Arthur Scargill

"Scargill" redirects here. For other uses, see Scargill (disambiguation).

Arthur Scargill
Arthur Scargill speaks at a Socialist Labour Party public meeting in Pontypridd in 2010
Born	(1938-01-11) 11 January 1938 Worsbrough Dale, West Riding of Yorkshire, England
Occupation(s)	Former coal miner Former General Secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers Leader of the Socialist Labour Party
Spouse	Anne Harper (divorced 2001)

Arthur Scargill (born 11 January 1938) is a British politician and trade unionist who was president of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) from 1982 to 2002. Joining the NUM at the age of 19 in 1957, he became one of its leading cadres in the late 1960s. In 1973, he was instrumental in organising the miners' strike that toppled Edward Heath's Conservative Government in March 1974. A decade later, he led the union through the 1984–85 miners' strike, a key event in British labour and political history. It was a confrontation with the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher, and the miners union was decisively defeated. Coal mining almost disappeared as a major industry in Britain.

A former Labour Party member, he is now the leader of the Socialist Labour Party (SLP), which he founded in 1996.

Early life

Scargill was born in Worsbrough Dale, Barnsley, West Riding of Yorkshire. His father, Harold, was a miner and a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. His mother Alice (née Pickering) was a professional cook. He did not take the Eleven plus exam and went to Worsbrough Dale School (now called the Elmhirst School). He left at 15 to become a coal miner at Woolley Colliery in 1953, where he remained for 19 years.

Early political and trade union activities

Scargill joined the Young Communist League in 1955, becoming its Yorkshire District Chair in 1956 and shortly after a member of its National Executive Committee. In 1957 he was elected NUM Yorkshire Area Youth Delegate, and attended the World Youth Festival in Moscow as a representative of the Yorkshire miners. In 1958, he attended the World Federation of Trade Unions youth congress in Prague. In a 1975 interview with New Left Review Scargill stated:

"I was in the Young Communist League for about six or seven years and I became a member of its National Executive Committee responsible for industrial work. The secretary at this time was a very good friend of mine called Jimmy Reid, and we're still close friends. A lot of other people on the National Executive at that time went on and became very respectable Labour MPs in Parliament. Many of us started in the 1950s in the Young Communist League. So that was my initial introduction into socialism and into political militancy. My father was a Communist. My mother was strictly non-political. But my father never forced me to be involved in politics at all."

In 1961, he was elected a member of the Woolley NUM Branch Committee. Scargill joined the Labour Party in 1962. He regularly attended Workers' Education Association (WEA) classes and Cooperative Party educational programmes, and in 1962, undertook a three-year, part-time course at the University of Leeds, where he studied economics, industrial relations and social history. In 1965 he was elected Branch Delegate from Woolley to the Yorkshire NUM Area Council, and in 1969 was elected a member of the Yorkshire NUM Area Executive Committee. In 1970, he was elected a member of the regional committee of the Co-operative Retail Services in Barnsley and a delegate to its national conference. He also represented the Barnsley Co-op at Cooperative congresses. He joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and also actively opposed civil nuclear power.

Scargill became involved in the Yorkshire Left, a group of left-wing activists involved in the Yorkshire region of the NUM, its largest region. He played an important role in the miners' strike of 1972 and was involved in the mass picket at Saltley Gate in Birmingham.

National Union of Mineworkers

In 1973, Scargill was elected to the full-time post of compensation agent in the Yorkshire NUM. (The Yorkshire Left had already decided to stand him as their candidate even before the strike.) A few months later the president of the Yorkshire NUM died unexpectedly, and Scargill won the election for his replacement, the two posts were then combined and he held them until 1981. During this time he earned the esteem of significant sections of the left and the British working class, who saw him as honest, hard-working and genuinely concerned with their welfare, and he was also respected for improving the administration of the compensation agent's post. In 1974, he was instrumental in organising the miners' strike that brought down Edward Heath's government at the February general election.

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 were more democratic. This had great implications for regional relations in the NUM; the executive was described as dominated by "Gormley's rotten boroughs", since every region – even quite small ones – had one delegate, and the larger regions had only a few more (Scotland and South Wales had two delegates each, Yorkshire had three).

Scargill was a very vocal opponent of Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government, frequently appearing on television to attack it. On the appointment of Ian MacGregor as head of the NCB in 1983, Scargill stated, "The policies of this government are clear – to destroy the coal industry and the NUM".

Miners' strike

Scargill led the union in the 1984–1985 miners' strike. He claimed that the government had a long-term strategy to destroy the industry by closing unprofitable pits, and that it listed pits it wanted to close each year. This was denied by the government at the time, although papers released in 2014 under the thirty year rule suggest that Scargill was right.

Miners were split between those who supported the strike and those who opposed it (see Union of Democratic Mineworkers). Scargill never balloted NUM members for a strike; this was seen as an erosion of democracy within the union, 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. The NUM had previously held three ballots on a national strike, all of which rejected the proposal: 55% voted against in January 1982, and 61% voted against in both October 1982 and March 1983.

The media characterised the strike as "Scargill's strike" and his critics accused him of looking for an excuse for industrial action since becoming union president. Many politicians, including the then Labour leader Neil Kinnock, believed Scargill had made a huge mistake in calling the strike in the summer rather than in the winter.

