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For those of you that are so woefully out of touch and reality, with the real facts about the strike. I am, for the last time going to inform you, of the true facts that led up to the strike.
Not Thatcher's spin, not Scargills spin, not even Kent NUM spin.
My true story.
What I am going to tell you are the true facts, the truth and nothing but the truth.
Planning and preparing for this strike went back as far as 1978 with the introduction of the "single nationally negotiated pay scale and terms and conditions". Overriding "local pay schemes"
Where, the national negotiations of miners interests nationally would supersede those of local bargaining.
To put this in simple terms, if production bonus was set at £1 per ton output, that would apply to all areas.
To anyone outside the industry, that would sound fare but when you take into account that in Nottingham, the average height of a coal seam was 14ft, when here in Kent, it was 3ft.
So for working in much better conditions and far easier targets to reach, the miners in Notts would be earning almost 5 times more than the Kent miner. Given that Notts coal was of very poor quality with 14 time less calorific value than Kent coking coal, you have to question why this scheme was being pushed through, even by Gormley.
Now here is the rub. Of course the Kent and Yorkshire miner was not going to agree to this obvious ploy to split us up in this outrageous way, so we called for a National Ballot and we won that Ballot by 55%.
So you theorists would say "ok that's democracy"
No. Not the case at all, this is where the hypocrisy for the cry's for a National Ballot fall woefully on our deaf ears.
Mr Justice Watkins ruled "The result of a Nationally Ballot conducted is not binding upon the National Executive Committee".
The schemes were then steam rollered through and started about undoing the effects of the NPLA, creating divisions in wages, terms and conditions. Miners in prosperous, moderate areas with harmonious relations with the employers would start to see an easy life and collaboration as an alternative to national demands and actions.
This was just what the plan was intended to create.
They built up stocks of coal with strategic stocks at power stations, to outlast any miners' strike.
They switched coal and fuel transport from unionised rail onto individual companies with non union private lorry drivers.
They ensured capability of joint oil as well as coal burn facilities at power stations.
They built up police powers and equipment, combined with anti- union and anti-picket legislation.
As we now know, these plans were implemented to the full, together with the expansion and retention of the nuclear option, regardless of cost or consequences.
About one year before the strike, it was there for everyone to see, masses of coal were being stockpiled; only one conclusion could be taken for this action.
We, the ordinary Kent miner, knew they were after closing our pits and we could easily have been single out as a lone area to close. What had seemed odd occurrences that had us confused, suddenly became obvious. Our pits were being manipulated by management bad practice.
Snowdown was heading for a new seam, virtually creating a new pit in a very short time. For some totally unknown (at the time) reason, the management decided to run the new road from one seam to the other, straight through a known fault. The union tried to contest this, knowing full well that this would cause massive delays and incur massive costs that would go against Snowdowns production costs. The men were forced to drive a road that they knew was destined to fail.
I worked on development at Betteshanger and we were preparing a new heading (road) for a new face. We were given new rings to support the new road and were told they were the latest technology that would allow us to work at a faster pace. After only a couple of weeks, these new rings were collapsing at an alarming rate, quickly closing our access, our request to drop back and repair the collapse was ignored. It got to a point that we were genuinely concerned that we were going into work at the heading and behind us the roof was collapsing, closing off our only means of egress, trapping us inside at our workplace. All our efforts and complaints to management fell on deaf ears and we were left with only one choice, to refuse to enter the heading and remove our labour.
I later found out, during the strike, that these same rings had been tested in Yorkshire and were condemned as dangerous and were meant to be scrapped, many months, before they were given to us to use.
With the knowledge that we had, every single area, on the same day, an area Ballot was taken and every single area came back with the same result, a unanimous decision to take Industrial Action against any Colliery closure, of any profitable pit, nationally.
Many people were unaware of this decision but Thatcher was well aware of it.
The men at Cortonwood Colliery were told their pit was safe and not under threat, the coal board even agreed to upgrade their washhouse, to the tune of millions of pounds. Then in March, they announced the closure of Cortonwood, citing the cost of the new washhouse had put the colliery into compulsory pit closure category.
This was done, knowing full well that this would invoke our earlier decision to take industrial action against this type of pit closure and at a time that we would never have chosen ourselves to take Industrial Action.
The timing of this closure was crucial to Thatcher's plans, to bring us out on strike at completely the wrong time of year and this, I believe was our downfall.
As far as the Kent Miner was concerned, Scargill was irrelevant, it was our decision to strike in support of Cortonwood and we informed Scargill that we had taken this action.
I do not regard our actions to be wrong. Had we not taken that action, Kent would have shut much earlier. If Kent was to survive, we had to win the strike and contrary to what many people believe, we nearly won on several occasions.
In October 1984 six months into the strike, the future of Thatcher's government hung in the balance with less than six weeks coal stocks left. Frank Ledger of the CEGB, director of operations, revealed that they had only planned for the strike to last six months; power supply by this time was "catastrophic. Former Chairman of the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB) Sir Walter Marshall spelt out what this meant when he said "our predictions showed on paper that Scargill would win certainly by Christmas. He also stated that "Margaret Thatcher got very worried about that and he felt she was wobbly."
Ian MacGregor was summoned to Downing Street and he recalls Thatcher's comments in his memoirs "I'm very worried about it. You have to realise that the fate of this government is in your hands Mr MacGregor. You have got to solve this problem."
The proposed strike by the pit supervisors union NACODS threatened to close down all working pits. NACODS voted in an individual secret nation-wide ballot 82.5% in favour of strike action. Thatcher describes how provocation's on behalf of the NCB against NACODS, almost led to her downfall "We had to make it quite clear that if it was not cured immediately, then the actual management of the Coal Board could indeed have brought down the government."
This demonstrates that Thatcher was well aware how delicately balanced the strike was, an intervention by NACODS as their members had clearly wished and voted for, would have swung the defeat into a massive unparalleled victory.
We do not know and maybe never will know, just what was done to get NACODS leaders to break the movement away from a crushing victory to crushing defeat.
It certainly wasn't a deal to save their jobs, since NACODS were killed off with the pits and the deputies and overmen now sit on the scrap heap along with the miners in the same socially deprived former pit communities.
The rest they say is history. I was never the "enemy within" I did not want to bring the government down, I just wanted to continue working at my pit, a pit that was profitable, breaking production records and should still be open today.
We have now reached full circle and I fear big trouble ahead. Things have moved on since our strike but I know firsthand how things can get out of your control within seconds with dire consequences.
I believe this government is under estimating the people of this country and bad things will follow.