Mr Scargill is fighting to change the system

Press, 24 October 1984, Page 24

Mr Scargill is fighting to change the system

NZPA-AP London From the age of 15, Arthur Scargill has seen himself as a soldier in a class struggle. Now, he is the general leading organised labour’s biggest battle against the British Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher. Seven months into a fight-to-the-finish miners’ strike, the tough, Marxist president of the National Union of Mineworkers strides the national stage. He is revered by his followers, detested by the establishment, and feared by many in between. “We are fighting a class issue and a class enemy,” says Mr Scargill, aged 46. ‘We want to change the system.' Mr Scargill has put into action the language of the radical Left — scoffing at the courts, marshalling the mass pickets, declaiming “working class power” in what the Government charges is a “Marxist crusade” to topple it. Mr Scargill set about changing things early in a life that began in a miner’s tiny cottage in Worsborough, a Yorkshire village where he still lives. After an academically undistinguished performance at the local school, Mr Scargill at the age of 15 followed his father, Harold, a lifelong member of the Communist Party, into the

nearby Woolley mine. A year later, local union leaders tried to expel the young Scargill from the union for organising a strike over working hours at Woolley against their wishes. They failed, and Mr Scargill, hacking at the coal face, was set on what was to be a meteoric career. At the age of 35 he became the youngest leader of miners in ' Yorkshire, Britain’s biggest and most militant coal county. Three years ago, by a record 70 per cent majority in a secret ballot, Britain’s miners elected Mr Scargill as their national president to succeed an oldtime moderate, Mr Joe Gormley. It is a job for life and he can be removed only by impeachment.

To many miners, it seemed that if anyone could halt successive cuts in the heavily losing, State-owned industry, it was Scargill. Others dislike his style, but fear that they cannot do without him. “I know Arthur rattles on,” says Ellis Hatchett, aged 45, a local union leader at Derbyshire’s Shirebrook mine. “But everything he has said about pit closings, about wages, is right. He’s bloody marvellous. He takes her (Mrs Thatcher) on.” Mr Scargill, commented the independent “Sunday Times,” “is one of the most

important, most admired, most hated, most feared men in the country.” Publicly, Mr Scargill’s manner is hectoring and declamatory. His voice, rising to crescendos in simple, short sentences,-he inspires fervour. With an 11-mmute speech he virtually took over the opening day of the Opposition Labour Party’s annual conference this month. Privately, aides say, he’s a quick wit, and a lover of jazz. He is a clever mimic, switching from his Yorkshire accent into takeoffs of Mrs Thatcher’s care-

ful, middle-class tones or the Scottish-American mixture of Mr lan MacGregor, who heads the State-run National Coal Board. Only a year ago, it seemed that Mr Scargill’s hour had come too late and that he would go down amid successive defeats inflicted on labour unions by Mrs Thatcher since she won power in 1979. Miners, whose 1974 strike helped topple Edward Heath’s Conservative Government, had rejected in secret ballots, two Scargill attempts to lead them back to the barricades with strikes over pay and the closing of mines. In March, when the Coal Board announced 20 of the 175 mines were to go within a year, there was no ballot. Yorkshire struck first and three-fourths of the rest followed suit. The largely pro-Conserva-tive British press tears into Mr Scargill, dubbed King Arthur, as a demagogue and a fanatic, attacking him for everything from his politics to his hairstyle — thinning strands carefully swept sideways to camouflage baldness. The union and Mr Scargill were fined this month for ignoring a High Court ruling that the strike was illegal in

two counties, Yorkshire and Derbyshire, because there was no ballot. “The only offence I have committed is to fight for my class,” Mr Scargill retorted at a public rally. He lives in a modest bungalow with his wife, Anne, whom he married in 1961, their only child, Margaret, aged 22, a veterinarian student, and his widowed father. He joined the Communist Party when he started work. At the age of 16, already on the party’s national executive committee, he horrified local union leaders by suggesting they pay for him to visit Moscow. Mr Scargill went anyway, and met the then Soviet leader, Mr Nikita Khrushchev. But he left the party at the age of 23 after losing heavily in the Worsborough local council elections and joined the socialist Labour Party. , Mr Scargill once recalled that his mother, Alice, who died when he was 18, had two hopes for her only child: that he would get a safe, clean job and that he would not join the Communist Party. “She thought it would lead to trouble,” said Mr Scargill.