The government’s plan was to isolate the miners. To this end, they exerted pressure on Kinnock and the rest of the Labour and trade union leadership to condemn the strike. They made no attempt to disguise their intentions: “Mr Scargill’s defeat will come from within the union movement”, wrote The Economist with ill-concealed glee.[5] The Tories played up the politicisation of the strike, just as Baldwin had done in 1926. Tory MP Geoffrey Dickens talked of Scargill as a “confessed Marxist surrounded by Communist aides and advisers… much more serious support for him is coming from the Kremlin.” Cranley Onslow suggested that unidentified figures were “controlling and directing riotous mobs”; Tony Marlow advocated that Scargill be “arrested for organising a private army.” But it was not just the Tory backbenchers that were making these attacks.
At the end of July, the campaign climaxed with Thatcher’s infamous “enemy within” speech. Addressing the 1922 Committee, she said: “In the Falklands we had to fight the enemy without. Here is the enemy within.” Scargillism was portrayed as the phenomenon dedicated to the wholesale destruction of British society. At the Tory Party conference in October, Thatcher declared: “Mr President, what we have seen in this country is the emergence of an organised revolutionary minority who are prepared to exploit industrial disputes, but whose real aim is the breakdown of law and order and the destruction of democratic Parliamentary government. We have seen the same sort of thugs and bullies at Grunwick, and more recently against Eddie Shah in Stockport, and now organised into flying squads around the country.”[6] In Thatcher’s address at the Guildhall in November she equated the actions of miners with terrorism, “We are drawing to the end of a year in which our people have seen violence and intimidation in our midst: the cruelty of the terrorist; the violence of the picket-line; the deliberate flouting of the law of the land.”
The TUC general secretary Norman Willis addressed a mass meeting in Aberavon on 13 November. Thousands were inside and outside of the Afan Lido building, amid scenes of chanting defiant miners and their supporters. Typically, the “even handed” Willis criticized “scenes of unprovoked police violence”, and then laid into the miners with greater vigour. “Any miner who resorts to violence damages the miners’ case far more than they weaken their opponents’ resolve,” he declared. “Violence creates more violence. Such acts if they are done by miners are alien to our common trade union tradition, however, not just because they were counter-productive but because they are wrong.”
The miners did not want violence. But they were not going to remain with arms folded when faced with police provocation, intimidation and state violence against them and their families. During Willis’s speech, a great roar went up from the crowd. In the middle of his attack on picket line violence, a noose was lowered and dangled in front of him with a placard that read, “Where’s Ramsay McKinnock?” This incident was an example of the rough and ready humour of the Welsh miners, but it also made a serious point about Kinnock’s role. Within days, Kinnock was accusing the leaders of the NUM of wanting a “glorious defeat”. This was comparable to the role of Citrine and MacDonald in 1926, and the miners knew it. It would never be forgotten nor forgiven.
In October the government placed a gun to the head of the whole Labour movement when the High Court in London sequestrated the entire funds of the NUM. On 31 November, following contempt proceedings, the Court appointed a receiver to take charge of the affairs of the NUM. This brutal attack placed a question mark over the very survival of the NUM as a union. It could only be successfully repulsed by a general strike. However, while promising to continue support for the NUM “in line with Congress policy”, the TUC leaders studiously avoiding any risk of the TUC being held in contempt of court.
Arthur Scargill accused them correctly of “making mealy-mouthed” resolutions, and called instead for solidarity action: “The most massive mobilisation of industrial action our movement has ever known and we must have it now”, said Scargill. “There is no other way to stop the courts attempt to destroy the NUM.” He concluded that the “trade union and Labour Party leaders must now stand up in contempt of laws being used against us – or remain forever in contempt of all those they represent: all those whose futures are at stake in this crucial battle.”
In face of these attempts to crush the NUM by use of the capitalist courts, the whole strength of the trade union movement was needed to repulse this sustained attack from the state. Tony Benn took up the call for a general strike, as did Dennis Skinner and other left MPs. “But a general strike may prove to be the only way of reminding this government of the harsh realities of life”, stated Benn. “The Labour movement has now got to face the fact that a general strike might become necessary to protect free trade unionism, ballot-box democracy, political freedom and civil liberties in Britain.”[7]
Kinnock, known to many as the Welsh windbag, immediately waded in. “The prospect of a general strike is nil, and any threat of a strike without a prospect of it being successful would be terminally damaging to the movement’s chances of putting the case for coal over to the public.” As usual Kinnock missed the point. The attack of the Thatcher government had gone far beyond the “case for coal”. At stake now was the very survival of trade unionism. Like an old record with a repeating groove, the Labour leader was continually warning the NUM leadership against violence, while at the same time down playing police violence against the picket lines. Throughout the dispute, he cut a cowardly and despicable figure. He was desperate to “prove himself” to the ruling class by kicking the miners, but his mealy-mouthed pleadings would not stop or appease the Tories, but only served to encourage them in their attacks.