19 April 1984
The reasons politicians lie is because the public doesn’t want to hear the truth. People want to hear what they want to hear.
http://www.perkel.com/politics/lies.htm
It is perhaps more accurate to say that many people believe they are being told the truth if it carries the weight of an authority figure or governing body. Such as The Government of the day, or The Media.
History is littered, of course, with evidence that the politicians who tend to lie the most are those who govern, those who have a vested interest to protect. And those governing politicians are in turn supported, or protected, by that section of the media which the governing class represents.
Back on Thursday April 19 1984 the national Miners’ Strike was six weeks old (the overtime ban, six months old). On that day, the print media focussed on two particular aspects of the strike:-
- The damage the striking National Union of Mineworkers was inflicting on the mining equipment supply industry;
- The first concession made by MacGregor, NCB Chairman, offering to revise the timing of the pit closure and redundancy programme, and the subsequent dismissal of that “concession” by Scargill (Scargill, of course. Never the miners or the NUM)
In Scotland, the Tory Government line was loyally served by the Tory supporting Glasgow Herald. Ian Imrie and Roy Rogers reported under the headline ‘Pit strike forces Scots firm to put 1500 on short time’ –
“The miners’ strike will almost certainly mean more than 1500 Anderson Strathclyde workers being put on short time next week while in Edinburgh a workshop for the blind is being badly affected financially by the dispute.”
The Managing Director of Anderson Strathclyde, a Scottish company manufacturing mining machinery, and at that time employing 1900 workers at Motherwell, 600 at Bridgeton, and 250 at Glenrothes, was quoted as saying:
“We are making no bones about the fact that we are directly affected by the action the National Union of Mineworkers is taking. It is inevitable that our workforce will feel some consequence of the action in the pits.”
The general manager of The Blind Sheltered Workshops at Craigmillar in Edinburgh, which at the time had a £500,000 annual contract with the NCB to supply wire mesh for underground roof supports, was reported to be suffering as a result of the miners’ dispute. The strike had come as a severe blow to the organisation, but there was no question of putting blind people on short time.
The Guardian, Financial Times and Scotsman led with reports on the NCB ‘Concession’, or even “peace move”, namely a supposed offer on the part of the NCB to “phase-in” the programme of 20,000 redundancies and loss of 4 million tonnes of coal production capacity.
The Scotsman rushed to report under the headline ‘Scargill rejects NCB offer of talks’
John Lloyd at the Financial Times, however, in his report under the headline ‘Concession from MacGregor on pit closure timing’ that the NCB “had not yet informed the NUM of this potentially significant concession”. He did, however, go on to pass comment on “the National Coal Board’s softer position” on redundancies and pit closures.
Keith Harper at the Guardian reported under the headline ‘Offer to alter closures timetable: First pit strike concession dismissed by Scargill’
At the same time, and reporting from a different angle, Ian Bruce of the Tory Unionist Glasgow Herald warned that the future of the Ravenscraig steel complex was threatened by the actions of the miners’ strike (‘steel men set to defy dock union on coal’).
Throughout all this time the NUM had claimed the NCB had a secret hit list of pit closures. It was vociferously denied, but little journalistic investigation went into revealing the truth of the miners’ claim.
Of course all of the NCB posturing, the Tory Government pretence of non-interference, and the indignant outrage of the right wing tory supporting media all belied the truth asserted from the outset – that the Tories were hell bent on culling the mining industry, destroying the National Union of Mineworkers, and thereby clearing the road to finishing off the remaining public sector unions.
Click to access 830915%20Minl%20Mtg%20MINERS%20PAY%20PREM19-1329%20f243.pdf
The above link will take you to what was once a Top Secret record of a meeting held of the highest offices of State at No 10 Downing Street on 15 September 1983, a whole six months before the ‘national’ miners’ strike kicked off in March 1984.
The top secret record is no longer top secret but its content, and the deception it reveals at the highest office of the UK state, is still not widely known or understood.
The NUM may have been wrong at the time that there was a ‘closure list’ of specific pits. What they were right about, however, was the extent of the planned butchering of the UK mining industry.
MacGregor’s April 1984 ‘concession’ or ‘peace plan’ to phase redundancies over a longer period than twelve months was a simple lie, supported by Tory Government.
The Coal Board’s plan was not to get rid of 20,000 jobs and 20 pits. The Tory government had been told that the mining workforce was planned to be slashed by one-third.
From a workforce of 202,000 miners in 1983 to 138,000 miners by the end of 1985. And undoubtedly with further savage and continuing cuts to come thereafter.
Peter Walker, Tory Secretary of State for Energy, understood well what the consequences were for mining communities. The minute records him observing that –
- Two-thirds of Welsh miners would be redundant;
- 35 per cent of all Scottish miners would be out of work;
- 48% of miners in the North East would lose their jobs;
- Half of South Yorkshire miners would cease to be;
- The South Midlands would be culled by 46 per cent;
- The Kent coalfield was finished.
And while the Directors of Anderson Strathclyde and the management of the Blind Workshops in Craigmillar were bemoaning the difficulties the striking miners were causing their businesses, what they perhaps did not know, or would not want to believe, was that the most senior UK Government Secretaries of State – and the Prime Minister – had already decided upon and sealed their fate. In September 1983 the Tory hierarchy with no mandate in Scotland was minuting that their planned butchery of the nation’s coal industry would have
“unfortunate effects on the mining equipment supply industry”.
Such is the short term thinking of much of UK industry. The UK Coal industry, Anderson Strathclyde, the Blind Workshops at Craigmillar, Ravenscraig steelworks and Thatcher are all dead and gone now. So “unfortunate”.
But we still live with the consequences of Thatcherism, and a Thatcherite Tory Government imposed on Scotland despite them having no mandate in Scotland.
And it is the same old Tory Westminster Government, with its privileged conservative establishment, and its right wing media, which continues to peddle the lies, distortion and deceit for the sole purpose of serving their own self-interests rather than the interests of the Scottish people, sucking us dry for their short term aims but leaving nothing in their wake for the longer term prosperity of our nation.
OrneryJocko 