Arthur Scargill (born 11 January 1938) is a British trade unionist who was President of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) from 1982 to 2002. He is best known for leading the 1984–1985 United Kingdom miners' strike, a major event in the history of the British labour movement.
Joining the NUM at the age of 19 in 1957, Scargill was one of its leading activists by the late 1960s. He led an unofficial strike in 1969, and played a key organising role during the strikes of 1972 and 1974, the latter of which played a part in the downfall of Edward Heath's Conservative government.
Thereafter Scargill led the NUM through the 1984–1985 miners' strike. It turned into a confrontation with the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher in which the miners' union was defeated. Initially a Young Communist League member, then a Labour Party member, Scargill is now deputy leader of the Socialist Labour Party (SLP), having founded the party in 1996 and served as its leader from the party's foundation until 2024.
Scargill was born in Worsbrough Dale near Barnsley, West Riding of Yorkshire. His father, Harold (died 1989), was a miner and a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. His mother, Alice (née Pickering), was a professional cook. He did not take the Eleven-Plus exam and went to Worsbrough Dale School (now called the Elmhirst School). He left school in 1953 at fifteen years old to work as a coal miner at Woolley Colliery, where he worked for nineteen years.
Early political and trade union activities
Scargill recalled how after becoming a miner, the poor working conditions and "people who should never have been working, having to work to live ... on that first day I promised myself I would try one day to get things changed". He joined the Young Communist League in 1955, becoming its Yorkshire District chair in 1956 and shortly after a member of its National Executive Committee. In 1957 he was elected NUM Yorkshire Area Youth Delegate, and attended the 6th World Festival of Youth and Students in Moscow as a representative of the Yorkshire miners. In 1958, he attended the World Federation of Trade Unions youth congress in Prague. In a 1975 interview with New Left Review Scargill said:
I was in the Young Communist League for about six or seven years and I became a member of its National Executive Committee responsible for industrial work. The secretary at this time was a very good friend of mine called Jimmy Reid, and we're still close friends. A lot of other people on the National Executive at that time went on and became very respectable Labour MPs in Parliament. Many of us started in the 1950s in the Young Communist League. So that was my initial introduction into socialism and into political militancy. My father was a Communist. My mother was strictly non-political. But my father never forced me to be involved in politics at all.
In 1961, Scargill was elected a member of the Woolley NUM Branch Committee. Scargill joined the Labour Party in 1962. He regularly attended Workers' Educational Association (WEA) classes and Co-operative Party educational programmes, and in 1962, undertook a three-year, part-time course at the University of Leeds, where he studied economics, industrial relations and social history. In 1965 he was elected branch delegate from Woolley to the Yorkshire NUM Area Council, and in 1969 was elected a member of the Yorkshire NUM Area Executive Committee. Although he never worked at Barrow Colliery in his home village, he was involved in the politics of the branch, where the membership was much more left-wing than in the conservative Woolley Colliery. In 1970, he was elected a member of the regional committee of the Co-operative Retail Services in Barnsley and a delegate to its national conference. He also represented the Barnsley Co-op at Cooperative congresses.
Scargill opposed civilian nuclear power and, during the first Wilson ministry, became highly critical of the government's energy policy. Following a Labour Party conference speech on energy policy by Richard Marsh in July 1967, Scargill said:
I can honestly say that I never heard flannel like we got from the Minister ... he said that we have nuclear power stations with us, whether we like it or not. I suggest to this Conference that we have coal mines with us ... but they did something about this problem: they closed them down. This was a complete reversal of the policy... that was promised by the Labour Government before it was put into office ... this represents a betrayal of the mining industry.
Scargill became involved in the Yorkshire Left, a group of left-wing activists involved in the Yorkshire region of the NUM, its largest region. He played an important role in the miners' strike of 1972 and was involved in the mass picket at Saltley Gate in Birmingham.
Scargill was a leader of the unofficial strike in 1969, which began in Yorkshire and spread across the country. He had challenged Sam Bullough, the president of the Yorkshire area NUM, to act on the working hours of surface workers, given that the union's conference had passed a resolution that their hours be shortened the previous year. When Bullough (unwell at the time) attempted to rule Scargill as "out of order", he was voted out by the area's delegates and a strike was declared across Yorkshire on the issue. Scargill saw this strike as a turning point in the union's attitude to militancy.
Scargill's major innovation was organising "flying pickets" involving hundreds or thousands of committed strikers who could be bussed to critical strike points to shut down a target. He gained fame for using the tactic to win the Battle of Saltley Gate in 1972, and made it his main tactical device in the 1984 strike. By 1984 however the police were ready and neutralised the tactic with superior force.
In 1973, Scargill was elected to the full-time post of compensation agent in the Yorkshire NUM. (The Yorkshire Left had already decided to stand him as their candidate even before the strike.) Scargill won widespread applause for his response to the disaster at Lofthouse Colliery in Outwood, West Yorkshire, at which he accompanied the rescue teams underground and was on site for six days with the relatives of the seven deceased. At the subsequent enquiry, he used notebooks of underground working from the 19th century, retrieved from the Institute of Geological Sciences in Leeds, to argue that the National Coal Board could have prevented the disaster had they acted on the information available. This performance strengthened his popularity with the Yorkshire miners.
A few months later, the president of the Yorkshire NUM died unexpectedly, and Scargill won the election for his replacement; the two posts were then combined and he held them until 1981. During this time, he earned the esteem of significant sections of the left and the British working class, who saw him as honest, hard-working and genuinely concerned with their welfare, and he was also respected for improving the administration of the compensation agent's post. In 1974, he was instrumental in organising the miners' strike that led Prime Minister Edward Heath to call a February general election.
Scargill was involved in a High Court case in 1978 that set a precedent in UK labour law, known as Roebuck v NUM (Yorkshire Area) No 2. The judge Sir Sydney Templeman held that it was unlawful that union members were disciplined by the NUM disciplinary panel, which Scargill chaired, for appearing as witnesses testifying against Scargill in a libel case.
In the 1981 election for NUM president, Scargill secured around 70% of the vote. One of the main planks of his platform was to give more power to union conferences than to executive meetings, on the grounds that the former were more democratic. This had great implications for regional relations in the NUM; the executive was described as dominated by "Gormley's rotten boroughs", since every region – even quite small ones – had one delegate, and the larger regions had only a few more (Scotland and South Wales had two delegates each, Yorkshire had three).