How secret services attacked British miners (18K)

SEUMAS MILNE, labour editor of the Guardian, is the author of a book about the operations of the British secret services against the National Union of Mineworkers (The Enemy Within, London, Verso, 1995). He was interviewed by LÁSZLÓ ANDOR, a member of the Hungarian organisation Left Alternative. Question: When, why and how was it decided by the British state that the NUM is a major public enemy? There are two basic reasons why NUM became the single most important target for the security services. The first is that after the oil crisis of the early 1970s, the proportion of British electricity generated from domestically produced coal reached an historic peak of about 80%. That gave the miners potentially a grip on power supply and therefore a grip on the government's power. The second point is that in the late '60s, what had been a rather sleepy and right-wing trade union, the NUM, was taken over in a series of dramatic and unofficial actions and strikes by young charismatic leaders, the most famous of whom was Arthur Scargill. In 1972 and 1974, there were two phenomenally successful miners' strikes, which sent an electric shock through the economic and administrative establishment. The second of these strikes led to the collapse of the Tory government of Edward Heath. That experience led to a particularly intense, almost neurotic paranoia in the Tory party about the power of the miners' union. Thatcher became leader determined to destroy the political and economic base of the NUM. From the early '70s onwards, as a result of the miners' strike, but also of other industrial actions, including the release of five dockers from prisons and the threat of a general strike in 1972, there was a massive increase in the resources of the Whitehall machine and the security services and the police against political, industrial and mass actions by the trade unions and the left. This led to the biggest industrial confrontation of the postwar period — the miners' strike of 1984-5. Question: Why did the NUM leadership call the strike? Initially, the government attempted to force through pit closures very rapidly. The government said the pits were unprofitable, and the miners' union response was that if all social and economic factors were taken into account, they were very far from being unprofitable or uneconomical. The government triggered the strike with a provocative attempt to accelerate pit closures. British coal was then one of the cheapest deep mine coals in the world. Question: The decision was made that action must be taken against the unions. What was the strategy? The strategy was laid out during the last Labour government by the then Tory opposition. Nicholas Ridley, who later became minister for industry, drew up a plan which included building up a force of non-unionised lorry drivers, the switching to oil-fired power stations in case of crisis and promoting divisions and splits in the trade union movement by supporting the right-wing effort to create a breakaway wing in the miners' union. All this took place during the strike. Of course, the security services were only part of the state's operation, but the strike provoked the biggest police operation ever seen in this country. There were 11,000 people arrested, more than a dozen people killed and the biggest mobilisation of the electronic surveillance network (GCHQ). It cost the government more than &163;10 billion to break the resistance of the miners. In the wake of the strike, as the pit closures accelerated, the government still failed to break the grip of the miners' union on the domestic energy supply. This was despite the promotion of nuclear power (even though it was far more expensive), the promotion of imported coal, attempts to undermine the power of the union in many different ways, primarily by creating a breakaway organisation and intervening secretly in the union. Despite all that, the union is still there. Up to 1990, about 75-80% of the electricity supply was produced by miners. In the end, they privatised the electricity and later the coal industry, at the end of 1994, in such a way as to directly destroy as much as possible of the mining industry. This was not done for economic reasons. In the late '80s and early '90s, even in the markets that were rigged against coal, and according to the narrowest profit criteria of "economic rationality", British-produced coal was easily competitive against imports. In 1993-4 they were closing pits which were producing coal 40% below the world market price. These pit closures were motivated overwhelmingly by political considerations. Question: The later pit closures and the privatisation are linked to the name of Michael Heseltine, now deputy prime minister. Heseltine and John Major's government came very close to a political defeat when it attempted to force through the closures of 31 pits with the loss of 30,000 jobs in one week in October 1992. There was a spontaneous upsurge of popular mass support for the miners, which forced a delay in the closures, which were later done one by one. Question: These closures were carried out along with privatisation? The government called this "ultimate privatisation" because it thought this would finally break the power of the NUM. The proof that the Thatcher and Major governments did not close pits for economic reasons is that since privatisation, 15 mines that were formerly closed by the state, were immediately reopened by the private owners and now produce coal profitably for the private sector. Question: Does that mean that the private sector can run businesses more economically than the state sector? No. The increase in productivity in the state sector in mining in the last 10 years has been 500% — the highest rate