1. ‘Buried treasure’: industrial development in the Scottish coalfields, c. 1940s–80s

Scotland’s post-Second World War economic development was characterized by an evolving relationship between energy generation and industry. This chapter presents a chronological assessment from the inauguration of major structural changes during the mid 1940s, to the demise of mass industrial employment in the 1980s. The analysis centres on how UK fuel and regional economic policies vastly altered the labour market in the coalfields. Over four decades, nationalized coal and power generation sectors were central to reconfiguring the basic economic structure which had evolved during the previous century. A much-altered geographical distribution of coal mining employment emerged through the concentration of production within technologically advanced collieries in eastern Scotland. Their markets were increasingly dominated by electricity production. These developments were augmented by the application of regional policy, which sought to diversify the nation’s industrial base through inward investment. Initially, modernizing civil servants sought to supplement employment in heavy industry by developing new mass production sectors. By the mid 1960s, these more modest aims had been displaced by the objective of pursuing economic growth through diverting labour from traditional sectors to light engineering.

The closure of collieries was largely managed consensually between the 1940s and the 1970s. Policymakers met moral economy obligations by engaging in dialogue with trade union representatives and ensured labour market security through linking divestment with the creation of jobs in new plants. This was not a straightforward process. There was a dynamic relationship between fuel policy and power generation on the one hand, and the application of regional policy on the other. As coalfield employment shrank, and the industry was disembedded from the towns and villages which had grown around it, a protective countermovement developed and articulated its objections in Scottish national terms. This became increasingly forthright when the nationalized industry’s rationalized structure was threatened by the closure of redeveloped pits during the 1960s. Those concerns were generalized as the logic of Scotland’s new political economy revealed itself. Coal employment had become more and more dependent upon power station burning, while multinationals became increasingly important in manufacturing. Demands for Scottish political autonomy grew within the labour movement, becoming increasingly enmeshed with criticisms of the centralizing tendencies of the National Coal Board (NCB) and the failure of regional policy to provide adequate replacement for lost employment in traditional industries. Coalfield experiences were formative, both to the major alterations in Scotland’s economic structure, but also in shaping the political response to these changes.

In 1945, Scotland’s economy would have looked familiar to a Victorian observer. Its industrial heartland, Clydeside, was characterized by family firms engaged in the ‘staple’ sectors of textiles, metals, heavy engineering and coal. In more backward collieries, workers still used pick axes and shovels to ‘hand strip’ faces, leaving ‘pillars’ of coal in place to maintain structural integrity.¹ Steel production remained concentrated in plate, much of which was used by a shipbuilding sector where bespoke products and craft skills predominated.² After the Second World War, a fundamental shift in political economy took place under state direction. It substantially altered both ownership structures and employment and production patterns. This transition included the growth of assembly goods plants, incorporating significant investment by American multinationals. Scottish industrial employment peaked in the mid 1950s, with considerable contraction following in the staple sectors. However, deindustrialization was not a straightforward process. Manufacturing employment peaked over a decade later, spurred by the expansion of sectors that grew through inward investment, before these sectors also shrank during the 1970s.³

The coalfields were at the heart of these changes. Scotland’s largest coalfield, Lanarkshire, experienced extensive colliery closures as the industry was rebalanced towards more productive seams to the east. Under nationalization, the workforce was concentrated in fewer, larger, highly mechanized pits.⁴ Over the same period, coal became increasingly dependent on a single market: power generation. Between 1950 and financial year 1972–3, power station coal consumption rose from thirty-three to sixty-nine million tonnes, from 16 per cent to 53 per cent of the UK’s annual coal use.⁵ As the steel industry contracted over the 1970s and early 1980s, dependency was further consolidated. By 1981, the NCB was selling 80 per cent of its product to the electricity market.⁶ Concurrently, government supported the development of alternative fuels for power generation. This judgment related to the requirements of maximizing productivity in Britain’s full employment economy, concerns about ability of the NCB to provide for expanding energy use, and to political anxieties over the power of organized labour within coal production and distribution.⁷ These developments created tension between miners and the NCB on the one hand and the Ministry of Fuel and Power and its successors, and the nationalized power generators, on the other. Although policymaking took place in a unitary, UK-wide, framework, the NCB’s Scottish division, and the South of Scotland Electricity Board (SSEB) secured significant devolved dimensions to administration.

The release of labour from coal was welcomed by an influential policymaking community who were empowered by the Scottish Office’s autonomy in the application of UK regional policy. A modernizing agenda developed through the Scottish Council (Development and Industry) (SCDI), a body dominated by business representatives, but which was also subscribed to by local authorities and trade unions.⁸ Civil servants and their allies within business and academia developed a strong commitment to applied economics. This stemmed from an analysis of Scotland’s industrial depression during the 1920s and 1930s. Modernizers emphasized the negative effects of Scotland’s overdependence on export-oriented heavy industries and capital goods production. They underlined the absence of mass production consumer durables sectors that proved more resilient in the English midlands and south-east.⁹

Table 1.1. Male employment in Lanarkshire

Sources: Census 1951 Scotland vol. iv: Occupation and Industries (Edinburgh, 1956), pp. 433–69; Census 1961 Scotland: Occupation and Industry County Tables: Glasgow and Lanark, Leaflet no. 15 (Edinburgh, 1966), pp. 16–21; Sample Census 1966 Scotland: Economic Activity: County Tables: Leaflet no. 3. Glasgow and Lanark (Edinburgh, 1968), pp. 33–44; Census 1971 Scotland: Economic Activity, County Tables part 2 (Edinburgh, 1976), table 3; Census 1981 Scotland: Economic Activity: 10% Strathclyde Region Microfiche (Edinburgh, 1983), Table 3.

^* Engineering in 1951 includes 3,915 constructional engineers who were omitted from later figures. The 1961, 1966, 1971 and 1981 engineering figures include engineering, vehicle manufacturing and other metal goods manufacturing.

^** The 1971 and 1981 figures are based on a 10 per cent sample. As there are no county figures available for 1981, the figures are an amalgamation of Clydesdale, Cumbernauld and Kilsyth East Kilbride, Hamilton, Motherwell, and Monklands District Council figures.

Table 1.2. Female employment in Lanarkshire

Source: As table 1.1.

Table 1.3. Unemployment in Lanarkshire

Sources: Census 1951 Scotland vol. iv: Occupation and Industries (Edinburgh, 1956), p. 190; Census 1961 Scotland vol. vi, part III (Edinburgh, 1966), p. 10; Sample Census 1966 Scotland, Economic Activity: County Tables: Leaflet no. 3, Glasgow and Lanark (Edinburgh, 1968) p. 5; Census 1971 Scotland: Economic Activity, County Tables part 2 (Edinburgh, 1976) Table 3; Census 1981 Scotland: Economic Activity: 10% Strathclyde Region Microfiche (Edinburgh, 1983), Table 1.