Scargill, along with Labour MP Tony Benn, was actively involved in the campaign to free strikers Russel Shankland and Dean Hancock from prison. The pair had been convicted of the murder of David Wilkie, a taxi driver, by throwing a block of concrete from a bridge onto his car. The life sentences for murder were reduced to eight years for manslaughter on appeal. They were released from prison in November 1989.

Later years

After the miners' strike, he was elected to lifetime presidency of the NUM by an overwhelming national majority, in a controversial election where some of the other candidates claimed that they were given very little time to prepare. He stepped down from leadership of the NUM at the end of July 2002, to become the honorary president. He was succeeded by Ian Lavery.

In January 2014, David Cameron stated 'I think if anyone needs to make an apology for their role in the miners' strike it should be Arthur Scargill for the appalling way that he led the union.' This was in the Prime Minister's rejection of Labour calls for an apology for government actions during the 1984-5 miners' strike. His comments followed a question in the Commons from Labour MP Lisa Nandy, who said the miners and their families deserved an apology for the mine closure.

Legal disputes

On 25 August 2010, it was reported that Scargill had been told that he no longer qualified for full membership of the NUM under union rules he had helped draw up, but was only eligible for "life" or "retired" or "honorary" membership – which did not carry voting rights. In February 2012, Scargill won £13,000 in a court action against the NUM, primarily for car expenses, and for the earlier temporary denial of membership. Scargill admitted there was 'bad blood' between him and the NUM general secretary Chris Kitchen, who said, "I honestly do believe that Arthur, in his own world, believes that the NUM is here to afford him the lifestyle that he's become accustomed to." However, in December 2012, Scargill lost a similar case concerning rent on his flat in the Barbican, London. For years the NUM had been paying £34,000 annual rent for the flat on Scargill's instructions, without the knowledge of NUM members or many senior officials; Scargill claimed the NUM should continue funding his flat for the rest of his life, and thereafter for any widow who survived him. Chris Kitchen said: "I would say it's time to walk away, Mr Scargill. You've been found out. The NUM is not your personal bank account and never will be again."

In 1993 Scargill tried to use Margaret Thatcher's flagship Right to Buy scheme to buy the flat on the Barbican estate. His application was refused because the flat in the Barbican Estate's Shakespeare Tower was not Scargill's primary residence. Former Scargill loyalist Jimmy Kelly, a miner at the Edlington Main pit near Doncaster in the 1980s, said he was astonished to learn of the attempt to buy the Barbican flat. "It's so hypocritical it's unreal," he said. "It was Thatcher's legislation, actually giving council tenants the right to buy their own houses. "I think if it had been made public before then there'd have been a huge outcry. I think people would be astounded by knowing that.

Socialist Labour Party

In 1996, Scargill founded the Socialist Labour Party after the Labour Party abandoned the original wording of Clause IV – the nationalisation of key industries and utilities – in its constitution. He has contested two parliamentary elections. In the 1997 general election, he ran against Alan Howarth, a defector from the Conservative Party to Labour, who had been given the safe seat of Newport East to contest. In the 2001 general election, he ran against Peter Mandelson in Hartlepool. He lost on both occasions, winning 2.4% of the vote in the Hartlepool election. In May 2009, he was the number one candidate for the Socialist Labour Party for one of London's seats in the European Parliament.

Scargill has become more politically outspoken since stepping down from the NUM presidency, coming out as a supporter of Stalinism saying that the "ideas of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin explain the real world". Scargill had long criticised Poland's Solidarity trade union for its attacks upon the communist system in Poland, which Scargill saw as deformed but reformable.

Elections

UK Parliament elections

Date of election	Constituency	Party	Votes	%
1997	Newport East	SLP	1,952	5.2
2001	Hartlepool	SLP	912	2.4

London Assembly elections (Entire London city)

Date of election	Party	Votes	%	Results	Notes
2000	SLP	17,401	1.0	Not elected	Multi-members party list

Welsh Assembly elections

Year	Region	Party	Votes	%	Result
2003	south Wales East	SLP	3,695	2.2	Not elected

European Parliament elections

Year	Region	Party	Votes	%	Result	Notes
1999	London	SLP	19,632	1.7	Not-elected	Multi-member constituency; party list
2009	London	SLP	15,306	0.9	Not-elected	Multi-member constituency; party list

In popular culture

• Scargill was portrayed by Peter Richardson in the 1988 comedy film The Strike.
• In Citizen Smith he was to have been in the cabinet had Wolfie Smith taken power.
• He was portrayed by David Hargreaves in the 1990 television film A Strike Out of Time.
• Scargill is referred to in the 1984 song "Too Hot", from the album Word of Mouth by The Kinks: "Arthur's on the warpath/ Here he goes again!"

Scargill is discussed in Episode 7 of "Our Friends in the North"

• Scargill appears on the cover of You're Not Alone (The Enemy song)

External links

• National Union of Mineworkers
• Socialist Labour Party website
• History of the Scargill family name
• Barnsley Hall of Fame
• Review of BBC Radio Play: "The Duel", by Michael Samuels – the struggle for control of the UK coal industry in 1984