of increase in productivity in any industry anywhere in the world in such a period. Of course, this state investment laid the ground for later private sector success. But the point is that those pits were closed supposedly on economic grounds and were immediately reopened once the state lost hold of them. They were privatised to get the miners out of the pit and re-hire those who were ready to work under different conditions. Question: The "ultimate privatisation" was preceded by a political campaign driven by the security services against the leaders of the NUM. What was the background to that? Despite the fact that the 1984-5 strike failed to achieve its first aim, and the union was much weaker and demoralised, the NUM was far from broken. Thatcher's memoir explains that she did not believe that the NUM was finished by any means. Five years later, the security services launched a smear campaign against the leaders of the strike, Arthur Scargill and Peter Heathfield, which could have put both of them in prison. This campaign lasted throughout the spring and summer of 1990, and involved the collapsing regimes of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Ultimately, the attempt failed but cost the union an immense amount of money, prestige and credibility. This operation was organised by the person who is now in charge of the British security services, Stella Rimington. Question: Robert Maxwell became a part of this story. What was his interest in this operation? The government had a very strong interest in seeing Arthur Scargill humiliated and discredited and out of the way. So did, for different reasons, the Labour leadership of the time, because it regarded Scargill as a threat to their attempt to move the party to the right and become an acceptable social democratic party. The Labour leader of the day, Neil Kinnock, made clear his support for the allegations by allowing his two closest supporters who were associated with the mining industry to push the campaign along throughout the summer. Kinnock presented a prize the following year to the journalists who were responsible for the campaign. The other dimension of this Labour connection was that the allegations were first made in the Daily Mirror, which was the biggest selling daily among the miners and Labour-supporting people. The allegations were made simultaneously on one of the most popular investigative TV programs, The Cook Report. Maxwell owned the Daily Mirror then and 25% of Central Television, the company that had The Cook Report. Maxwell himself told the editor of the Mirror that he considered it possible that it was an MI5-inspired campaign, but he did not mind about that. Maxwell had very close associations with intelligence services. It was generally believed that he was linked with the KGB. But in fact all the evidence that came out after his death suggested that he was much closer to the British intelligence services. (His connections with the Israeli secret services represented a separate dimension.) Others had an interest in seeing Scargill discredited, including people in the former regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. They backed the campaign because Scargill had allegedly diverted a Soviet strike donation of a &163;1 million and also money from the GDR and Hungary. Evidence from Russian Communist Party documents makes it clear that Gorbachev did not want the money to support the strike because he wanted to protect his emerging relationship with Margaret Thatcher. In 1990, however, people in the former trade union apparatuses wanted to discredit Scargill, because he wanted to build a non-western-controlled international trade union alliance. The evidence suggests that the anti-Scargill campaign's origins were in the British security services. The main witness who made the key allegations was Roger Windsor, a former chief executive of the NUM, who held the most senior non-elected position in the union. He was named in parliament as an MI5 agent who worked directly for Stella Rimington. Sources within the secret services provided information that the campaign against the NUM leaders was organised by the security services and they had tried to put money in an account linked with Scargill and then attempted to withdraw to make it look like corruption. It was also discovered that MI5 tried to get someone into the NUM, next to Scargill, just before Windsor joined the organisation. An MI5 employee, through his lawyer, warned the NUM that it had someone high up. There is other corroborating evidence that Roger Windsor was a spy and agent provocateur working for the government. Question: Was the operation against the NUM a unique case in the history of the British state? In Britain, there is a history of the secret services having been used against the left and the labour movement going back 200 years. In the 19th century, there was a revulsion against using spies against the nascent labour movement. In Britain it was called "the continental spy system" because it was regarded as normal in France, Austria-Hungary and other strong states. It belonged to the ABC of statecraft, but was considered rather un-English. Since World War I, in most capitalist countries, the labour movement is regarded at best as an economic and political irritant, at worst a threat to state security. Therefore, it is the subject of surveillance, harassment, disinformation, infiltration and agent provocateur operations. It is a normal part of the state system in all capitalist countries. In the last two decades, the main targets of the secret services were the Soviet Union, the former socialist countries, the IRA and the miners' union. There is now a cease-fire in Ireland, the Soviet Union does not exist any more, and the left and the labour