I BLAME LEADERS FOR PIT VIOLENCE
MRS. THATCHER yesterday placed blame for violence on the pit picket lines squarely at the door of the leadership of the National Union of Mineworkers.
In an interview at the end of a day in Yorkshire, the Prime Minister said:
“It is no earthly good coming out with ritual condemnations of violence and then trying to say the police are violent.
“People don't believe it. Stop looking at the words. We saw words, words at the TUC.
“We saw the violence stopped there which indicates that the NUM leaders can stop it. Don't look at the words. Look at what has happened on the picket lines since.
“Look at the ball bearings one inch in diameter that have been catapulted at the police.
“I looked this morning at what had been found in fields. They had tried to get under the feet of police horses with upstanding nails, with the sharp end of the nail to get under the horses' feet.
“That is what the NUM leadership is doing. That is what is happening on the picket line.
“I cannot think it happens by accident. I cannot think that all that number of pickets turn up at 4 a.m. or 6 a.m. by accident. But that is what is actually happening.
“The TUC must be very worried. Many people who for years have solidly supported Labour must be worried about it. It is not what they regard as the Labour party. But it is what is happening.
“And it is the trade unions who support the Labour party, because the Labour party is the political wing of the trade union movement; that is how historically it was born in this country.
“And that is why it is difficult for Labour. They are the political wing of the trade union movement.
“At the moment the main striking union is causing violence against its own members, against the police, against people whose only crime is they want to work to keep their wives and children.
“The mob violence we are seeing is a blot on Britain's reputation. It is doing immense harm. You think that what we see on television shocks us, but they are seeing it the world over. The fantastic reputation of Britain which has been built up over the years as fair, honourable and law-abiding, is suffering badly.
“The Nicholas EdwardsSecretary for Wales now is going to Japan to try to get investment. They are seeing these things on the television screen and it is not going to help either investment in Britain or orders for Britain.
“It is doing immense harm to jobs, and the idea of mob violence and the bullyboy strong arm tactics in Britain is not what one expects of Britain. It is horrifying us.
“But I think, I must say, that the police are handling it superbly. They are doing their job and seeing that anyone who wanted to go to work shall be got to work.”
With an apparently closer liaison between Mr. Scargill 's miners and the TUC, and a power industry engineering leader predicting power cuts within eight weeks, what sort of winter did she see in store?
“I wonder how many times I have heard the same thing during the last six months—that in eight weeks, or however many weeks, there will be power cuts.
“If I had been talking to you a year ago and said to you that within a year there would be a coal strike and after six months there will be no power cuts, would you have believed me?”
If some trade unionists—a small number of trade unionists—were trying to stop coal reaching the power stations, then they were attempting to destroy the jobs of their own members.
“Trade unionists who do this are saying three things:
ONE—We support mob violence even against trade unionists. We do not believe in the rule of law—we believe in mob violence.
TWO—We don't believe that ordinary trade unionists should have a say in the decision to strike.
THREE—We don't care about the consequences of what we are about to do to our own members. We don't care if they lose their own jobs.
“I can't believe that trade unions want to do that, but if they do I cannot see why people want to belong to a trade union.”
Also at stake was the good name of trade unionism.
“There must be enough trade union members who care about that.
“It's not for them to turn round to me and say you do something about unemployment. What they are doing is destroying jobs faster than anything else.
“The railwaymen normally move most of the coal. They are only moving a small part of the coal at the moment, so those railwaymen whose jobs is to move coal, and who have been asked by their trade unions not to do it, are being made, by their trade union leaders, to suffer to the extent of £20 or £30 a week. They have geared their standard of living to that sort of wage. Is that the function of a trade union—to lower the standard of living of its members.
“They attempted to close down steelworks. Is it the function of a trade union to say: ‘All right, we are going to support mob violence, close down the steelworks and lose all our jobs in steel’?”
The Nigel LawsonChancellor had told the International Monetary Fund that Britain's growth rate had slowed down. What did the Prime Minister think:
“We expected three per cent. growth. The forecast is now down to two per cent. But we are getting two per cent. growth even with a miners' strike. Just think of the growth we should have had if the miners had not gone on strike.
“It is not only the miners; it is the industries that supply the miners who are affected. It is not only the direct effects of the strike; it is the orders that would have come to Britain from people who thought that at last Britain was pulling out of bad industrial relations.
“If there is a feeling that people wish to kill their own livelihoods I am doing everything I can to stop them.
“Who is, in fact, responsible for cutting down growth and cutting down jobs and cutting down prospects and cutting down orders and cutting down investment in this country?
“Those who are prepared to sacrifice everyone else's job and who know full [end p1] well they will be actively sacrificing far more of their own as well.
“Our unit labour costs have gone up by more than anyone elses. That is bad. The United States were down, the Japanese were stable, Germany was up about two per cent. and we are up about four per cent. That is bad.
“I think prices and incomes policies did immense harm to this country. They got people thinking in terms of wages and salaries only—I am entitled to a certain income regardless. Now, no-one is entitled to a certain income regardless.
“We have to earn it and if we don't, we can't have it.
