Still The Enemy Within

Owen Dowling writes:

Seumas Milne’s The Enemy Within: The Secret War Against the Miners, first published by Verso in 1994, remains an elementary text for socialists navigating the question of where established power truly resides in modern Britain. Reviewing the book at the time in the pages of Tribune, Tony Benn concluded: ‘Seumas Milne has written a major work … He has told us how Britain is really governed.’

A long-time Guardian comment editor, and from 2015 to 2020 Jeremy Corbyn’s executive director of strategy and communications, Milne won his spurs as a radical journalist with his meticulous 1994 exposé of the byzantine machinations against the National Union of Mineworkers and its president, Arthur Scargill, during and after the 1984–5 miners’ strike.

To mark the thirtieth anniversary of The Enemy Within’s release, Tribune’s Owen Dowling spoke to Seumas Milne about the book and its inception, the British media’s relationship with state and class power, and how British socialists today should look back on the miners’ strike and the elements — open and clandestine — that were mobilised against it.

OD What was the ‘Scargill affair’?

SM What was called the Scargill affair was an explosive set of false media allegations, made five years after the end of the 1984–5 miners’ strike, of scandal and corruption at the heart of the strike and in the handling of money by the miners’ leadership. The two main leaders of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), Arthur Scargill and Peter Heathfield, were accused in Robert Maxwell’s Daily Mirror and The Cook Report — a TV programme then getting audiences of 15 million people a night — of embezzlement and corruption. Specifically, of stealing money donated from Colonel Gaddafi’s Libya to pay off their personal mortgages at the height of the strike.

The two main witnesses behind the allegations were Roger Windsor, chief executive of the NUM during and after the strike, and Jim Parker, Arthur Scargill’s driver and bodyguard. The stories were launched with huge media fanfare. It may have been 1990, and the strike may not have succeeded in stopping pit closures, but the NUM’s members still produced 80 percent of coal stocks, which in turn generated 80 percent of the country’s power supply — so the union still possessed huge economic, and so political, leverage.

Not only were the union’s leaders accused of secretly using Libyan money to pay off their personal mortgages, Scargill and Heathfield were also accused of diverting £1 million (or maybe £10 million, depending on the version of the story) sent from the Soviet Union to support the strike, which had then supposedly disappeared.

Those were the two main initial accusations, but there were a string of other lurid tales. On the face of it, given who the witnesses were, it looked like a pretty devastating set of allegations. The one thing that people had never accused Arthur Scargill of was being personally corrupt, which is what these stories claimed. He’d been accused of being dangerous, extremist, and authoritarian, but he’d never been accused of corruption. That was now the core of the Scargill affair.

As it turned out, the reason why the main allegation was completely false was that neither Scargill nor Heathfield had a mortgage to pay off with Libyan or any other money. In fact, every single allegation that was made as part of this campaign was in due course proven to be false — and in many cases the opposite of what was alleged.

In the process of uncovering and exposing what had actually gone on, the way these kinds of attacks on progressive organisations and political leaders can be played out was exposed, but so too was the way the various branches of the state and media can operate when power and vital class interests are at stake. It took quite a time, but once the stories were proven to be untrue and clearly couldn’t be stood up at all, most of the media lost interest in the whole thing — as is the normal way with such press attacks. If they don’t really do the business, then the caravan moves on.

OD For yourself as a Guardian journalist, when did you start actively following the story at the time? Can you recall, beyond a general feeling, how your suspicions were aroused?

SM It so happened that I joined The Guardian during the miners’ strike. The first stories I wrote for the paper were about the strike and early attempts to seize the assets of the union in South Wales. But in 1990, when the Scargill affair broke, I was working as a general reporter. I remember seeing the story on the front page of The Mirror and I wasn’t sure what to think. It seemed, on the face of it, very hard from my experience of journalism to imagine that with these two witnesses — people who were close to the NUM leadership, and one of them having been chief executive of the union — this could all be made up.

