One hour in Brighton nearly changed 25 years in Wales

The Grand Hotel, Brighton shortly after the 1984 IRA attack

TOMORROW’S 25th anniversary of the Brighton bomb brings back into focus one of the more intriguing counterfactuals of recent times, and one with huge significance for Wales.

In Marching to the Fault Line: the 1984 Miners’ Strike and the Death of Industrial Britain Francis Beckett and David Hencke describe the negotiations between the NCB/government and NACODS in the early part of October 1984. Although the smaller pit overseers’ union had already voted by a huge margin to join the NUM on the picket lines, a series of high level moves averted their strike. This was crucial, because had NACODS come out, it would have been illegal for the NCB to operate any pits at all, including those still at work in Nottinghamshire. The tactic of splitting the miners would have been much harder, the drift back to work on which the the government strategy was based would have failed and, with it, Margaret Thatcher’s entire policy of facing down the “enemy within”.

Yet in the early hours of the 12th October the NACODS strike was within hours of going ahead. NUM boss Ian MacGregor had bungled – perhaps deliberately – one set of negotiations with the NACODS leadership, and was preparing an almost certainly ill-fated plan to jettison further talks, and rely on private safety contractors to do the job of the striking overseers.

At around 2am on the morning of the 12th, having been alerted to MacGregor’s plan, Thatcher phoned the NCB boss and instructed him to do all he could to keep the NACODS members in work. The plan to hire private staff was dropped. Less than an hour later, the Brighton bomb detonated.

Had the IRA operative Patrick Magee set the timer for the bomb a little earlier, or had Margaret Thatcher left her call to Ian MacGregor until later, the course of the Miners’ Strike would almost certainly altered dramatically. MacGregor, who thought he could drive NACODS out of business altogether later admitted that a overseers’ strike would have occasioned a negotiated settlement with the miners. The then-Energy Secretary Peter Walker was in no doubt even at the time of the strategic importance of this union’s 16,000 members to the course of the whole strike.

How different would things have looked from the perspective of a comprise agreement between the Conservative government and the NUM? A central plank of Margaret Thatcher’s political strategy, that of rolling back trade union power, would have been destroyed. Strikes in other sectors, particularly in declining heavy industries may have followed. The privatisation programme would have been scaled back, and perhaps even averted for some organisations.

For Labour, such an outcome would scarcely have been any better. The party’s leader, Neil Kinnock would have been obliged to fete Arthur Scargill and his tactics, and Labour itself may well have given greater emphasis to industrial unrest as a means of contesting Thatcherism. The SDP, who urged a far more consensual approach to industrial policy could have gained ground at Labour’s expense, and perhaps even supplanted it. In almost any of these scenarios, Wales’s route to devolution would have looked very different. A less confrontational Conservative government would not have catalyzed the devolution movement within Labour or elsewhere. Moreover, had the miners come out of the strike with a settlement, the need to keep together to coalition that formed in favour of their plight in 1984 would not, ironically, have been so pressing. Had the Tories been defeated at the next General Election, a more left-leaning Labour government would likely have eschewed devolution in favour of a pan-British class-based political strategy. A Liberal-SDP ascendancy, on the other hand, might have brought devolution to Wales sooner.

But more important than these machinations is what a negotiated settlement would have done to the lives of those in the south Wales coalfield. A number of the mines would have stayed in operation for many more years than they did, and with them the jobs, relative prosperity and proud, cohesive culture of mining communities. It is unlikely that there would be much of a coal mining industry in Wales today even under this scenario, and the legacy of this dangerous, dirty, extractive enterprise should never be romanticised. But the passage from the (already much reduced) industrialised Wales of the early 1980s to today would surely have been a more humane, less jarring one.