^* The 1971 and 1981 figures are based on a 10 per cent sample. As there are no county figures available for 1981, the figures are an amalgamation of Clydesdale, Cumbernauld and Kilsyth, East Kilbride, Hamilton, Motherwell, and Monklands District Council figures. Temporary sick in receipt of benefits are included within 1961 and 1981 figures.

Table 1.4. Scottish Coal employment

Source: M. K. Oglethorpe, Scottish Collieries: an Inventory of the Scottish Coal Industry in the Nationalised Era (Edinburgh, 2006), p. 20.

State policy was central to Scotland’s protracted deindustrialization. Coalfield contraction, and the later rundown of steel employment, were managed through nationalization, which cemented a relatively consensual approach to closures and their integration with regional policy.¹⁰ The closure of collieries and steelworks made available the space and labour necessary for renewal in light engineering. Coordinated investment and divestment was secured by regional policy efforts which utilized incentives and coercion through Industrial Development Certificates to ‘steer’ investment from the ‘congested’ South East and Midlands to ‘peripheral’ areas of the UK.¹¹ Tables 1.1 and 1.2 demonstrate that industrial employment rates remained high in Lanarkshire between the 1940s and early 1970s. Assembly engineering replaced lost male jobs in coal and steel and women’s work in textiles. Overall, male industrial employment rates remained approximately proportionally static in the context of a growing workforce, while the female industrial workforce grew absolutely and proportionally. Unemployment rates were relatively low until employment in assembly engineering fell from the late 1970s onwards, as is demonstrated in table 1.3.

Coal employment expanded during the early years of public ownership, as demonstrated in table 1.4, but in an uneven manner. Table 1.1 shows a sharp fall in male coal mining employment between 1951 and 1961, indicating the impact rationalization had in the closure of smaller and less productive collieries in Lanarkshire. The 1945 Labour government’s case for taking coal into public ownership rested on the benefits of planning: ‘the nation’s most precious raw material’ had, for a quarter of a century, been ‘floundering chaotically under the ownership of many hundreds of independent companies’. Public ownership promised ‘great economies’ through modernizing investment and the redeployment of labour.¹² By ‘humanising’ industrial relations, the nationalized industry could secure partnerships between workers and management and heal the scars of interwar conflict.¹³ Efficiency through industrial renewal was clearly enunciated by the NCB Scottish division in Scotland’s Coal Plan. The 1955 prospectus outlined a £100-million plan for future development, including fifteen new colliery sinkings and thirty-nine major reconstructions. It was announced as ‘the greatest single industrial venture ever undertaken for the benefit of the Scottish people’.¹⁴

In the eight years prior to 1955, the Board had already closed 67 of the 275 pits that the division inherited from the private sector when ownership was transferred on vesting day, 1 January 1947. Despite these closures, the NCB had succeeded in maintaining production levels.¹⁵ The plan entailed a significant further redistribution of employment. Lanarkshire was to continue to contract, while investment was to be focused on the ‘buried treasure’ within the Limestone coal reserves, 800 to 3,000 feet beneath ground. New developments were primarily concentrated in Fife and Midlothian in Eastern Scotland, and Clackmannanshire in the centre of the country. Showpiece projects included the new sinking at Rothes in Fife, where a new town, Glenrothes, received migrants from the Lanarkshire coalfield, as well as the construction of a major drift mine complex at Glenochil in Clackmannanshire. The Scottish division’s strategy was based on consolidating the industry into larger modern, mechanized, collieries that would generally have an output of 4,000 to 6,000 tonnes per day. This was over five times a typical pre-nationalization unit. Mechanization entailed moves towards a ‘continuous mining’ approach, providing a consistent flow of coal through simultaneous cutting and loading. This was achieved through new machinery for coal-getting including scraper box ploughs, as well as roof controls, face conveyors, power loading machinery and electronic winding engines.¹⁶

Coalfield-wide reconstruction initially enjoyed the support of the NUMSA, which was committed to ensuring that nationalization succeeded. Union leaders across the UK concurred, including those on the left. Arthur Horner, who was the union’s general secretary and a Welsh Communist, declared in 1948 that ‘old pits have to die’.¹⁷ Horner’s fellow party member and NUMSA president, Abe Moffat, also supported rationalization. At the NUM’s Scottish conference in 1947 Moffat told delegates that:

Moffatt’s perspective concurred with the modernizers’ view of the need for a major reorganization of the Scottish economy. The Clyde Valley Regional Plan of 1946, commissioned by the Scottish Office, stated that mining in Lanarkshire was ‘fast dying’ and prescribed a solution that combined miners migrating to other coalfields with inward investment. Lanarkshire’s steelmaking capacity would also be lost over this period as the ‘heavy industry centre of gravity’ moved south-west of Glasgow. The plan argued that a coastal-based steel strip mill would be better suited for an industry which relied on imported iron ore.¹⁹ In place of collieries and steelworks, ‘several substantial new industries employing thousands of men’ were required. Large-scale external investment, ‘rather than the setting up of concerns merely to supplement the basic industrial structure’ would be brought to the region to achieve progress.²⁰ A modernizing perspective for comprehensive industrial rejuvenation can be seen in the plan’s designation of state policy as the nodal point for economic development: improved transport infrastructure would connect new publicly owned industrial estates that were to house light industries characterized by ‘footlooseness’, such as the manufacture of ball bearings, vacuums and electric registers. The achievement of such a ‘reasonable measure of industrial balance’ depended on attracting inward investment to develop new industries which would provide improved employment opportunities, especially for women workers.²¹

These economic aims were strongly tied to social goals. Both industrial and population congestion would be abated through establishing new towns, including two in Lanarkshire: Cumbernauld to the northeast and East Kilbride to the south. They were to be in part populated by the ‘overspill’ population from Glasgow’s slum clearances, offering work in a large range of sectors to avoid the plight of the ‘one-industry town’ which had suffered so greatly in the interwar period.²² The Clyde Valley Regional Plan’s aim of redevelopment, first through two new towns in Lanarkshire and second by replacing traditional industries with external investment in state provisioned industrial estates, was principally fulfilled. However, a significant divergence from the plan’s proposals was the relocation of the steel industry. Ultimately, the Macmillan government, which faced political constraints in a region characterized by high rates of male unemployment, maintained production in Lanarkshire and pressurized Colvilles to invest in a strip mill at Ravenscraig. This was part of an effort to provide the materials required for assembly engineering activities.²³ The continuity in steel employment between the early 1950s and early 1970s (visible in table 1.1) was tied to modernization through inward investment. Ravenscraig reoriented Scottish steel production towards the requirements of consumer durables manufacturing.

