Mar1984-Mar85 MI5 manage UK energy policy Miners' Strike

[TonyGosling]

Oil industry clearly in the driving seat
Adjusting UK energy policy to suit US & EU interests
Tory Marples appointee Beeching smashing railways in the 1960s
Tories smashing coal in 1980s

Newly released cabinet papers from 1984 reveal mineworkers' union leader Arthur Scargill may have been right to claim there was a "secret hit-list" of more than 70 pits marked for closure.
The government and National Coal Board said at the time they wanted to close 20. But the documents reveal a plan to shut 75 mines over three years.
A key adviser to then-PM Margaret Thatcher denies any cover-up claims.
The miners' strike began in March 1984 and did not end until the next year.
Other papers from 1984 reveal warnings of violence outside the Libyan embassy, in which WPC Yvonne Fletcher was killed.
One of the warnings was passed on by the British ambassador in Tripoli, Oliver Miles, who was sceptical about what he was told by Libyan government officials.
And the previously confidential files released on Friday by the National Archives also show the effect of the Brighton bomb on Mrs Thatcher's thinking about Ireland.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-25549596




The year-long miners' strike, which started in March 1984, was characterised by often violent confrontations between police and massed picketing miners.
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Long-shot wait for miners' cash

At one stage during the miners' strike the government hoped it might catch red-handed someone from the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) trying to smuggle a suitcase full of banknotes into Britain.

The union's assets had been seized after the NUM refused to pay fines. But the government thought miners might get financial support from Moscow or eastern Europe, and was trying to prevent the funds getting through.

Cabinet Secretary Sir Robert Armstrong wrote: "If a representative of the NUM could be detected entering this country with a suitcase full of banknotes, it might be possible for him to be stopped and searched at customs."

"Those concerned" (by which he presumably meant Special Branch and MI5) were "exercising vigilance" and on the look-out for anyone from the union going abroad "for the purpose of collecting consignments of notes".

This was, he admitted, something of a long shot, "but is the best we can do".

But one of the documents in the archives suggests that there was an agreement in government to shut 75 pits by the following year, and cut 64,000 jobs - but that no list of which should be closed should be issued.

Nick Jones, who covered the strike for BBC radio as its industrial correspondent and later wrote a book about the dispute, said a document in the files dating from September 1983 was of particular significance.

The document, marked "Not to be photocopied or circulated outside the private office", records a meeting attended by just seven people, including the prime minister, chancellor, energy secretary and employment secretary, at No 10.

The meeting was told the National Coal Board's pit closure programme had "gone better this year than planned: there had been one pit closed every three weeks" and the workforce had shrunk by 10%.

The new chairman of the board, Ian MacGregor, now meant to go further.

"Mr MacGregor had it in mind over the three years 1983-85 that a further 75 pits would be closed... There should be no closure list, but a pit-by-pit procedure.

"The manpower at the end of that time in the industry would be down to 138,000 from its current level of 202,000."




"If this document had ever emerged during the strike it would have been devastating for the credibility of Margaret Thatcher" because Mrs Thatcher and Mr MacGregor always maintained there were plans for the closure of only 20 pits, said Mr Jones.
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Secret files
Cabinet papers used to be published after 30 years
The National Archives is reducing that gap to 20 years
To get to that point, it is currently releasing documents every six months - hence the latest crop, from 1984
Papers for 1985 will be available this coming summer

"It raises in my mind the question of whether there was a cover-up of these figures, and whether when we look back at what actually happened Arthur Scargill was right when he claimed that Ian MacGregor wanted to butcher the industry all along."

But it is a version of events that is pooh-poohed by Lord Armstrong, who as Sir Robert Armstrong was Mrs Thatcher's cabinet secretary at the time.

The National Coal Board was closing something like 20 pits a year anyway, he said - 75 over three years was not such a big increase. The real issue was Mr Scargill's "impossible demand" for a guarantee that uneconomic pits would not be closed.

So why the secrecy? "I think when you're in a negotiation of this kind you want to show as little of your hand as you can to those who are negotiating, particularly if the purposes of those people are, as they were in this case, malign," he told the BBC.

http://www.theparacast.com/darkmatters/LarsHannson.mp3