Coalfield Communities

Debate between Andrew Bridgen and David T C Davies

Tuesday 28th October 2014 Commons Chamber

[David T. C. Davies (Monmouth) (Con)]

The hon. Member for North West Durham (Pat Glass) referred to miners as an honest, decent, hard-working group of people, and on that point she was absolutely right. Like most other Members who have spoken in the debate, I have a direct connection with this subject. I was the first person for generations on my mother’s side of the family who was not raised in a pit village. Except for one or two men who joined the Army, I was probably the first male in the family who was not a miner. Virtually all of them were.

I am happy to speak here for those miners who wanted to work during the strike, as many of my relatives did. Disgracefully, a lot of myths have been perpetuated today. It is interesting that not one Labour Member has mentioned Arthur Scargill. The tragedy for the miners was that they were disgracefully badly led by one man who felt that he had the right to run the country. He tried to bring down the Government in 1974 and tried again for a strike in the 1980s. He balloted his members three times and lost, then brought them out on strike anyway. He was absolutely hated by many miners, as well as by many in the Labour movement. It is an open secret that the leader of the Labour party at the time, Neil Kinnock, hated Arthur Scargill. Many people in the Labour movement hated him, and the reality is that he hated them. Labour Members are all trying to line themselves up as friends of the miners now, but the reality is that Arthur Scargill would have despised the new Labour party that sits in the Chamber today as much as he hated the Tories.

[Andrew Bridgen]

My hon. Friend rightly gives the other perspective to this sad story of our country’s history: that of the areas where the miners wanted to work and the intimidation they faced, which split our communities in half. The Labour party has always supported the right to work, but what about the right to work at that time of miners who wanted to go down the pit and did not want to join the strike? How about respecting that?

[David T. C. Davies]

My hon. Friend makes an important point, because one third of the miners continued to work throughout that strike and many more would have done so had they been able to. Of course it was not just the mining union and the miners themselves who were split on this; the whole trade union movement was split on it. The steelworkers did not particularly want the strike to go ahead and the shipworkers’ unions were not in favour of it; they were all happy to turn a blind eye to coal that was still being pulled out of the ground, and they knew that they had to, because if the steel furnaces had been allowed to run down, it would not just have been miners who lost their jobs but thousands of steelworkers. But none of that was important to Arthur Scargill; he was more than happy to risk the jobs of thousands of other working people, as well as those of the miners, to try to impose his will on a democratically elected Government who had just won a very large majority.

The hon. Member for Wansbeck (Ian Lavery), along with many others, criticised the police and asked whether we had ever had someone spit in our face. I have had someone spit in my face, and I have also been in violent situations as a serving police officer. I know that emotions can run high and that there can be inappropriate behaviour when people are suffering extreme provocation. All those thousands of people who turned up at the Orgreave cokeworks—and had been badly led—had been taken there to stop people working, in order to prevent coke from being delivered to the steelworks. Had they succeeded, they would have destroyed thousands of jobs.