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Authors: Claire Berlinski

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Walker was one of the leading wets in Thatcher's cabinet. “From the point of view of the right wing of my party, I was a terrible neocommunist myself, you know,” he says ruefully. Thus did it come as a surprise to him when Thatcher asked him, in 1983, to take the energy portfolio. Of course, from a public relations standpoint it made perfect sense to assign that responsibility to a
man known for his lack of radicalism.
We are not the ones causing the problems here. The miners can't even get along with a wet like Walker . . .
The Wet Lord sinks into the comfortable sofa of the morning room and orders an aperitif. He spots Bernard Ingham across the room; the men bob their heads at each other courteously. The waiter arrives with the Chablis. Walker clears his throat. Thatcher had called him, he tells me, the morning after the 1983 election. She feared a conflict with Scargill. She thought Walker was the man to handle it. She flattered him lavishly, telling him that everywhere she had gone on the campaign trail, the voters had declared him their hero. Walker's feathers ruffle proudly as he recalls this conversation. He accepted the job. “The first thing I did was do an enormous personal study of Scargill,” he says. He read everything Scargill had ever written, every word about him that had ever been reported. “I had this enormous volume of papers. And what you discovered was that above all he was a totally committed Marxist.”
Walker is not exaggerating. Scargill
was
a totally committed Marxist. This is the first point everyone close to Thatcher stresses when his name comes up, and they are right to stress it. The brutality of Thatcher's response to Scargill can be put in proper perspective only if we appreciate that Scargill was, in fact, committed to bringing about a communist revolution in Britain. Moreover, it was not at all clear at the time that he would fail. A revolution along Bolshevik lines was never likely, but it was entirely realistic to fear that he would permanently establish the unions as the nation's preeminent political power, reverse the outcome of a democratic election by force, and irreversibly cripple the British economy.
“He was, you know, an absolute, outright, complete Marxist,” John Hoskyns had said to me several days prior. “I remember a senior union man saying to me, once, ‘I'll tell you about Arthur.' I said, ‘Tell me about Arthur.' And he said, ‘Well, I think you can say that when he's shaving and he's looking in the mirror every morning,
he says to his reflection, “One day, you will be the President of the Socialist Republic of Britain.”'”
No one who knows anything about Scargill disagrees with this assessment, no matter what their political orientation. They disagree only about whether Scargill's ambition was a laudable one.
Arthur Scargill—King Coal—was born in 1938, just south of Barnsley, in Yorkshire. Scargill is not a
nom de guerre,
much though it sounds like one; it is just one of those oddball literary coincidences that his first name evokes mythical heroism even as his last name metonymically hints of thuggishness and slime. His father was a coal miner and a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Scargill too became a miner after leaving school at the age of sixteen; he joined the Young Communist League in 1955. He became leader of the Yorkshire division of the National Union of Mineworkers in 1973. Two years after Thatcher came to power, he was elected president of the national union.
I wanted very much to meet him. I wrote to him to ask whether he might permit me to get his side of the story. I received a reply from a woman by the name of Linda Sheridan. Scargill was, she wrote, “quite adamant that he does not wish to discuss Thatcher or the miners' strike with you, or any other journalist for that matter.”
141
When I entered Sheridan's name in Google, I discovered that she represents the Socialist Labour Party in central Scotland. The party, which Scargill now heads, aims “to abolish capitalism and replace it with a socialist system.”
142
Those nostalgic for the Labour Party's Clause 4 will be pleased to know that it is not dead. It is merely pining for the fjords in the Socialist Labour Party's manifesto.
I wasn't deterred. I wrote back, saying that I understood that Mr. Scargill's relationship with the Fourth Estate was not a particularly
happy one. But I thought it important to represent his point of view accurately, and I couldn't do that unless he spoke to me directly. Would she please ask him to reconsider?
It was out of the question, she replied. I imagine she had looked me up on Google as well; perhaps she discovered that I am no great fan of revolutionary socialism.
Dear Claire,
 
. . . Please understand that Margaret Thatcher is hated by many of us here. For every dozen people you speak to who will say she was a wonderful strong Prime Minister who licked the unions into shape and privatized (and ruined) our national industries, you will find hundreds of others, living in communities which were destroyed by her policies, who feel nothing but a passionate hatred for her. The saying is that when Thatcher goes, she is going to a place where there is a lot of coal, hot coal, and when she does go, we'll all be down at the pub raising our glasses, and putting two fingers up to her. I'm sorry but that's how it is.
 
Best regards
Linda
143
I liked her spirit, if not her politics. I searched for more information about her and found her photograph online. She looks to be in her early forties. She has skin so pale it is almost translucent and a beautiful mane of wild auburn hair. I wrote again. Was she
quite
certain Mr. Scargill didn't fancy meeting me?
144
Dear Claire
 
You owe it to yourself to try. As a writer myself I appreciate that only too well.
 