Modernizing industrial investment developed concurrently with the incremental replacement of coal by oil and nuclear fuels, which contributed to concerns about employment levels in contracting coalfields. As is demonstrated in table 1.4, coal employment contracted swiftly from the mid 1950s. This was the result of deliberation by Conservative government ministers and civil servants who held pronounced opposition to coal on economic and political grounds. Officials in the Ministry of Fuel and Power encouraged coal’s displacement, reflecting both their commitments to market liberalization and their hostility towards organized labour. A briefing prepared for the minister of power, George Lloyd, before he met oil company representatives during the summer of 1955, prescribed ‘public encouragement to a rapid conversion from coal to oil in the field of general industry and commerce’. It went on to emphasize that a railway workers’ strike, and unofficial action by Yorkshire miners, had produced a ‘psychological moment’ to argue for greater oil use.²⁴ Ministry civil servants and Conservative ministers regularly identified coal and its labour relations as a justification for transition to alternative fuel sources. During discussions with the Central Energy Authority, Ministry of Fuel and Power officials posited that ‘the Government must loosen miners’ stranglehold’ on energy policy.²⁵ The same phrase had been used the previous year in discussions over supporting the nuclear power programme.²⁶ These remarks indicate the importance of political perspectives to guiding the fuel policy decisions which led to the closure of collieries during the second half of the 1950s and early 1960s.

Imposing market competition was another key objective. This was openly asserted by Lloyd, who had a background in oil administration, when he addressed parliament on the 1955 coal price increase. Lloyd described the price rise as ‘the most powerful stroke for fuel efficiency since the war’. He stated that the NCB ‘lack true cost consciousness’. Its managers were trained in technical mining competency but not in entrepreneurship, which was crucial for the sector’s future.²⁷ Lloyd’s speech mirrored the sentiments of his civil servants, but they used more direct language. C. L. Wilkinson, a Ministry official, saw nuclear and oil as means to ‘enforce the measure of discipline that is needed’ on miners and the NCB. These policies challenged the Scottish division’s plans for expansion and its assumption that electricity markets would continue to be dominated by coal.²⁸ Politicized hostility towards coal miners was twinned with suspicion towards the nationalized industry’s monopoly position in the production of the UK’s basic energy source. These both encouraged the adoption of fuel diversification policies, including the construction of financially uncompetitive nuclear power stations, which were formative to deindustrialization in the coalfields from the late 1950s.

The liberal market perspective of civil servants jarred with the NCB’s commitment to planning the sector’s future, and provoked concerns within coalfield areas over future employment. Dimensions of the double movement are apparent in these differences where financial priorities competed with communitarian perspectives on coal mining employment. Within its own operations, the NCB pursued productionist imperatives and adherence to cost prerogatives. This outlook competed with moral economy obligations to the workforce in industry governance, especially colliery divestment and investment. However, when facing government and the generating boards, the NCB often shared interests with mining trade unions in making the case for maximizing coal output and asserting obligations to utilize national resource endowments for economic gain. During 1957, a senior Scottish officer at the Ministry of Power wrote to the Coal Division in London expressing concern that the conversion of power stations on the Thames to oil will ‘result in surplus of electricity smalls and loss of traditional seaborne UK market’. This was considered a significant threat. The areas most affected by this change were adjacent to the Firth of Forth. It would affect developments in East Fife and the Lothians which were at the forefront of the NCB Scottish division’s investment programme.²⁹

The agency of policymakers in fuel transitions affirms the importance of long-term investment decisions to determining episodes of deindustrialization.³⁰ Britain’s move towards oil in industry and multifuel power generation was not the straightforward result of technological development. Rather, it was a product of political economy, incorporating resistance and conflict.³¹ Plentiful cheap oil imports, which seemed dependable for the long term were formative to this process, as was policymaker faith in the capacity of nuclear power to deliver a low cost energy future, favourable in terms of productivity and the balance of payments. Another key element was suspicion of coal due to its reliance on organized labour and a desire to impose market forces onto the nationalized industry, which was impossible from a monopoly fuel position. The widespread adoption of oil underpinned a comparatively egalitarian ‘democratic capitalist’ economic management in developed economies after 1945. However, investment in oil infrastructure was motivated by miners’ capacity to disrupt or ‘sabotage’ capital accumulation.³²

High modernization

From the early 1960s, Scottish modernizers actively promoted the contraction of traditional sectors.³³ This would free up the labour and space required for the mass production industries necessary to match UK growth rates, and overcome persistently higher rates of unemployment.³⁴ The construction of Ravenscraig coincided with the peak of Scottish heavy industrial employment in the late 1950s, after which coal, steel and shipbuilding shed tens of thousands of jobs.³⁵ During 1961, the SCDI published an influential study actively welcoming this, and arguing that economic growth could be achieved through releasing labour from heavy industry to provide manpower for light engineering. The report was produced by an inquiry chaired by Sir John Toothill. Toothill was also the chairman of Ferranti, an English electronics firm which relocated to Edinburgh during the Second World War.³⁶

The Toothill Report warned against ‘supporting the inefficient and seeking to postpone for a little by means of subsidy or control the decay of industries and districts that had no prospect of achieving independent prosperity or growth’, which would waste manpower. Growth would be attained through releasing labour to ‘the newer industries’ via the ‘build-up of industrial complexes and centres which offer prospects of becoming zones of growth’.³⁷ The focus of these complexes was to be ‘chiefly in large-quantity production,’ which signalled a departure from Scottish industry’s traditional orientation towards bespoke production for niche markets. Ravenscraig was welcomed as the ‘prerequisite, almost, of the development of modern mass-production engineering-based consumers’ durables industry’.³⁸ These arguments were relayed by the Conservative secretary of state for Scotland, Michael Noble, at the opening of a new factory in East Kilbride in 1964. Noble noted the important role Ravenscraig was to play in supplying materials for producing motor vehicles, which put it at the heart of Scotland’s economic rejuvenation.³⁹

Toothill had considerable influence over Scottish policymaking. In 1964, the report’s emphasis on industrial complexes was referred to by a Ministry of Labour representative as justifying investment in infrastructure to support the ‘fast-growing and specialised’ electronics industry. Toothill’s perspective warranted investment in workforce reskilling for contracting coalfield areas, with Motherwell and East Kilbride listed as potential locations for electronic engineering training centres alongside areas in West Lothian and Fife, which had previously been designated an expanding coalfield.⁴⁰ The report’s impact was also apparent when the Scottish Development Department was established in 1962, fulfilling a key recommendation.⁴¹ Toothill’s objectives closely aligned with Labour governments’ objectives. In 1967, Prime Minister Harold Wilson summarized his understanding that ‘the fundamental problem facing this country is to secure and maintain a high level of economic growth’. Wilson further emphasized Britain’s failure to perform in export markets relative to other ‘advanced countries’, giving a distinctly ‘declinist’ tone to the modernization effort.⁴² These motifs were especially marked in the Scottish context where indigenous industrial failures were seen to require rectification through inward investment. Accordingly, the movement of labour from contracting heavy industries to export assembly goods sectors became an economic priority.

