Traffic snarled up when miners leave cars on bridge

Press, 26 July 1984, Page 8

Traffic snarled up when miners leave cars on bridge

NZPA-AP London Ninety-five striking coalminers were arrested in clashes with the police yesterday, but the British Prime Minister, Mrs Margaret Thatcher, vowed that her Conservative Government would "never give in to violence and intimidation.” Miners, who have been on strike for more than 19 weeks, stalled morning rush-hour traffic for 2 , /z hours around Hull in northeast England yesterday by abandoning 100 cars on the giant Humber Estuary Bridge and its approaches. Miners also clashed with the police yesterday at the Port Talbot steelworks in south Wales—where strikers’ wives formed human chains across roads to block them—and at Scotland’s Bilston Glen mine near Edinburgh. At Port Talbot seven women were among 30 people arrested during fighting as 500 pickets tried to stop a convoy of 130 trucks taking iron from the plant. The trouble occurred at Bilston Glen, Scotland’s biggest pit, when day-shift workers defying the strike call were entering and leaving work. Twenty-four pickets were arrested after 600 striking miners drove a police cordon back towards the colliery gates. Three policemen and four pickets were injured, none seriously, the police said. Nine more strikers were arrested, some of them handcuffed, later.

After the collapse of the dockers’ strike last week the Government appears to be intensifying its propaganda campaign against the miners. Mrs Thatcher told the House of Commons yesterday that to give in to the continuing violence on picket lines would signal “the end of democracy in

this country.” She underlined her assertion that the miners’ strike was partially responsible for Britain’s high interest rates, and she told the Commons that “there have been more jobs lost in mining under Labour Governments than under Conservative Governments.” The miners’ strike began on March 12 to protest against the Governmentowned industry’s plan to close money-losing mines with the loss of 20,000 of the industry’s 183,000 jobs. The police had to close the Humber Bridge, the world’s longest span at 1410 metres, and divert traffic to the west as lines of paralysed traffic stretched back 16km. Twenty-six pickets were arrested during the bridge blockade, the police said. It began shortly after 7 a.m. and ended when the miners returned and drove their cars away. The police said that before the blockade they had turned back 3000 miners heading toward the Scunthorpe steel plant in Yorkshire, militant heartland of the strike, which miners have picketed sporadically during the increasingly bitter walk-out. Six pickets were arrested in Lancashire as pickets tried to stop miners reporting for work at the Gollborne mine, the police reported. During the first five months of 1984 7.2 million Working days—more than three-quarters of them caused by the miners’ strike—were lost through labour disputes, the Employment Minister, Mr John Selwyn, told the Commons yesterday. “The Times” reported that dissident British miners were secretly planning a campaign to coax their striking colleagues to end

the strike. Secret talks had been held in London and 12 coalfields to plan a widespread return to work by disenchanted strikers, it said. The aim was to set a date when all miners who wanted to go back would return to work to stretch the National Union of Miners’ picketing strength to the limit.

The plan was disclosed in south Wales, where unionists opposed the strike at first but conformed under pressure from their leaders and in the face of picket lines. Union officials there dismissed the plans as the work of cranks but a senior National Coal board official, while expressing scepticism about its forcing an end to the strike, said the idea of a uniform return to work date was practical. The board’s attempts to coax individual miners back to work in recent weeks with personal letters, telephone calls, and even home visits in some cases, have been spectacularly unsuccessful. A survey early this week showed that only 402 more miners were at work since the campaign began last month. Leading the dissidents’ campaign is a working miner from Nottinghamshire, the centre of union defiance, who is using his fortnight’s holiday to travel the country seeking support. He asked to be identified only by a code-name, “Silver Birch” after threats that his daughter would be raped, his son beaten up, and his house burnt. He told “The Times” that the London meeting was attended by miners from most coal areas, including Nottinghamshire, Staffordshire, north and south Wales, Warwickshire, Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Scotland, Kent, and north and south Yorkshire.