Sometimes, if the gatekeeper is lazy, going to lunch and leaving the key in the lock, you can creep on tiptoe and softly turn it, pushing the door wide, inch by inch, until you can slip through into the hallowed hall and surprise the dragon sleeping in his lair, or working hard at his desk, as the case may be. This time it didn't work. No hard feelings.
 
The unvarnished truth about Thatcher is that generally Thatcher has had a free hand as far as the US media and therefore the American audience is concerned. She is held to be the best prime minister since Churchill and because of strong publicity from, for example, Murdoch,
145
this has never been challenged. She is far from well now which is not surprising. When one lives one's life on a narrow path, without compassion and understanding for the deeper issues in life, when temporal power is taken away, one invariably falls into a spiritual abyss of self-doubt and loneliness. Some people call it karma. As you give so you receive.
 
It has been nice to talk with you Claire.
 
Good luck.
 
Best wishes
Linda
Right, then. From now on, Scargill will communicate with us through Linda, his spirit medium.
If Peter Walker concluded that Scargill was a committed Marxist, this is because no other conclusion is possible. “Capitalism is an obscene system which deserves to be overthrown,” Scargill declared forthrightly.
146
Scargill left the Communist Party in 1961 not because he objected in any way to Stalin's excesses—in fact, he approved of the Soviet Union's invasion of Hungary and mourned the removal of Stalin's body from the Red Square mausoleum
147
—but because he had decided that the British Communist Party wasn't powerful enough. “I gradually began to be interested in the unions themselves,” he told the
New Left Review
in 1975,
because it appeared to me that, irrespective of what I did in . . . the Labour or Communist Party or any other political organization, the real power—and I say that in the best possible sense—the real power lay either with the working classes or with the ruling classes.
148
In the same interview, he proposed as soon as possible to “take into common ownership everything in Britain.” The first measure would be “the immediate nationalization of the means of production, distribution and exchange. I can't compromise on this.” There could be no middle way: “I do not believe compromise with the capitalist system of society will achieve anything.” Immediately upon taking power, he stressed, he would bring all organs of the press under state control.
Not only was Scargill a Marxist, there is much evidence for the case that he was a Stalinist, in particular. Stalin briskly dismissed the notion that workers in advanced capitalist nations, whom he denounced as a labor aristocracy, would spontaneously bring about the Revolution; they had drunk too deeply of the wine of bourgeois ideology; they swam in a soporific miasma of false consciousness.
149
Scargill shared this sentiment. “I disagree totally with the concept of workers' control,” Scargill told
Marxism Today
:
It is only by politicizing our membership that we will ever bring about the irreversible shift towards a socialist system in society. Therefore I don't agree that we ought to be putting workers on the boards . . . I am against the whole concept of participation which only serves to perpetuate the capitalist system.
150
On the radical Left, the word “irreversible” is a common euphemism. It means
no more elections
.
Like Stalin, Scargill sought to foster a personality cult; activists were encouraged to chant his name and pledge their loyalty to him, rather than to the union or a political party. “Arthur Scargill Walks on Water,” sung to the tune of “Deck the Halls,” and “There's only one Arthur Scargill,” sung to the tune of “Guantanamera,” were classics of the genre.
In 2000, Scargill just came out with it. At a meeting of the British Stalin Society in London (yes, there is such a thing), Scargill declared himself “sick and tired of listening to the so-called ‘experts' today who still criticize the Soviet Union and, in
particular, Stalin.” The meeting was organized by the Committee to Celebrate the October Revolution. The remarks of Comrade Scargill—as he is termed in the minutes—warrant quotation at length, for there are still many who see Thatcher, not Scargill, as the dangerous provocateur in this conflict. “Tonight's event,” Scargill declared,
must be a celebration and not merely a commemoration of that earth-shattering event, and it should be an evening when we pay tribute to those who created the Soviet Union—a Socialist society which not only defeated poverty, ignorance, injustice and inequality but also defeated the mightiest fascist war machine ever seen on the face of the earth . . . it was the Soviets who first put a man into space. They did so without the obscenities of the market economy, including Coca Cola plants and McDonald's fast-food chains, or what some misguided souls believe is ‘freedom and democracy.' Following the death of Stalin in 1953, new forces seized control in the Soviet Union, and a so-called ‘new realism' began to take the place of Socialist planning. Khruschev, Brezhnev, later Andropov, Chernenko, but, above all, Gorbachev did what the might of the Nazi army had failed to do—they ripped the heart out of the Soviet Union and destroyed its Socialist system.
151
Despite the Great Betrayal, Scargill remained throughout his union career on exceedingly cozy terms with the Kremlin, making numerous trips to Moscow and Cuba on the Red dime as he worked his way up the union ranks. He airmailed copies of the
Yorkshire Miner
to Castro every month. He denounced the counter-revolutionary Solidarity movement in Poland and refused
to condemn the Soviet Union when in 1983 it downed a South Korean passenger plane.

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