The following interview with Arthur Scargill. member of the Yurkshire executive of the NUM, leader of the flying squad of Yorkshire pickets, and in charge of the picketing at the Saltley coke depot in Birmingham, was carried out immediately after the miners had succeeded in closing the depot on Thursday. 10th February.
Could you say what you think you have achieved at Saltley?
Well we have achieved a number of things. I think that firstly of course we have achieved the closure of Saltley depot which was the main object of the exercise. But I think we achieved several things more. First of all 1 think we achieved a lesson, a classic lesson in working class history. I believe that the events of today will go down in the history of the British working class movement as a historic day when not just individual unions but British trade unionists decided that they had had enough of police brutality, they had had enough of intimidation by the police in obtaining passage through the picket lines for scab labour, and they decided to do something about it. I firmly believe that on this day it was not individual unions but it was the British working class movement as a whole that demonstrated clearly that they are no longer prepared to put up with Tory Govern.
ment dictation in political matters and they demonstrated to the Government quite clearly that as far as the miners were concerned, and the rest of the British trade union movement, Saltley would be closed. In fact we had a lesson in workers control, for the time in many many years the workers of this land decided that the nation would be defied, that the state system would be defied, and the gates of Saltley depot would be closed and at 10.45 those gates were indeed closed. So l think that was an extremely important lesson for the boys. The third thing, and I think it's extremely important, in the course of this struggle two things have emerged, one from the miners point of view and the other from the rest of the Birmingham trade unionists. Both have become aware of each other's problems and we have made it perfectly clear that we do not accept the Tory Government's proposals or even Vic Feather's suggestions that the miners are a special case. We are not a special case. We are fighting the Tory wages policy. We are in the vanguard of the struggle against that policy. Could you say something about the press coverage of the struggle, particularly the role of the police? 1 think the press coverage of the situation and the television coverage of the situation is exactly what one would expect. The people that take the film on the site, the press reporters press reports back to the newspapers and the television boys send the films back to the studios where the editors and cutters get to work and inevitably try to produce a biased report. But 1 believe in this particular dispute what has happened is that irrespective of the cutting that has been done no one could obliterate the police brutality that took place on the picket lines in the first four days. There was a lot of talk in the press about people using the miners" bitterness for their own ends. They talked about Maoists, students and building worker strikers channeling the miners' militancy for their own needs. Could you say whether this had any effect on the miners?
I believe the only effect it had on the miners was to increase their political awareness that the enemies of the British working class movement will use any tactic possible to try and turn public opinion against the struggle that's taking place at that time. It's ironic but every time a strike takes place the people on strike cease to be members of the general public; we always have a series of infiltrators and if it wasn't for the Maoists, the Trotskyists, the Communists or any other organisation I'm sure the Tories of this nation and the capitalist press of this nation would bloody well invent some.
A lot of rank and file trade unionists both amongst the miners and the power workers thought that the power workers should have taken solidarity industrial action with the miners. Could you say something about the decision of the power workers to accept the 7% to 9 per cent increase?
A bloody sell out, I believe that the power workers should,quite frankly have achieved complete sucess with the miners in a wages struggle that was a wages struggle against the Tory government. The Tory government have clearly laid down their policy towards that end achieve victories in battles that take place on the individual wages question and other questions. What's your attitude towards Chapple's statement, which has been echoed a lot by other trade union leaders, that the trade unions mustn't create serious enough industrial crisis or industrial damage to the nation's economy to cause a crisis which could topple the Heath administration? Chapple's arguments and statements are the classic statements of a collaborator with the Tory Party and capitalist system. It's clear from the past experiences of other people, particularly in the A.E.U, when we had the blokes who lead that who became knights of a certain order, that we'll only have these people trotting out the arguments in support of the capitalist system in order to defend and maintain a. system of society that in many ways retains the kind of bureaucracy they live in and retains the kind of status quo they think is ideal for them but which is indeed against the interests of the working class and the members of their particular trade union. Do you think that the return of another Labour government would be sufficient to solve the problems of the trade union movement?
If 1 believed that, I would be an idealistic dreamer. I think the only thing that can help to bring about a socialist system of society is the working class movement of this nation bringing about a united front of all the political organisations on the left to create the necessary conditions to establish a socialist system of society. All the things we have been talking about previously in this interview obviously play a part and when they can be channelled into one central point of struggle, whether it be one on the wages question or any other, then and then alone will the Tory government be brought down and a socialist system of society established. It will never be established by a Social Democratic Party which believes in collaboration with the system under which we live and only having slight reforms within it.
What we have to do is take down the system as it stands and rebuild a completely new system of society when the workers of this nation will truly take their place in the sun.
The Red Mole has advocated a struggle towards the democratisation of trade unions and a workers government based on those democratic trade unions; what do you think of that?
Well as I've been advocating the same sort of thing for the past 15 years including writing pamphlets on it about five years ago then I'm in complete agreement with it.
Do you think that this can be achieved?
1 think that the previous answers to the questions you've put to me indicate that it can be achieved but it will not be achieved by taking many things out of