movement are much weaker than ever in this century. However, MI5 is bigger than it was even 20 years ago. It has 2000 full-time employees and a huge palace on the north bank of the Thames. Stella Rimington is trying to increase the power of the organisation and turn it into a British FBI. The experience of the past 15 years can be characterised by a marvellous quote from Nigel Lawson, former chancellor of the exchequer. He writes in his memoirs that Thatcher was besotted with the intelligence services, and she was a great reader of the novels by Frederick Foresyth. The one area of the British public sector that was completely immune from Thatcherite economic policies and public spending cuts was the security service. Question: It is widely believed that the United States has had a much greater tradition of secret operations against the labour movement. What are the links between the AFL-CIO, the US mafia, the secret services and the government? How do they compare to the British case? Because of the Cold War, the trade unions were particular targets of intelligence operations on both sides. The CIA, from the 1940 onwards, was very active and spent large sums of money to split the World Federation of Trade Unions and to create the International Council of Free Trade Unions, the western-backed centre. It then tried in each country to weaken the power of the left within the trade unions. In France, for example, it managed to split the CGT. In the last 20 years, as this role of the CIA became public, the Americans and other western countries tended to use state-founded bodies such as the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Germany, or the National Endowment for Democracy in the US, to influence the course of the labour movement in each country. NED finances organisations that were previously financed by the CIA. The Friedrich Ebert Foundation, because it is linked to the German Social Democratic Party, has more credibility, and is more subtle in its operations. NED and FEF have been active in attempts to disaffiliate trade unions from the Soviet-centred trade union federations and to get them affiliated to western trade union centres. That was very much part of the story with the miners, because Scargill had been instrumental in wanting to create an international union of miners, which would bridge the east-west divide. It was only partially successful, but managed to pull in a lot of western unions previously in the pro-western camp. Question: Should we, in the former socialist countries, expect that the secret services will be rebuilt along the lines you described for the advanced capitalist countries? In eastern Europe, there has been some restructuring of the security services. The western security services have played a role in this reconstruction. Stella Rimington, in the only public statement she has made since she became head of MI5, talked triumphantly about the role the British security services played in rebuilding, reconstructing and reshaping the secret services in central and eastern Europe. Of course, one of the elements of the western-style security service has been to operate against social protest and labour movement activity. Question: You have suggested the NUM controlled a key sector of the economy. This could be interpreted as a special interest promoting its own cause against the national interest and would legitimise secret state operations against it. Hence, when we reject such operations, we also have to put forward other mechanisms to run the economy. Other unions were also targeted by the security services, although not to the same degree. People knew during the miners' strike that the police operation was very large, but I do not believe that there would have been public support for what actually was done to the NUM. In 1992, when the final phase of pit closures was forced through, 90% of the population supported the miners against the government, but their views were ignored. During the miners' strike, even though it was portrayed by the media in the most propagandistic way, at least a third of the whole population supported the strike. The miners' strike was not only about the miners. It was a battle for different social and economic policies and priorities, which would take into account the wider social and economic effects of running industries. Question: Why do you think the so-called social contract of the Wilson government failed? The social contract was an attempt to give a quid pro quo to the labour movement in exchange for wage restraint. All the experience of wage restraint was a very negative one, in a sense that it not only demobilised the trade unions and the working class in the workplace, but it also led to real wage cuts year after year after year. One of the major problems of the social contract was that, with the exception of the first year, which brought a rather egalitarian wage policy by giving a &163;6-a-week increase to everybody, in the subsequent three years there were real wage cuts for the majority. There were two reasons for this: the absolute limit on pay increases and because inflation was running so high, skilled and better-paid workers were pushed into higher tax brackets, which meant that they had a double attack on their living standards. The real reason Thatcher won the 1979 election is not because of some ideological shift among ordinary people, but because the living standards of the skilled workers were dramatically squeezed in the 1976-79 period. They were the ones to shift to Thatcher. As a result of that experience, the policy of wage restraint became really discredited in the British labour movement. People saw that it meant savage cuts in benefits year after year and that the whole labour movement was demobilised by the policy.