The modernizers achieved hegemony in Scottish economic policy between the 1940s and 1960s. Initially, their objectives centred on the diversified industrial structure envisioned by the Clyde Valley Regional Plan. These were later refined and extended to focus on releasing labour from heavy industry to establish the complexes of engineering plants that Toothill called for. Trade union representatives were initially agreeable to the modernizing perspective. They tolerated the decline of employment in heavy industry in return for manufacturing inward investment. As colliery closures intensified from the late 1950s, the NUMSA’s leadership were relatively accepting of the approach outlined by Toothill. In late 1961, the NUMSA president Alex Moffat – who had succeeded his brother Abe earlier in the year – made it clear that his priority was employment stability and not the maintenance of coal jobs. At an Area conference, Moffat bluntly stated, ‘The government could shut down all the pits if every miner had a reasonable job to go to’.⁴³ The 1964–70 Wilson governments encouraged this approach. At a speech in Glasgow in 1970, the minister of state for the Ministry of Technology, Eric Varley – who was a former coal-mining craftsman and NUM-sponsored MP – advocated modernization in now familiar terms. Varley was critical of those who lamented the decline of shipbuilding and coal, which he referred to as ‘my own industry’. The minister praised the ‘remarkable progress’ made by Honeywell, the American office machinery manufacturers who were delivering employment and product expansion at the Newhouse, Bellshill and Uddingston industrial estates. With employment at the American firm due to expand to 7,000, North Lanarkshire had a ‘bright future’.⁴⁴

Varley’s comments came in the wake of the landmark 1967 Fuel Policy white paper, which welcomed the development of a four-fuel (coal, oil, nuclear and natural gas) energy economy in Britain. It prominently announced ‘the coming of age of nuclear power as a potential major source of energy’, despite a decade of disappointments with the sector’s development.⁴⁵ The NCB were ‘the only influential opponents’ of the decision to invest in an extensive advanced gas cooler reactor programme during the 1960s. Nuclear power was judged by politicians and civil servants as having near limitless potential, but they also considered oil to be dependable, cheap and secure in supply.⁴⁶ The predominance of these outlooks in government contributed to conflict with the NCB, whose senior officials contested the assumptions behind nuclear projections and advised caution over anticipations of a future of ever-affordable oil. Scottish autonomy within the NCB was considerably reduced as employment shrank, especially in the sustained rundown of the 1960s. During 1967, the Divisional structure was replaced by less autonomous ‘Areas’, which confirmed the centralization of power to the Board’s headquarters at Hobart House in London.⁴⁷ Several major Scottish pit development failures between the late 1950s and early 1960s anticipated these later administrative changes, which only confirmed existing alterations to internal power relations. Centralization was encouraged by employment contraction and the policy consensus that the industry’s production and workforce would continue to fall. It also allowed the NCB’s core management to oversee a major and coordinated overhaul of the UK coalfields, which privileged the ‘central’ coalfields of the English Midlands, Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire in the distribution of manpower and investment.⁴⁸

A Scottish coal lobby emerged from the shock of modernized collieries being closed between 1959 and 1962. It persisted into the imposition of liberalized market logic on the industry by Conservative governments during the 1980s. The lobby combined political interest from coalfield areas. Protests were voiced from within the coal industry in explicitly Scottish national terms, anticipating both the Nationalist electoral breakthrough and high-profile arguments over Scotland’s constitutional status later in the decade. While closures during the 1950s had been largely accepted and even embraced by the NUMSA, there was a distinct change of attitude as some of the projects upon which Scottish coal’s future had been staked failed. Major examples included the closure of Devon in Clackmannanshire in 1959, with nearby Glenochil following in 1962 and the prestige project at Rothes in Fife also closing the same year. This was followed by the cessation of production at the redeveloped Barony colliery in Ayrshire following a shaft collapse on 8 November 1962 that killed four men.⁴⁹

The announcement of Devon colliery’s closure in June 1959 was met by resistance from the workforce, who undertook an unofficial ‘stay down’ strike for three days, gaining considerable support in a walkout across the Scottish coalfield. Coal Board officials explained that miners’ anger was stimulated by an extensive rundown of manpower in the area, with nearby Policy and Meta having closed the same year, and because Devon was a modern colliery.⁵⁰ Devon’s closure also followed the abandonment of the nearby Airth colliery, which had previously been projected to be a major coking coal producer. Furthermore, the announcement at Devon came alongside the closure of nineteen other pits in Scotland. These were part of a ‘special’ economic closure programme across the UK, but which was highly concentrated in Scotland.⁵¹ Ministry officials noted that the workforce’s feeling was inflamed by the rate of closures, which ‘means that the openings for miners’ sons who had hoped to go into mining would be much reduced’.⁵²

These sentiments indicate that contraction across the Scottish coalfield presented threats to both communal identities and economic security, which contributed to a developing sense of crisis. Deindustrialization was experienced as a threat to social order and stability as well as livelihoods. The effects of closures, which had already been felt in dislocation at local levels through coalfield reconstruction, became recalibrated as a national problem as the industry’s modernized collieries became vulnerable. These fears were consolidated by the announcement of closure at Rothes and Glenochil in 1962, following severe faltering and failure to meet performance expectations. Objections were encouraged by the experience of restructuring: modernized pits had been paid for at the price of the closure of older collieries. The Board had assured miners of secure employment in modern mines. Board officials noted that as late as the closure of Devon, the NUMSA had been informed that its take could be worked from Glenochil, and furthermore that 850 miners had transferred into Scottish Special Housing Association (SSHA) houses in the area built for the Glenochil development. Most incomers had migrated from Lanarkshire. In response to these failures within the Scottish coalfields, the NCB proposed transfers to England. Offers were made to men in short-life collieries as well as closing ones.⁵³ The NCB operated a system which differentiated collieries between categories A, B and C with category A pits regarded as ‘long-life’ viable prospects, B as intermediate and C ‘short-life’ or likely to close. These categories were meant to provide security by integrating individual collieries within the Board’s plans. But the sudden closure of units that were previously regarded as viable had the opposite effect by encouraging perceptions that the nationalized industry was governed by distant authorities following short-term economic logic.

