The Importance of Class Traitors

The ruling class tends to rely on the co-option of those that purportedly represent the working people, whether as informers or as full collaborators, to aid in their ongoing control of society. Such as leaders of parties that claim to support working people, such as the Labour (UK), New Democratic (Canada) and Democratic (US) parties, labour union leaders and strike breakers. Although some of them enjoy munificent rewards, such as Tony Blair, many others find that they are rapidly cast off when they are no longer useful. Whatever their desserts, they facilitate the ongoing subjugation of the many by the few. It is why solidarity and discipline are so important to working people’s movements.

In the 20th Century there were two great disputes between the UK miners and the mine owners, the first a lock out in 1926 by the owners to force swingeing wage reductions combined with longer hours, and the second in 1984 a strike against pit closures driven by the Conservative Party. In both cases the miners were defeated from within, and in both cases it was the Nottinghamshire coal miners, as well as Labour Party and other union leaders who were to blame. The account below uses the book, Look back In Anger: The Miners’ Strike In Nottinghamshire, by Harry Paterson as a major source.

In 1924 the Dawes Plan had allowed German coal mines to supply France and Italy as part of Germany’s war reparations, with the extra supply reducing coal prices. In 1925 the Chancellor of the Exchequer Winston Churchill had made the ruinous decision to place the British Pound back on the gold standard at too high a level, backed by high domestic interest rates. Not ruinous for the City of London that it supported, nor for British foreign investors who could purchase foreign assets for less British Pounds. But ruinous for British manufacturing and mining, with the 1920s a time of economic stagnation, deflation and high unemployment. The high exchange rate made British coal exports uncompetitive and the high interest rates reduced demand at home. The cost would be born by the workers, and very specifically the mine workers, whose weekly wages had already been reduced from £6 to £3 18 shillings (there were 20 shillings in a pound) over a period of seven years leading up to 1926.

The mine owners now proposed further cuts in weekly pay and even longer working hours, as the government proposed to remove subsidies that had supported the industry. A general strike was called in support of the miners but this collapsed after only nine days, with both the Labour Party and union leaders more scared of the “militants” within their own ranks than the consequences of folding to the ruling class. They had already been well co-opted and had gotten used to their comfortable and “respectable” new positions. A reality that would repeat again and again through the Twentieth Century and more recently with “Blairism” (Margaret Thatcher called Blair her greatest achievement). After the collapse of the general strike, the miners struggled on for a further six months before giving in to lower wages and longer working hours. The miners were starved back to work in a time of little or no government social support, and with defeat came employer blacklisting, victimization and purges of activist with some miners never working again; resulting in malnutrition, poverty, and squalor. This documentary details how the full resources of the mine owners, other right-wing businessmen and the state were combined to crush the miners.

Toward the end of the miner’s action Labour MP George Spencer lead a movement in Nottinghamshire to negotiate a separate agreement and then to set up a breakaway “moderate” union; fundamentally undermining national solidarity. The union was anything but moderate, being decidedly “right-wing and uncompromisingly opposed to all that genuine trade unionism represented” (Chapter 1).

His stated belief that that unions and politics should be separated was at best naive, as of course the ownership class would never separate their own “unions” (corporations, owner associations etc.) from politics. The full power of the state had been brought to bear to crush the general strike and the miner’s union. It later became known that “Spencer’s union-busting activities were financed, in part, by [the right-wing head of the seaman’s union] and by donations from grateful colliery owners” (Chapter 1) and local right-wing businessmen. The division in the miner’s union, which lasted until the founding of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) in 1945, aided the owners in reducing mining employment by more than a third from the 1.2 million prior to the strike. Wages plummeted even further during the 1930s Great Depression, during which the Labour leader MacDonald (another class traitor) formed a National Government with the Conservative Party (the party of the ruling class). At the same time mine owners intensified working conditions, and pushed the already appalling safety levels even lower. One result was the Gresford Colliery disaster of 1934, when 265 miners were killed in an explosion.

