Arthur Scargill

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Arthur Scargill (born January 11, 1938) was the leader of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) from 1981 to 2000 and is presently (2006) the leader of the Socialist Labour Party, a political party he founded in 1996.

Scargill was born in Worsbrough Dale, just south of Barnsley, the son of Harold Scargill, a miner and a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. He became a miner after leaving school, working at Woolley Colliery from 1953. He soon became a left-wing political activist, joining the Young Communist League from 1955-1962. He became a member of the Labour Party 1962-1996. Then he became the leader of the Yorkshire division of the NUM 1973-1981. In 1973 he was instrumental in organising the miners' strike which led to the fall of Edward Heath's Government in March 1974. Scargill became president of the NUM in 1981, with Mick McGahey as vice-president.

1 Role in the National Union of Mineworkers
2 Founding of the Socialist Labour Party
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Role in the National Union of Mineworkers

During his period as President of the Yorkshire region of the NUM, Scargill became popular. Miners saw him as honest, hard-working and genuinely concerned with their welfare[1]. In the 1981 election for NUM President, Scargill secured around 70% of the vote. One of the main planks of his platform was to give more power to union conferences than to executive meetings on the grounds that the former was more democratic. This had great implications for regional relations in the NUM; executive committees gave the same number of votes to a large region such as Yorkshire as it did to a small region such as North Wales. The small regions, with the exception of Kent, were less militant. Scargill's platform gave greater scope for the approval of militancy within the union.

Scargill was a very controversial figure for his outspokenness and the tactics he utilized. The use of flying pickets in the 1972 and 1974 strike brought remarkable concessions to the miners and made him the most feared man amongst the British Conservative right. At the time of the miner's strike of 1983, there were allegations that the N.U.M. was helped financially by the Soviet Union.

He is also noted as a fiery and emotional orator with audiences sympathetic to his cause. Although he already had a high level of national prominence it rose even further with the miners' conflicts with the Government during 1974. After the miner's strike he was elected to lifetime Presidency of the NUM by an overwhelming national majority in a very controversial election where some of the alternative candidates claimed that they were given very little time to prepare. His stand both for the future of the mining industry and the communities dependent on it and against the policies of the Thatcher Government led to his leadership of the 1984-1985 miners' strike. This ended in a shattering defeat for the miners and saw a split in the union (see also Union of Democratic Mineworkers). The strike is generally seen as a major defeat for the National Union of Mineworkers and the trade union movement generally.

The media characterised the 1984-5 action as "Scargill's strike", believing that he had been looking for any excuse to go on strike ever since becoming union president. This portrayal may not be wholly accurate, as the strike began when miners walked out in Yorkshire, rather than when Scargill called for action. The decision not to hold a ballot of members was seen as an erosion of democracy within the union by Scargill, but the role of ballots in decision-making had been made very unclear after previous leader, Joe Gormley, had ignored two ballots over wage reforms and his decisions had been upheld after appeals to court were made.

An objective assessment of Scargill is arguably impossible, given his close association with one side of a very divisive conflict in British politics, the 1984-1985 miners' strike. His opponents would be likely to characterise him as a marginalised politician out of touch with popular politics, losing a long and ultimately futile miners strike, splitting the National Union of Miners and destroying the international competitiveness of deep mined coal. His supporters would be unlikely to accept any part of that assessment, other than the objective fact that the strike ended in defeat for the miners. A left-wing assessment would characterise the strike as necessary, the split in the National Union of Miners as being the fault of the Union of Democratic Mineworkers, the decline in the coal industry as being the result of a government whose priority was attacking trade unionism, and his unpopularity compared to more centrist left-wing politicians as being a result of his willingness to stick to his principles even if they were unpopular.

What does seem clear is that many of his predictions have come true. On the appointment of Ian MacGregor as head of the Coal Board in 1983, Scargill stated, "The policies of this government are clear - to destroy the coal industry and the NUM" [2]. This became something of a joke, as it seemed a hysterical response. During the strike, Scargill constantly claimed that the government had a long term strategy to decimate the industry and that it listed pits that it wanted to close each year; this was both denied by the government and dismissed by the public as paranoid. However, of the 170 British pits in 1984, only 15 were still open at the time of privatisation in December 1994.

[edit] Founding of the Socialist Labour Party

He founded the Socialist Labour Party after the Labour Party abandoned the original wording of Clause IV in its constitution. His breakaway party has had little success in the polls. Scargill himself has become more politically outspoken, defending Stalin;^[1]^[2] Scargill had long criticized Poland's Solidarity trade union movement for its destabilisation of socialism, as he saw it. He himself has contested two parliamentary elections — in the 1997 general election against Alan Howarth, a defector from the Conservative Party to Labour who had been given a safe seat to contest, and in the 2001 general election, against Peter Mandelson in Hartlepool. He lost on both occasions.

In the film Brassed Off, the union leader played by Christopher Tetlow bears a very strong resemblance to Scargill.

The novelist David Peace is a defender of Scargill. He stated in an interview with the Daily Telegraph that "it suits both left and right to blame [Scargill]", and that the latter had been made into "an utter scapegoat".