The Board’s admission of long-term contraction across Scotland was accompanied by significant centralization within the NCB. Rothes’s closure was disputed by the Scottish Division, who felt that the pit had the potential to economically work its best reserves with reduced manpower.⁵⁴ The Division were successful in winning approval from the Board to continue developing drivages during 1961. However, their activities were closely monitored. E. H. Browne, a Board member, was charged with investigating high expenditure levels. Browne noted that after a visit to Rothes in June 1961, ‘HQ representatives left the Divisional Board in no doubts that they could not see any prospect of accepting the Divisional Board’s proposal’. He emphasized that the Scottish division were nevertheless determined to continue operations and began to incur expenditure over and above awarded allocations on two occasions later in 1961. Browne concluded that there had been an overspend of just over £40,000 and put this down to the speeding up of drivage operations. He argued, in contrast to the Division, that ‘so pronounced a change should not have occurred’.⁵⁵

These findings accord with Halliday’s memories of employment in the NCB Scottish Division’s production department, which he published in 1990. Halliday recalled the closures of Rothes and Glenochil as ‘a watershed in relations between the Divisional reconstruction team and headquarters in Edinburgh and London’, referring to a ‘battle’ between the Scottish Division and the NCB’s UK headquarters at Hobart House.⁵⁶ Rothes’s closure had ramifications beyond the mining industry itself and was understood as a threat to Scotland’s industrial prestige. The Scottish Trades Union Congress (STUC) general secretary, George Middleton, wrote to Alf Robens, the chairman of the NCB, objecting to Rothes’s closure, which he described as ‘a serious blow to Scotland’. Middleton expressed doubt about the NCB’s ‘rather facile inclination to talk about alternative employment … for those becoming redundant’. Prefiguring the keener mobilization of Scottish national identity by trade union representatives over the following decade, Middleton highlighted Roben’s geographical and social distance from Fife by adding that ‘this does not impress us very greatly in Scotland’.⁵⁷ The theme of discontent with UK economic management was articulated more vociferously by the Scottish National Party’s leader, William Wolfe. Following the announcement of Barony’s closure, Wolfe wrote a letter to Robens which criticized the Board’s commitment to Scotland:

While he was the object of these protests, Robens made use of fears over unemployment and southwards migration when agitating for Scottish power station investment. In August 1962, before the disaster at Barony, Robens addressed a meeting of the SCDI. He made the case for a coal-fired power station in central Scotland based on providing work: ‘if they had another nuclear station in Scotland not only would it have to be subsidized, but it would cost several thousand miners their jobs’. J. L. Warrander reported to the Ministry of Power that ‘this suggestion was not unfavourably received’.⁵⁹ During March 1963, the NCB publicly increased pressure on government and the SSEB as part of a successful campaign for coal-fired power station investment. Following the Barony disaster, it released a public statement that underlined that only investment in a new coal-fired station could justify spending £2.5 million to sink a new shaft and raise 500,000 tonnes per year. Reopening the pit would restore employment to 1,600 men, including the 800 miners who were still redundant following the disaster. Furthermore, the Board claimed that ‘unless the longer-term demand for coal in Scotland is established many men now employed in the mining industry in Ayrshire will find permanent work in the mining industry only by transferring to English collieries. The Board recognize that this would have a serious effect on the level of employment in Ayrshire and particular in Auchinleck and Cumnock’.⁶⁰ Officials in the Ministry of Power were furious with the Board’s communiqué, noting that they had not even had the ‘courtesy’ to inform the minister first: ‘As things are, however, the announcement has been made in terms which are liable to cause embarrassment to many people: and perhaps this was the intended effect. If the decision goes against the coal-fired station in Scotland it will be alleged that those who so decided are responsible for continuing unemployment in the Barony area’.⁶¹

Widespread support in Scottish industry and political circles for the NCB’s campaign to ensure investment in a major power station facility delivered material results when the SSEB commissioned Longannet power station in 1964. It was supplied by a drift mine complex, which spanned across Fife and Clackmannanshire. The NCB’s case built on the findings of the Mackenzie Committee on the Generation and Distribution of Electricity in Scotland, which reported that Scotland required a coal-fired power station with over two megawatts of capacity.⁶² W. S. McKinnell of the Ministry of Power reported ‘a strong coal lobby in the committee’, who were eager to see further investment in Scotland beyond the commissioning of Kincardine in Fife and Cockenzie in the Lothians. Some committee members favoured Ayrshire as the site for a third investment.⁶³ In giving evidence before the committee, senior NCB officials, including Robens, his future successor, Derek Ezra, and the chair of the Scottish Divisional Board, Ronald Parker, argued that the Scottish coalfields had the capacity to support another power station. Robens alluded to the politically unpalatable alternative: ‘I do not think that public opinion would stand long for the idea of closing pits in Scotland and sending Scots miners down to Yorkshire to mine coal to send back for power stations in Scotland’. While emphasizing these social dimensions, the Board also pressed home their productionist agenda for consolidation. Parker argued that rather than Ayrshire, it was Clackmannan and Fife which would best provide coal for power station use.⁶⁴ This was consistent with the Board’s long-term aims of rebalancing the workforce towards the most productive coalfields in the east of Scotland.

However, Longannet’s designation as a coal-fired power station also amounted to a major change in mining strategy. Instead of focusing on deep Limestone coals, Scottish coal mining was reoriented towards readily accessible low-quality Hirst coal, which was suited to power station requirements.⁶⁵ Longannet’s drift mines became the core of a much-reduced coal sector that was primarily made up of long-life pits associated with electricity production. New and modernized Scottish collieries received over £75 million of investment during the 1950s and 1960s. Their workforce continued to grow through miners transferring from the contracting Lanarkshire coalfield and other older collieries. At Longannet, the extent of modernization included pioneering computerized technology, the Remotely Operated Longwall Face (‘ROLF’).⁶⁶ ROLF was an ultimately abortive attempt to apply self-steering and censor technology to coal cutting that would allow miners to more safely operate machinery at distance. It was deployed alongside electronic indicative and signalling equipment which eventually inspired the Mines Operating System (MINOS) that the NCB developed during the 1970s. These developments involved considerable growth in surveillance, threatening faceworkers’ skills and autonomy. Traditionally, hewers had maintained their social status and economic power through their physical distance from management overseers as well as their physical strength and knowledge of coal cutting techniques.⁶⁷ After coal was cut in Longannet’s drift mines, it was mechanically conveyed directly to the power station above ground.⁶⁸ This zenith of late twentieth-century Scottish coal mining was a dramatic transformation from the small collieries operating under the pillar and stoop methods that the NCB had inherited, and largely closed, since 1947. Extensive sectoral reorganization and technological transformation was achieved over the course of a single working lifetime under public ownership, while maintaining broadly consensual industrial relations.

