. The miners command, and deserve, a degree of sympathy. Theirs remains one of the most unpleasant and dangerous jobs in modem industry. Their local ties are usually strong and they are reluctant to move when pits close, even if work is available elsewhere. At the same time, the miners’ industrial strength has turned them into an aristocracy of labour, sustained at the expense of many other Britons in less well paid jobs, or with no jobs at all. The issues have become a good deal wider than the rationalisation of the coal industry, important as this continues to be to Britain’s industrial and economic health, and to the pockets of its taxpayers. The rule of law has been ignored by the strikers in ways that the Government and the Courts are finding harder and harder to ignore. The incident that provoked the dock strike shows that vast inconvenience and loss can still be inflicted on the community by a dispute about who should do what job. Britain’s economic recovery, a slow and uncertain business at best, is being set back. Employment, productivity, and the value of the currency are all suffering. Whatever the opinion polls may say, Mrs Thatcher still has a huge majority of seats in Parliament. Her Government’s failure to solve the strikes, or to intervene decisively, is costing her political support. The strikers have a degree of popular backing, but it could be quickly eroded by wider strikes or winter power cuts. Battles to improve the performance of British industry have been fought in the iron and steel industry, and in transport, against industrial opposition. If the miners win this particular fight, they will merely have succeeded in delaying changes that are essential if Britain is to retain a place in the modem, industrialised world, and if the benefits of changes in other sections of industry are not to be lost in propping up an inefficient yet overproducing coal industry. For some weeks after the strike began, the National Coal Board drew comfort from the number of pits that stayed open. It hoped that at mines not threatened with closing, the miners would drift back to work once a gesture had been made. Instead, more pits have voted to close, or have been forced to close by pickets. The dock strike may well be settled during the week-end; the miners’ strike is likely to go on indefinitely. In the end, the Government and the Courts will almost certainly be dragged in. A final settlement may well come only through the pockets of the miners and their union leaders, facing substantial fines when court orders are ignored, but backed up by substantial benefits in the form of redundancy pay for miners at the pits where closing remains inevitable.