“If we were half as obsessed with getting maximum output as we have been with getting maximum income, we would have better output and better income.
“Throughout the last five years, average earnings in this country have gone ahead faster than prices. In other words we have had an increase in real terms. But we have had very little growth, so the extra growth that we have had has gone into an increasing standard of living for those in work at the expense of the unemployed.
“I am constantly saying that and no one takes any notice because it does not come home to them.”
Mrs. Thatcher was not in favour of action to protect the pound against the dollar.
“You cannot intervene for long against the market,” she said. “You might just intervene for a day. That is to say if everyone is selling Deutchmarks, and a lot of people who hold Deutchmarks are selling Deutchmarks, and not enough people are selling dollars, the Deutchmark goes down and the dollar goes up.
“Then the bank comes in and says: ‘We are going to buy Deutchmarks’. But they have got to buy them with dollars.
“The point is you can intervene for a day, a day and a half, or two days. And then what happens? Things go back to what they were before because the speculators are using the intervention.”
Mrs. Thatcher was not “fussed” about turbulent priests. Of the David JenkinsBishop of Durham's comments on the strike, she said:
“I really don't get so fussed about what people say. I turn round and look at the facts and then try to make the facts tell the story, as Peter Walker indicated in his letter to the Bishop of Durham.
“For every day we have been in government, £2m. has been invested in new coal mines.
“Because the miners quite rightly regard themselves as among the top paid of people working in industry, they get about 25 per cent. above the average industrial wage which is a higher differential than under any previous government.
“You have to change—otherwise we would all be in a museum society and we could not simply have said you must go and make those steam locomotives forever that I saw this morning. So it is in coal. You have to change from old pits to new ones.
“Some people would otherwise be hurt or have to lose their jobs. So how do you deal with it? With the most generous redundancy scheme ever offered.
“A miner of 49 who has spent his life in the industry gets £33,000; at age 50 we felt we needed to change it because people want a combination of capital and income—so he gets £20,000, plus £78 every week; £20,000 invested at ten per cent. gives a return of £2,000 a year, which is nearly £40 a week added to £78.
“He has got his capital intact and got a reasonable income.
“These are the facts. The fact is that these redundancy terms are so good that people queue up to take them. There has not been a single, compulsory redundancy.
“These are the facts and I think that from the feeling that comes to us—we are constantly in touch—a lot of people after this will apply for redundancy because they want out.
“What some of them have gone through, wholly against their wishes, wholly against everything within them, means that a lot will apply for redundancy. They want out.
“The working miners have been magnificent. There are many many miners on strike who would like to go back to work. There are others who don't want to go on the picket lines but are intimidated to do so and there is a small group of bullyboys who do the stone throwing, the catapulting, the dropping of stones from bridges.
“There will be quite a lot of people who want to get out who will want to take that redundancy even if a pit is not closing.”
After her day in Yorkshire, the Prime Minister summed up the situation in the coalfield like this:
“What we have seen in Yorkshire is not Yorkshire at all. The sooner it gets rid of that blot on its reputation the better. It is not Yorkshire at all.”
The Prime Minister hinted that there could be more aid for the North East.
“I am constantly thinking about how to get more to the North East,” she said.
“So many people talk about Wales, Scotland and Merseyside. But there are people saying constantly—‘Look, you have got the North East’.
“Shipbuilding is going down because we are not able to compete with Japan and South Korea.
“So we have to watch that very carefully, because you have your traditional shipbuilding, heavy engineering, coal and steel in the North East.
“I can only tell you we took out some figures of how all the grants that we offer nationwide—the ones for starting up small businesses, the ones for innovation, the enterprise alliance scheme for people who are self-starters—and you will find that the take-up of available grants in the North East is not good.
“I was enormously pleased that Nissan decided to go there because I knew it would raise the morale of the area.
“But one of the things Japan hesitated about was the history of this country's industrial relations.”
Before the serious business of the day, Mrs. Thatcher enjoyed herself playing trains at the National Railway Museum.
She waved a green flag to signal a full scale replica of Rocket to come steaming into the museum, and them climbed onto the footplate.
Her first reference to the strike came when she glanced into the locomotive's tender, and said to the driver, Mr. John Bellwood: “I see you have got some.”
She looked over a huge locomotive which Britain had sold to the Chinese before the last war, and who had returned it as a gift for the museum. “It cost them £25,000 to buy, and us £26,000 in freight charges to bring it back,” she said.
While at the museum, the Prime Minister met the chairman of British Rail, Mr. Bob Reid, who gave her a private briefing on the £306m. electrification of the East Coast main line.
After lunch, the Prime Minister went to York Minster to see the repair work on the fire damaged south transept. She was clearly impressed. “The great thing about this country is that when we have a disaster everyone forgets everything else and gets on with it. [end p2]
Mrs. Thatcher climbed more than 100 stone steps and arrived slightly breathless at the top of the 70ft. high scaffolding to see the fire damaged stonework for herself. She firmly discounted suggestions that the fire had been an Act of God.
“The laws of physics were fixed at the beginning of time,” she said. “It is up to us to try and rebuild, and the way the work is bringing people together is pulling something positive out of the tragedy.”