Even the Board’s modern investments were threatened by alternative sources of electricity generation. After 1965, British coal production targets were incrementally reduced. An initial decrease from 175 to 155 million tonnes gave way to a target of 135 million tonnes of deep-mined coal by 1970.⁶⁹ The NCB objected to this being declared publicly on the grounds that the new target would have ‘a serious impact on the morale of men and management’, because it would lead to the closure of collieries that had been previously judged economically viable.⁷⁰ In planning for up to 35,000 job losses per annum, the Board noted that Scotland would be worst affected part of the UK. At some collieries, transfers would only be offered to workers prepared to move to expanding English central coalfields.⁷¹ These outcomes were especially concerning to Robens and the NCB because they threatened the modernized industry assembled during the previous decade of rationalization. Robens unsuccessfully argued for further coal-fired power stations investment, in preference to the government’s decision to invest at a nuclear facility at Hunterston in Ayrshire. He underlined the Board’s success in concentrating production within high productivity units. Failure to invest in coal-fired generation would threaten new ‘pits on which large capital sums have been spent in recent years specifically to provide for the needs of the electricity industry in Scotland’.⁷² Pessimism over the industry’s future was confirmed by a Ministry official, K. M. Tait, in 1971, on her return from a tour of Scottish collieries:

Tait’s image of endemic parochialism among Scottish miners overlooked what they had in common: a shared experience of incremental contraction over the previous decade, which had diminished their confidence in the future of coal mining. Parochial divisions were eroded by the experience of commuting growing distances to work in ‘cosmopolitan’ collieries and the perceived threat of further closures. This encouraged the development of a more pronounced collective national identity across Scotland’s coalfield territories. National objections became more pronounced as unemployment grew and the modernizers’ ambitions appeared to falter during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Simultaneously, the relationship between coal and electricity generation policy became increasingly politicized.

Stabilization

Moral economy responsibilities were incurred by policymakers overseeing the application of regional policy concurrent with colliery closures. Obligations towards communities with high unemployment rates competed with development goals in the allocation of inward investment, despite support for the aims of the Toothill report. Scottish Office officials who were charged with directing inward investment operated regional policy to ameliorate the worst excesses of unemployment created by coalfield contraction. In September 1969, H. J. Henson of the Board of Trade Office for Scotland wrote to the department of industry expressing concern at the ‘seriously aggravated’ male unemployment that he expected to develop in Kilsyth, North Lanarkshire, over the following months. Henson detailed the expected closure of Cardowan colliery, with the immediate redundancy of 1,200 men, due to the pit being put onto ‘jeopardy’ status regarding its financial losses. The adjacent Bedlay colliery, which employed Kilsyth men too, was also expected to close due to a gas problem. There were only limited employment opportunities in the area. Henson noted that just less than half, 80 of 180, available local jobs were classified as ‘male’ and most of the local advance factories were oriented towards ‘women’s work’. These deliberations confirm the moral economy’s grounding in the highly gendered understandings of the social status ascribed to colliery employment, as well as commitments to localized coalfield communities. The letter concluded that ‘when drawing up any future programme of advance factories, the needs of Kilsyth will be borne in mind’, given the ‘effect that the continued rundown in the coal-mining industry is likely to have on employment’.⁷⁴

These concerns typified the development of regional policy as objectives shifted during the late 1960s and early 1970s from economic growth to maintaining employment.⁷⁵ Unemployment in Kilsyth remained a concern. A 1972 department of industry report about the Burroughs office machinery plant in nearby Cumbernauld noted that Kilsyth was suffering from redundancies at the plant as well as worries over the future of Bedlay and Cardowan. The male unemployment rate of 19.7 per cent was over double the Scottish rate of 8.5, itself twice the post-1945 average. Despite the relatively small numbers involved (444 men), Scottish Office officials argued that male joblessness constituted a major problem in the locality.⁷⁶ A broader concern was emerging over the modernizers’ strategy, centred on its failure to embed viable new sectors in the Scottish economy. It was in this context that coal’s employment contraction slowed, as demonstrated in tables 1.1 and 1.4. This materialized in North Lanarkshire through Bedlay and Cardowan’s survival into the 1980s.

From the 1940s to early 1970s, inward investment was focused towards the Glasgow Planning Area. It principally came from American multinationals and was concentrated in the new towns and industrial estates built in the contracting Lanarkshire coalfields. This area accounted for 56,700 of the 82,600 US subsidiary employees in Scotland during 1972, predominantly in mechanical, electrical and instrument engineering. By 1972, US multinationals accounted for 26.5, 39.5 and 45.6 per cent of employment in these sectors within Scotland.⁷⁷ The SCDI concluded that American inward investors were making ‘a most important contribution to Scotland’s economic revival’ through the introduction of new products and processes. Export from American plants grew in value from £75 million to £367.1 million between 1964 and 1972. Even after accounting for inflation, this was a significant increase.⁷⁸ Less optimistically, a Scottish Office official noted with concern that between 1962 and 1967, engineering redundancy rates more than doubled, from below to above average for the Scottish workforce. The biggest concentration was in the ‘other machinery’ category, which largely consisted of electronics and electrical engineering. Between 1962 and 1966, Scottish employment in electronics increased by over 50 per cent but only by 14 per cent in Britain as a whole. However, Scotland’s share of industrial R&D fell relatively and absolutely. This led to the pessimistic conclusion that ‘at least to some extent the trends result from structural factors such as the large number of branch factories in Scotland in these growth sectors of industry controlled from headquarters elsewhere’. These trends were particularly ‘disturbing because of the great emphasis we have attached to the long-term change in the Scottish industrial structure, resulting from the increase in modern science-based engineering and electrical industries’.⁷⁹

This outlook was rejected by the modernizers. Willie Ross was the member of parliament for Kilmarnock, within the Ayrshire coalfields, and secretary of state for Scotland from 1964 to 1970 and 1974 to 1976. He keenly endorsed the commitment to achieving higher economic growth rates by encouraging the development of assembly goods industries held by the Wilson governments elected in 1964 and re-elected in 1966.⁸⁰ In January 1970, Ross made a speech at the unveiling of an extension to the Hoover plant in Cambuslang in South Lanarkshire, the seventh since its opening in 1946, which profiled the plant as a major success. Rising employment and production made it ‘a model operation’ based around growing exports. This was facilitated by government investment in transport infrastructure across land, sea and air, including a new inland clearance depot at Coatbridge, to the north-east of Cambuslang, which connected Lanarkshire to upgraded port facilities on both the east and west coasts.⁸¹ The modernizers emphasized the positive aspects of job creation and industrial development associated with inward investment, while the negative aspects of dependency on multinational enterprises were ignored by politicians and policymakers.

