Coalfield Communities

Debate between Michael Dugher and Mark Spencer

Tuesday 28th October 2014 Commons Chamber

[Michael Dugher]

As always, my hon. Friend brings to this place insight from his own constituency. Fundamentally, the Cabinet papers also show the true scale of the dishonesty in maintaining that the strike was about an industrial dispute based on economics, and it puts paid to the nonsense assertion at the time that Ministers were somehow neutral bystanders. The fact is that the Government of the day saw the strike in political terms. Far from Ministers being non-interventionist, they were in fact the micro-managers of this dispute.

One paper from a Downing street meeting shows that Mrs Thatcher told Ferdinand Mount, a senior policy adviser, that her Government should

“neglect no opportunity to erode trade union membership.”

In a paper prepared for Mrs Thatcher by the Downing street head of policy, the now right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood), it was said that miners had a “revolutionary” strategy, and it urged the Prime Minister to return to her original plan of

“encouraging a war of attrition”

against the miners. That completely reinforces the view at the time that the Government of the day regarded the striking miners as—to use that most infamous of phrases—“the enemy within.”

[Mr Mark Spencer (Sherwood) (Con)]

I hope that the shadow Minister will recognise that one of the fundamentals of trade unionism is that the union is there to represent its members, that it has a ballot and that it acts upon the result of that ballot. One of the fundamental flaws in the NUM strategy was that it did not have a ballot, which divided the work force.