I didn’t properly understand at that time how the normal rules of journalism and libel don’t always apply, depending on who the target is. But I was unsure about it, and as the story started to unravel, I was appointed labour correspondent at The Guardian. The first job I was given was to report on this scandal, and my heart sank. I felt I was being asked to do it because they knew I wouldn’t like the story and what looked like the humiliation of the NUM leadership.

One of the things about these kinds of allegations and attacks is that they’re often very complicated. In the case of the miners’ union and the way it had operated during and after the strike under sequestration and receivership, it was extremely complex legally, financially, and organisationally. It required a lot of work to understand what had actually happened. But by getting into the guts of it and talking to people most journalists weren’t bothered to talk to, I quickly started to realise that the whole thing was a scam; and it also became clear early on that the fingerprints of intelligence-related organisations and agencies from more than one country were all over it.

The Scargill affair — which was in fact a classic smear campaign against the miners’ leadership — started on 5 March 1990, but it had different phases in which it kept reviving with different allegations, new investigations, different crises. Through reporting on it, getting into the detail, and gradually getting the confidence of the miners’ leaders to get access to the records held by them and used in their defence, I was able to unpick the story and follow up stories; and then [I] started to uncover the evidence of intelligence involvement, which became clearer and more extensive as time went on.

OD Can you describe the journalistic work of critically investigating these allegations? Where did you have to travel; who did you have to speak to?

SM Initially it was a basic reporting job: speaking to everyone involved, reading documents, interviewing NUM officials and lawyers, reporting the court cases, immersi[ng myself] in the complexities of the transactions, and so on. As time went on, and the case grew and became internationalised, it involved travelling to France, Moscow, and eventually to Tunisia to meet the Libyans who had actually been involved in transferring money and attempting to support the strike in 1984 — money which in fact never reached the union or its leaders, but was used instead as part of a sting operation designed to discredit them during and after the strike.

One of the first things that gave us real access to the scale of the intelligence involvement in the Scargill affair was a tip-off that came from someone who worked for the US National Security Agency (NSA) at Bude in Cornwall, which is a big GCHQ [the UK’s Government Communications Head- quarters]–NSA electronic-eavesdropping base — it was then, and obviously it’s on a vastly bigger scale now. He didn’t like what had taken place and what he’d learned; he knew that GCHQ had been heavily involved in tracking the NUM’s operations during the strike, its attempts to protect its assets from seizure; and [he] had also been informed that there was an operation to smear Scargill and the NUM leadership, including to set them up with phoney cash deposits.

The second big breakthrough on the intelligence role in the smear campaign and the scandal around it — and actually about the wider role of MI5 and Special Branch in the strike itself — came when the Major government in 1991 publicly announced, for the first time, who was going to be the new head of MI5. That was Stella Rimington. As it turned out, one of the so-called ‘maverick’ Labour MPs of the time, Tam Dalyell, who had his own very good contacts in the state machine, was contacted by a chief constable in Scotland who had been in charge of policing in his constituency during the miners’ strike and told him that Rimington had been running MI5 operations against the strike in 1984–5. He also revealed that Rimington had been cooperating with a man called David Hart who was very close to Thatcher. Hart was a right-wing property developer who got huge corporate donations during the strike to fund strikebreakers across the Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire coalfields in particular, and was also instrumental in bringing the legal actions that led to the NUM being put into sequestration and receivership — which in turn led the miners’ leaders to have to operate through independent accounts and in cash to keep the union going, laying the basis for the smear campaign five years later.

Dalyell stated in Parliament that Hart had been working with Rimington and asked the government to comment on it; of course, the government didn’t. Then a month later, he came back to Parliament and named Roger Windsor — the NUM chief executive during and after the strike, who had himself been filmed embracing the Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi in 1984, and who then became the main witness claiming Scargill had used Libyan funds to pay off his non-existent mortgage — as having also been involved with Stella Rimington. This was the first time that Windsor, who had accused Scargill and Heathfield of corruption and so instigated the whole scandal, had been named as having worked with MI5 during and after the strike. It was that that made me decide to write The Enemy Within.