This stance increasingly lost credibility with labour movement representatives who had previously been supportive of industrial diversification policies, even at the cost of losing jobs in traditional industry. After mounting speculation, the announcement of 5,800 steel redundancies in Lanarkshire during June 1972 was described as ‘a greater crisis’ than the threatened closure of Upper Clyde Shipbuilders (UCS) by an STUC spokesperson.⁸² The UCS yards were occupied by the workforce between June 1971 and October 1972 in opposition to Conservative prime minister Ted Heath’s policy to close the yards and other ‘lame duck’ industrial enterprises. The work-in’s eventual success in forcing the Heath government to ‘U-turn’ by providing investment that preserved shipbuilding employment in three of the four yards signalled a change in government policy. Inward investment’s inability to maintain employment levels in areas experiencing further contraction in traditional industries destabilized the modernization agenda. It had enjoyed legitimacy as long as it appeared to deliver relative labour market stability. Government commitment to preserving industrial employment was affirmed in the 1972 Industry Act, which included a more favourable view of heavy industry.⁸³

Changes in energy’s international political economy associated with tensions in the Middle East profoundly altered prevailing policy assumptions during the early 1970s by creating severe fluctuations in oil prices. This exposed the UK’s reliance on imported oil which had developed during the 1950s and 1960s. A mixed-fuel energy policy developed during the early 1970s, which incorporated a substantial guarantee of coal’s place in power generation. Changes in policy were triggered by a shift in the trade-offs behind energy policymaking. These most readily related to the oil spike of 1973–4, and oil-price instability, as well as the failure of nuclear to meet politicians and civil servants’ expectations. Rather than the economic costs of price increases, it was the perception of international vulnerability and insecurity which led British policymakers to lessen reliance on oil.⁸⁴ Coal was bolstered by the assertion of power by miners during UK-wide national strikes in 1972 and 1974, which – although formally fought over wages – were underpinned by the experience of contraction and demands for sectoral security. The stabilization of coal’s place in energy markets was highly interrelated with protective labour market action and a renewed social embedding of coal industry. The incoming Wilson–Callaghan Labour government adopted the Plan for Coal in its resolution of the 1974 dispute. It enshrined a commitment to securing coal’s long-term place in British power generation and renewing the industry. Annual capacity was to be maintained at 120 million tonnes per annum through to 1985, by replacing 42 million tonnes of capacity, and then working towards up to 170 million deep-mined tonnes per annum under Plan 2000. Contemporaneously, North and Spooner emphasized that the experience of the oil spike ‘really threw into disarray existing conceptions about the energy base of the British economy’.⁸⁵ They noted that ‘the militant miners’ and the NCB now had a common interest in overturning the norms which prevailed during ‘the dreadful decade’ of the 1960s by asserting the value of coal and obtaining investment in the industry.⁸⁶ The plan re-established the hope of the early nationalized period, holding out the promise of an orderly transition to productive units and securing life-time employment.

Policymakers significantly altered their assessments of coal, including their perceptions of industrial relations conflicts. Their reflections confirm that a conflict between liberalizing economic imperatives and a protective countermovement was formative to the alterations in energy policy in the 1970s. During the previous decade, the NCB had viewed pit closures as an effective mechanism to discipline the workforce by ensuring they felt market pressures. In May 1962, J. H. Plumptre, the general manager for the Board’s South East Division, had written to Robens congratulating him on pressing for the closure of Glenochil and Rothes. Plumptre claimed these measures had helped improve performance at Betteshanger and other Kent collieries that traditionally had a combative workforce, ‘because NUM spokesmen have referred publicly to the danger that the sort of things that have been happening in Scotland might also occur in Kent unless results improved’.⁸⁷

By the early 1970s, officials within the Department for Trade and Industry were critical of nuclear power stations’ failure to match the economically viable performance which had been forecast in the 1950s and 1960s. One civil servant, writing in response to cabinet papers on energy policy, used Prime Minister Heath’s language of ‘lame ducks’ to describe nuclear power as an industry which could not perform without uneconomic state subsidies. K. M. Tait was also keen to argue that coal had a similar status, asserting – after the withdrawal of government funding for UCS and Rolls Royce – that ‘the maintenance of employment at public expense has manifestly not been a government aim in some other areas’.⁸⁸ Tait also questioned the insistence that coal was more secure than oil, following the beginning of significant production in the North Sea. This stance was shared by others commenting on the papers. One official argued that ‘more North Sea gas and oil enable us to phase out coal without loss of security’.⁸⁹ In light of these findings, a 1973 STUC annual conference contribution from the NUMSA’s general secretary and STUC general council member, Bill McLean, seems particularly perceptive. McLean moved a NUMSA motion in support of a coordinated energy policy operating within a long-term conception of national requirements rather than market fluctuations. He argued this was a pressing concern given expanding North Sea production. Oil could have been a valuable resource in a diversified energy sector. Instead, the fuel was as a threat to coalfield communities: ‘it was unfortunate indeed that every time a new oil strike was announced a shudder ran through the mining industry. This resulted from the lack of a definite government fuel strategy’.⁹⁰

However, despite the discovery of deposits in the North Sea shelf, by late 1971 policymakers were actively pursuing ‘alternatives to oil dependency’, emphasizing the build-up of political pressures in the Middle East and OPEC’s willingness to use oil prices for political and economic gain. These developments changed perspectives on coal. Industrial relations conflicts in the coalfields were viewed as a threat to economic security, just as they had been before the development of significant alternative fuel options during the late 1950s.⁹¹ The experience of the 1972 and 1974 strikes, alongside the 1973–4 oil spike, consolidated shifts towards a policy that strengthened coal’s position in the UK’s energy supply. As early as February 1971, the prime minister’s advisors had already noted the diplomatic prescience of reducing oil dependency to provide ‘a demonstration to the oil producing countries that they are in danger of killing, or at least weakening, the goose that lays the golden eggs’.⁹² During January 1972, the month in which the first of the two major coal disputes of the Heath premiership began, the Central Policy Review Staff argued that the government should take steps to preserve up to 120 million tonnes of annual coal production. This was justified to maintain employment and the balance of payments. Officials also noted that coal production could not be speedily restarted, which necessitated supporting a level of capacity judged to be of a suitable economic quality.⁹³ Notably, the figure of 120 million tonnes of deep-mined coal was the one that appeared in the Plan for Coal two years later following a change of government and remained central to coal production planning throughout the decade.⁹⁴