After the end of WW2 the Labour Party won an unassailable majority but were lead by a Clement Attlee who was at best soft-left and moved rightwards in the post-war years. Churchill described him as “A sheep in sheep’s clothing”, negating the possibility of more fundamental change rather than a class compromise that allowed the ruling class to stave off more radical possibilities. Attlee was also as much an imperialist, comfortable with sucking wealth from the colonies, as any Conservative. In 1947 the mines were nationalized, with the owners generously compensated and many owners and managers employed and very well remunerated by the government National Coal Board (NCB).

Nothing much really changed for the miners, and mines were closed at a steady rate under both Labour and Conservative governments; by 1970 the number of pits fell from 980 to 292 with the workforce falling from 700,000 to 287,000. All facilitated by an NUM leadership far to the right of their members, and focused as much on tamping down any “radical” elements and maintaining their comfortable and “respectable” positions than fighting for their members who were viewed in an extremely paternalistic way. Aided by the extremely high bar requirement of a two-thirds majority for any strike action to be taken.

In 1969 this cozy co-opted leadership was opposed in what was called the “October Revolution” lead by Arthur Scargill, and the rules changed to allow for strike action with a 55% majority. Miner’s pay had leapt from 81st to 14th place in the industrial pay league in 1944, but miners’ relative pay and conditions had markedly deteriorated by the early 1970s. Even the National Pay Board reported that miners were earning significantly less than others in heavy industry. The miners went on strike and won nearly all of their demands, together with bringing down the Conservative government; something that would not be forgiven.

From 1971 to 1982 the NUM was lead by Joe Gormley, an “old school” union leader who was happy to cozy up to national politicians and the management of the NCB; with the focus on compromise and pragmatism to protect the system as a whole. In 2002 he was exposed as a ruling class collaborator, who worked with state security against his own membership, among up to 23 senior trade unionists in total. With leaders like this the union membership hardly needed enemies! Here is the BBC program exposing the union leaders.

At the same time, the right-wing of the Labour Party quickly put an end to the industrial planning proposed by Tony Benn, with James Callaghan (Prime Minister) and Dennis Healey (Chancellor of the Exchequer) then utilizing an IMF loan as an excuse to implement austerity and the start of neoliberalism in the UK. This was totally unneeded as the flow of North Sea Oil revenues was only just starting. In addition, wage restraint policies were extended to keep inflation in check while management pay and profits increased. The end result was the 1979 Winter of Discontent that directly lead to the election of Margaret Thatcher and her Conservative government.

From the start Margaret Thatcher’s government understood that they needed to smash the Miner’s Union, still with 220,000 members, if they were going to be able to completely remake owner employee relations in favour of the latter; as part of the neoliberal revolution. By 1984 all of the resources of the state and the private sector had been aligned to smash the miner’s union. In 1982 Gormley was replaced with Scargill, who was much better aligned with the members of the NUM; the stage was set for a showdown. Ian MacGregor (dubbed “Mac the Knife”), who had broken strikes in the US and Canada, was appointed as the head of the NCB. He had also been part of the anti-union management of British Leyland and had overseen the shrinking of British Steel from 166,000 to 71,000 workers. The government drive was to force a strike through which the NUM could be broken, and MacGregor announced at the start of 1994 the closure within a few weeks of 20 pits with the loss of more than 20,000 jobs. Importantly, none of the closures were in Nottinghamshire which had some of the best paid miners in the country; a “miners aristocracy”. An overtime ban that had been started the previous Autumn was being effective in running down coal stocks, and the government knew that a strike needed to be provoked early in the year before coal stocks reached critical levels. In March MacGregor got his strike as Yorkshire, Lancashire, Scotland, Durham, Kent and South Wales areas struck. Nottinghamshire did not.