People were well aware in 1984–5 that Special Branch [was] recruiting agents in the pit villages; they were even aware how much [it was] paying, and that [it was] heavily involved in anti-picketing operations. Of course, the absolutely enormous militarised police operation on the ground in the mining areas was the main battering ram used by the Thatcher government against the strike. And, naturally, people suspected that MI5 was involved, but didn’t know how. Piece by piece, and through a lot of work to get corroborating evidence from other former intelligence officers or sources within the government machine, we were able to build up a more solid picture of what had taken place. It became clear that the role of the security services in the strike and its aftermath was far greater than [had been] understood … [or] could have [been] known at the time. That was at the core of what I was trying to expose in the book.

Of course, the security services were only one part of the way the entire state was mobilised against the strike and against the union and its leadership, but it was a crucial part, which hadn’t been known or properly understood, and which the government was very anxious to keep under wraps.

OD With all that in mind, what can we now say in sum about the extent and main dynamics of intelligence service operations against the NUM during the miners’ strike, including within the NUM itself?

SM The security service and wider state operations against the miners’ strike were by far the biggest so-called ‘counter-subversion’ operations against anybody in Britain (as opposed to Northern Ireland) since the Second World War; there’s no doubt about that. The scale of mass surveillance and bug- ging through GCHQ, MI5, and Special Branch; the secret tracking of funds, the dirty tricks, the phoney cash deposits; the use of undercover agents and agents provocateurs inside the union, including at the highest level; the involvement of the security services in bringing legal actions to tie up and disable the union during and after the strike; and their role in the smear campaign to discredit the NUM leadership after the strike — you put all those things together, and that is really quite a devastating record of the use of secret undercover state agencies to damage, smear, undermine, and break the back of an independent trade union defending its members’ rights. It’s quite an indictment, I would say.

The government of the day would defend it by saying, as Thatcher did, that the miners’ union were ‘the enemy within’ and were seeking support abroad from dangerous foreigners. In reality, they were trying to stop pit closures, defend their jobs and communities, and see off the attack on the most powerful and important part of the trade union movement at the time. If they’d been successful, of course that wouldn’t have rolled back the entire Thatcherite onslaught on organised labour or the neoliberal reconstruction of the economy and life in Britain, but it would have certainly halted or slowed it down and weakened the pressure pushing the Labour leadership towards Third Way centrist politics. If the strike had succeeded, it wouldn’t have changed everything, but it would have certainly had a major impact.

OD What does the Scargill affair reveal about the relationship between the British media and the security state at the time of and immediately following the miners’ strike?

SM Anyone familiar with the way the intelligence and security services operate in Britain knows that they have long had close relationships with the mainstream media, at all levels and with all kinds of media, and that the dividing line between a journalistic relationship and a relationship of influence for the intelligence services (as well as for other parts of the government) can be quite blurred in practice.

There have always been relationships between some journalists and the security and intelligence agencies that go well beyond the journalistic. Evidence of that has come out from time to time in different forms — and not just about the British intelligence services and security services, and their relationship with journalists and the media, but also about the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] and other overseas intelligence agencies and their close relationship with different parts of the media here.

It’s definitely ubiquitous. But I think you can also say that these kinds of smear campaigns often reflect the way different parts of the establishment more broadly operate in tandem. The security services are only one part of that: there’s the state machine, the government, the courts, the media, the corporate sector, and there’s sections of the right wing of the labour movement as well who often play to the same agenda. That doesn’t mean they’re necessarily coordinated — they mostly don’t need to be — but they feed off each other.

You see that being played out and repeated time and again in different circumstances — including during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party — where different branches of the establishment, loosely defined, have a common approach and common interests, and feed into each other in the way that these kinds of attacks and campaigns are played out. It doesn’t have to be a ‘conspiracy’; it’s the fact that the different elements have overlapping interests and complement each other. That happened in the Scargill affair, and I would say it also happened to the Corbyn leadership.

