Scargill still lacked the numbers he needed, however. He addressed the workers of Birmingham itself with the appeal that ‘We don’t want your pound notes … Will you go down in history as the working class in Birmingham who stood by while the miners were battered, or will you become immortal?’ The call reached deep and far. What happened next began with a banner appearing on the top of a hill. Behind it was a mass of people. And then a ‘roar’ was heard from the other side of the hill. They had come in their thousands. In the crowd were last-minute reinforcements, the weak fired with the passion of warriors. As a result, the Battle of Saltley seemed a peasants’ revolt bedecked with the colours of chivalry; indeed, it was as ‘King Arthur’ that Scargill was to be commemorated.
It is idle to observe that the victory was largely a symbolic one; as so often happens, the symbol had become a sacred ritual which struck those who did not observe it. ‘We looked absolutely into the abyss,’ said Willie Whitelaw. Thus a strike that most thought would die within days paralysed the nation. A council of state announced a third state of emergency. Victoria Graham caught the mood of many of her generation when she observed to a friend: ‘When we were suffering for the nation’s survival during the war the task was easy, but now we seem to be silently suffering, as we watch the country brought to its knees.’ For her, as for many others, the miners’ struggle evoked tyranny. Douglas Hurd expressed the prevailing mood in government from the standpoint of the defeated: ‘The government was now wandering vainly over the battlefield looking for someone to surrender to – and being massacred all the time.’
A new blackout seemed to beckon. The sombre truth was that the nation needed fuel and could no longer afford oil. The stocks of coal could not be used, and power stations were running at 25 per cent capacity. Nurses were forced to care for their patients by candlelight. A nation without electricity was, it was said, only weeks away. It was time to lay down arms and sue for peace. The truce, for such it was, was ignominious. Lord Wilberforce, who presided over an inquiry into the strike, gave the miners almost everything they wanted; and, where he did not, Heath himself obliged, sullenly and desperately. On 19 February, he granted everything the NUM demanded, conceding more than even the Wilberforce Report had suggested.
Characteristically, Heath appealed to the country. Appearing on television, he conceded none of his adversaries’ claims. No one had won, he stated. All had lost. Without naming the unions directly, he made clear his view that the world had changed, and for the worse, and that if the spirit of unity were abandoned, there would be further trouble. For his part, Arthur Scargill had learned that the ‘unions united can never be defeated’. Perhaps he had not heard of the error of Stoicism: the fallacy that you have only to succeed once to succeed always.
46
The first shot
It was the fate of the Heath administration to know no respite. The strongest city will fall when attacked from all sides and ‘Heathco’ faced a ceaseless barrage. Principal among its vicissitudes was the unrest in Northern Ireland. For years, the Province had been held in fief by the Protestant majority. The Catholic minority was disadvantaged in most ways that free citizens might be expected to resent, in matters such as housing, employment and even the electoral register. Thus far Martin McGuinness was correct in calling the Province ‘a unionist state for a unionist people’ – its borders had been fixed to ensure that an otherwise narrow Protestant majority would be a decisive one.
The Unionists had their own resentments. When they looked south of the border, they saw not the benign nation recognized by the English, but a predatory theocracy determined to lash them to the mast of Rome. Their chief spokesman in the Seventies was the Reverend Ian Paisley MP. He was feared by many in the north as a fanatical and bigoted zealot, but in truth he was neither. Though he detested the papacy and feared the Republic, he won warm plaudits from his Catholic constituents as a fair-minded and considerate MP. Similarly, he never lent his name or support to the Protestant paramilitaries, and he was to oppose the policy of internment. Those who knew him best were wont to ascribe his public stance less to fanaticism than to irresponsibility. He was a show-off rather than a demagogue, and in this he resembled another staunch defender of the Province’s integrity, Enoch Powell.
The ‘Troubles’ began in the late Sixties. Unionist wrath had been aroused by a series of incidents and, as a result, Catholics now stood in fear of their lives. Hundreds of families were driven from their burning homes until it seemed that little less than a pogrom was under way. In 1969, frantic appeals to the government both in Northern Ireland and on the mainland at last bore fruit when Callaghan agreed that troops must be sent in. The army was greeted with tea, cakes and chips in a carnival of relieved gratitude, but the honeymoon soon waned. Loyalists had drawn first blood, although this was soon forgotten. The Ulster Volunteer Force killed a barman, for no better reason than that they were drunk and he was Catholic. Although IRA atrocities were more frequent and larger in scale, Loyalists showed from the first a penchant for elaborate sadism. The IRA justified its deeds as acts of war, the Loyalists as demonstrations of ‘loyalty’. Both sides proclaimed that they were protecting their own communities, and neither respected sex, age, or civilian status. The innocent were killed on the basis of supposed complicity with the foe, and dead civilians were passed off as combatants. Indeed the conflict in Northern Ireland was above all one in which the civilian was placed in the front line.
The IRA always maintained that the English were at fault; in a sense they were, for one Englishman can certainly be blamed for much of the havoc and misery that blighted the Province during the Heath years. Sean Macstiofain’s life was a tragicomedy of self-reinvention. He was baptized John Stephenson; his father was an English solicitor and his mother was born in Bethnal Green, rendering their son rather less Irish than most of his enemies. Nonetheless, his mother early imbued him with a keen sense of his supposed Irishness, and in this certainty was incubated a fierce nationalism. Those who adopt a cause are often far more zealous than those born to it, and so it proved here.
Until 1969, there had been only the Official IRA. Its leadership, however, increasingly drew away from Irish nationalism and towards theoretical Marxism. Both bullet and ballot were considered bourgeois distractions. Its stated goal now was to ‘educate’ the workers of Northern Ireland, Catholic and Protestant, to the point where they would, of their own volition, throw off their economic oppressors. However, Macstiofain and other romantic nationalists hungered for flesh. The result was a split from which arose the Provisional IRA, formed to protect and avenge Catholic communities, fight the army and subvert British rule. Its time soon came. The honeymoon of the British army and the Catholic population had long soured when, in the summer of 1970, a detachment of troops entered the Falls Road in search of a cache of weapons. When they re-emerged it was to a street filled with men and women in a mood of raging protest. After all that had been endured, this was too much. The troops came under attack and soon had to call for reinforcements. The best they could achieve was a stalemate. On 3 July 1970, a curfew was imposed on the Falls Road. The Troubles had taken wing.
The English were for the most part indifferent. Given that the Province was a problem that would not go away, would it not be sensible to send it away? Why not withdraw from Northern Ireland altogether? After all, the terrorists had struck only those people across the sea, and misery and violence were felt by many to be the birthright of the Irishman. Let him get on with what he knew best, as long as he didn’t bring his baggage over here. But then in 1971, the IRA detonated a bomb at the military camp in Aldershot. Five people were killed, all of them civilians. Among the dead were two elderly cleaning ladies and a Catholic priest.