It was the most productive and profitable coal field and its members considered their pits not at risk of being closed down. Their high pay also separated them from workers in other areas who could not afford their kind of “middle class” lifestyle. The government also understood that if they could keep the Nottinghamshire pits working they could win the strike, and that meant stopping pickets from others areas preventing the Nottinghamshire miners from going to work. The county was very rapidly transformed into a police state, with pickets being illegally turned back many, many miles from the pits they were travelling to (for example exits from the main M1 motorway near Nottinghamshire had police roadblocks). The police actions were also greatly aided by a collaborator at a senior level within the NUM who would inform them in advance of planned picketing actions. Enormous numbers of police were drafted in from around the country, and pit towns were placed under a police occupation. For example, at Clipstone colliery:

We had seen an invasion of our village by the police on an unbelievable scale. From dawn to dusk, two-man foot patrols were everywhere while Transit vans full of uniformed police officers cruised throughout the day. The extensive use of roadblocks throughout Nottinghamshire not only saw them encircle the county to keep out the Yorkshire and Derbyshire strikers, but also restrict movement within it - between pit and pit, and pit and home. We were sewn in tight. (Chapter 4)

At the same Neil Kinnock and the other leaders of the Labour Party were not supportive of the strike, and other union leaders did not step in to stop their members from going through picket lines to move coal from the depots to the power stations. Echoing the 1926 strike, a “Notts Working Miners’ Committee was established with monetary support coming from businessmen (including the Eton-educated David Hart who was on the extreme right of the Conservative Party and had linkages with the security services), Conservatives and others generally opposed to unions. Its leader “Silver Birch” hid his identity as he travelled the coalfields promoting strike-breaking and was fully supported by the national media. It later emerged that many of the leaders of these proliferating working miners’ committees were working directly with the security services, and Silver Birch himself was a state asset.

Where large pickets were able to form, what could be construed as “police riots” broke out with the police attacking the picketers. The media repeatedly tried to misrepresent this as the police responding to picketer violence as with the case with Orgreave where the BBC intentionally reversed the footage to make it appear that the picketers attacked the police rather than the opposite which was the truth.

All of the strikers arrested at the Battle of Orgreave had the charges against them dismissed as police testimony and written statements were found to be highly unreliable, with scores of police from many different police forces being found to be using exactly the same phrases while much testimony was not supported from by video evidence made at the time.

Cabinet papers released in the 2010s revealed a Margaret Thatcher that was detail managing the response to the strike, in direct contrast to the many statements she made at the time. as Mike Simons states:

the Cabinet papers show the Tories were fighting a class war as a civil war. There are too many who claim to be on the left telling us today that class politics are old fashioned. They are not. The rich fight the class war every day and they are very conscious of what they are doing (Chapter 17).

Even with all the efforts of the state and the ruling class generally, the miners would have won the strike if Nottinghamshire had come out on strike. The ruling class still needed the high level informer within the NUM that greatly reduced the ability of picketers to shut down Nottinghamshire pits, and the Nottinghamshire miners themselves, to win. Without the class traitors the working people would have won the strike and quite possibly destroyed the Thatcher government. Instead, Thatcher destroyed the strongest trade union and went on to cow and reduce the rest as she created a thoroughly neoliberal UK. Her legacy was also the Conservative leaders of the Labour Party, Blair and now Starmer.

From the late 1980s through the 1990s more and more of the Nottinghamshire coal mines were closed, putting the lie to the belief that the county’s mines were safe from closure and showing the self-defeating nature of the Nottinghamshire miners traitorous behaviour. Once they were no longer useful they were quickly cast aside by the ruling class. By 1993 there were only 44,000 British coal miners, by 2015 2,000 with the last deep coal mine being closed in that year.

The coal mining communities have still not recovered from the devastation of the closure of what was in many cases the only major employer. Still The Enemy Within is perhaps the best documentary on the UK Miners’ Strike.

The ruling class will always fight the class war, while telling the rest of society class is irrelevant, looking for leaders that can be co-opted and bribed to work against those they are supposed to represent. So many progressive and socialist governments fail due to such efforts.