The corporate media — and the billionaire- proprietor press, in particular — have of course long played that attack-dog role against any- body, any force or movement, that is a serious challenge to the system of class power and entrenched interests in the country.

I mean the Corbyn media experience was so extreme, it was off the scale. Many of the things I was talking about in The Enemy Within you could say were played out on an even broader canvas with the Corbyn Labour Party. One of the lessons of the saga laid out in The Enemy Within is that when there’s a serious challenge of any kind to the existing power and state structures, they don’t play by the Queensbury Rules — they change the rules. That was definitely a parallel with the NUM experience and the Corbyn experience: the stakes were raised, so the rules were changed.

OD We’re now forty years on from the start of the miners’ strike, and thirty years on from the publication of The Enemy Within. What do you make of the commemoration of this history in the British public sphere today? What is its importance for today’s socialist and trade union cadres?

SM The way in which the miners’ strike is talked about historically in the media now, it’s mostly presented in a supposedly depoliticised way, and remembered as a tragic episode from the past when communities were divided and suffered as they faced the inevitable demise of their industry. In other versions it’s presented as a sort of morality tale about a reckless and incompetent battle of lions led by donkeys, an undemocratic uprising that was doomed from the start, with the chance of a negotiated settlement thrown away by violence and adventurism, and that it was Arthur Scargill himself rather than Margaret Thatcher who was actually responsible for coal’s demise.

It’s tendentious nonsense. There was simply no option of a gentle rundown of the industry in 1984, with or without a national ballot, for a workforce facing a government bent on class revenge and determined to break the single greatest obstacle to the transformation of the economy in the interests of corporate privilege and wealth.

The miners’ strike was a decisive social and economic confrontation, which was not only a battle to protect jobs and communities conducted with great ingenuity and resourcefulness that came far closer to breaking the Thatcher onslaught than is understood — but it was also a formidable challenge to the kind of corporate-driven transformation of the economy that ultimately crashed and burned in the financial crisis of 2008, one which raised the alternative of a different kind of Britain rooted in solidarity and collective action. And that’s something that obviously speaks to our times.

The experience of the miners’ strike is a reminder, even more so now we know so much more about what actually went on behind the scenes, of the timeless lesson that when state and class power interests are seriously at stake, the establishment doesn’t play nice; [it] change[s] the rules of the game. Across the whole range of responses and actions taken by the government and the authorities, business as usual was unceremoniously junked. The police acted like an occupying army in the mining areas; the courts and judiciary behaved in a highly partisan way, while any pretence at even-handed media reporting was dumped.

That also goes for the intelligence services, who were prepared to take much more extreme action than they had done for decades in their operations against the strike. It’s since been revealed that the government was planning to bring conspiracy charges against the miners’ leaders if the strike had continued, and that Thatcher had been demanding that the army be sent into the mining areas as the strike hung in the balance. If you challenge the existing order by whatever political, industrial, or other means in a serious way, the other side won’t play by the usual rules. And you have to take that into account when you’re deciding how to do politics. When class and state power and the way the system is run is being challenged, you’ve got to be prepared for the fact that the backlash will be intense.

The experience of the strike is also a reminder that you can’t always fight on the territory and the time [that] you choose. The idea that there was a soft option of a negotiated settlement that was thrown away by a militant leadership is fanciful. By that stage there wasn’t any. The only choice was the certainty of mass closures against the chance of halting the assault. The large majority of miners understood that at the time, which is why they joined the strike.

Now, in the era of green energy and the climate crisis, talking about a non-existent coal and mining industry can seem irrelevant to the twenty-first century. But that misses the point. The miners’ strike wasn’t primarily about fuel and energy, but about class and power — which is why they’re still either rubbishing or sanitising it forty years later.