Vol. 7 No. 20 · 21 November 1985
pages 6-7 | 3313 words
Claiming victory
John Lloyd
- The Miners’ Strike by Geoffrey Goodman
Pluto, 213 pp, £4.50, September 1985, ISBN 0 7453 0073 1
- Strike: Thatcher, Scargill and the Miners by Peter Wilsher, Donald Macintyre and Michael Jones
Deutsch, 284 pp, £9.95, September 1985, ISBN 0 233 97825 9
The consensus since the miners’ strike ended in March has been overwhelming: it was a disaster, most of all for the miners themselves. It is irresistible, in the interests of fairness at least, to look at the possibility that that verdict is wrong. Let us suppose – as Arthur Scargill invites us to – that it was forced upon them: that, as he also claims, it was a victory.
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Letters
Vol. 8 No. 2 · 6 February 1986
From Colin Smith
SIR: John Lloyd is altogether too generous to Geoffrey Goodman, author of The Miners’ Strike, in placing him on the ‘sensible’ left (LRB, 21 November, 1985). There is nothing in Mr Goodman’s polemic with which any self-respecting activist would wish to take issue. First, the book itself, dedicated ‘to the British miners whose courage’ the author salutes, is issued under the imprint of Pluto Press, which is strongly identified with the far Left. Secondly, the list of people to whom the author turned for help is, to say the least, instructive. It includes Bill Keys, Moss Evans, Ray Buckton, Ron Todd, Rodney Bickerstaffe, Tony Bunyan and Cathie Lloyd (both of the GLC Police Committee) and ‘my old friend the late Will Paynter, one of the finest NUM leaders of all time’. Will Paynter was also an unwavering Communist but Mr Goodman does not mention this. Nor does he see fit to tell his readers that Andrew Glyn (‘Fellow in Economics at Corpus Christi College, Oxford’) is a Trotskyist of the Militant Tendency. Thirdly, the book concludes that
primary responsibility for the conflict has to be attributed to the Government. It wanted a showdown because it had become convinced that this was the only way to destroy Arthur Scargill and ‘Scargillism’ and through that route to administer a severe blow to active trade-unionism. The police forces were used quite unscrupulously, as subsequent court events have made remarkably apparent. And the NUM leadership played their part by misreading the signs and misusing their own card. That in no way diminishes the astonishing courage and fortitude of the miners and their families. Theirs was a heroic stand …
If the NUM strike under Scargill’s leadership was, as Goodman implies, an example of ‘active’ trade-unionism, then we know what this means. Fourthly, according to the publisher’s blurb, ‘the author produces powerful evidence that the Government deliberately set out to provoke the strike.’ Given Mr Scargill’s repeated threats to destroy ‘Thatcherism’ by industrial action, this is a most remarkable conclusion to reach.
Lastly, Mr Goodman is far too sympathetic to the aims of the strike to be capable of reaching any kind of independent assessment and he takes issue with Mr Scargill only on tactical grounds. In Goodman’s view Scargill ought to have won but didn’t because he employed the wrong tactics. This, incidentally, is also the view of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and in particular of their Industrial Organiser, Pete Carter, whom Goodman quotes. Does John Lloyd really believe that an identity of opinion with the CPGB is the mark of the ‘sensible’ Left?
Colin Smith
London SW1