The NUM president, Joe Gormley, carried these arguments into tripartite meetings on energy policy. These were established under the Wilson– Callaghan governments as forums between government departments, trade unions representing coal and energy workers, and the NCB and the generating boards. In 1976, Gormley argued that coal mining productivity had only increased during the 1960s through ‘chopping limbs off,’ and that energy policy ‘should be as self-sufficient as possible’.⁹⁵ Indicating the relatively favourable environment for coal during the mid 1970s, a Central Energy Generating Board (CEGB) representative accused the NCB of using its power to ‘jack up’ prices in a captive market. Frank Tombs, chair of the SSEB, similarly complained that Scottish electricity coal prices had doubled in recent years, but that the Electricity Board was compelled to purchase it while other users were not.⁹⁶ At the same meeting, the NUMSA president, Michael McGahey, who had succeeded Alex Moffat in 1967, argued in favour of ‘a Scottish energy plan’. McGahey cited the distinct electricity markets and generating boards as justifying this approach. Scottish and Welsh Office representatives also attended the meeting, indicating the intersection of energy policy with constitutional concerns in the context of advanced discussions on devolution proposals.⁹⁷

A distinct Scottish coal interest was strongly communicated under the 1970s Labour governments, principally through secretary of state for energy Tony Benn’s receptiveness to the NUMSA, but also by the voices of sympathetic MPs and Scottish Office and Coal Board officials. Coal concerns were strongly related to power station investment and fuel choices. A tripartite meeting on Scottish power generation during 1976 discussed the threat to 10,000 coal jobs from power stations under construction which had been ordered before alterations in energy policy: the nuclear station at Hunterston, and oil-fired stations at Inverkip and Peterhead. Benn concurred with both the NCB and NUM that it was ‘intolerable and unacceptable’ to allow large-scale contraction in the Scottish coalfields. Furthermore, he argued that Scottish coal was in fact ‘relatively cheap compared to world prices’.⁹⁸

Benn was supported by Alex Eadie, who was minister of state for energy throughout the 1974–9 Labour governments. Eadie was the member for Midlothian, and a ‘miners’ MP’ from an NUM background. He shared Benn’s sentiments towards the promotion of coal. Under Benn’s and Eadie’s stewardship, some tangible benefits were provided in a situation where the Scottish coal lobby’s capacity was strengthened. At the 1978 NUMSA conference, Eadie was commended by McGahey for having ‘done so much for the coal mining industry in pushing forward our interests’. The Area president singled out the government’s provision of a support grant to the SSEB to preserve 8 million tonnes of annual coal burn as a major contribution to stabilizing the sector. This development laid the basis for the development of further modernized coal production in Scotland. A prominent example was extensive NCB investment in a project linking the Midlothian coalfield with the Longannet complex via Musselburgh, which facilitated access to coal reserves under the Firth of Forth. Another development connected Kinneil colliery in West Lothian to the Longannet drift mine at Castlebridge. However, noting the continuation of a long-term concern, McGahey also underlined that the Scottish nuclear sector was continuing to develop with considerable public investment in a new facility at Torness in East Lothian.⁹⁹ Although there were some significant reversals of policies which had undermined coal’s position during the 1960s, the longue durée trends towards power station diversification and the contraction of coal use in other sectors of the economy continued in the 1970s. North Sea oil represented a heightened threat, given it held out the prospect of secure domestic supplies in a major competitor fuel. Miners’ attitudes had shifted to a more assertive approach towards colliery closures. The commitments in the Plan for Coal had embedded the moral economy within the operation of energy policy.

Accelerated deindustrialization

The election of the Thatcher government in 1979 brought a new set of priorities to bear on the coal industry. This agenda involved open antagonism towards trade unions and social democratic economic infrastructure, of which the nationalized mining industry was a prime example. Its initial objectives included ending government subsidies for coal, eroding trade union influence through redistributing workplace authority towards management in the medium term, and finally the long-term goal of privatizing the industry. A phased approach towards coal sat within the Thatcherite ‘stepping stones’ strategy to eliminating trade union power by isolating and defeating groups of workers one by one.¹⁰⁰ Meeting the first objective began with the implementation of the 1980 Coal Industry Act which moved towards the complete removal of grant funding (other than social grants) by 1983–4.¹⁰¹ The second aim was achieved following the government’s and NCB’s decisive victory in the 1984–5 miners’ strike. Privatization followed in 1994.¹⁰² The build up to the strike was decisive in shaping the trajectory upon which policy later followed. It included a decisive reduction in NCB autonomy vis-à-vis government, in part through the strict application of External Funding Limits. This placed severe limitations on the Board’s expenditure, restricting its ability to sustain loss-making collieries or invest in new developments.

As with other restrictions on public spending and subsidy that are characteristically associated with neoliberalism, these measures had origins in Jim Callaghan’s premiership and the ramifications of the reforms implemented after the IMF bailout of 1976. Deflationary measures included public spending cuts and tax and interest rate rises. Unemployment resultantly rose to unprecedented levels in the post-Second World War era, but the economy was in fact recovering by the time of the 1979 general election.¹⁰³ The effects of neoliberal prescriptions became more pronounced as an instrument of energy policy transformation after 1979.¹⁰⁴At workplace level upwards, the imposition of market logic was accompanied by the assertion of managerial prerogative and the elimination of customary trade union rights. These developments contributed to incrementally worsening relations between the union and the Board and government. Relations between the NCB and government also soured before Ian MacGregor was appointed as the Board’s chair in 1983, with a remit for aggressive anti-trade unionism.¹⁰⁵

The first Thatcher government came to power in the context of a second oil spike following the Iranian Revolution, which renewed concerns over oil supplies. These developments appeared to provide a context for continuity in energy policy. During 1979, the NCB produced 83 million tonnes of coal for power stations, which was its highest ever sale. This required a ‘special effort’ to achieve deep-mined output.¹⁰⁶ The Board were working to a medium-term development plan which assumed that power station demand would roughly maintain itself at this level, if not expand, up to the year 2000. Although approximately stagnant, maintaining this level of production required extensive replacement of older capacity. Under the Plan for Coal, the NCB aimed to develop 38 million tonnes of annual production by 2000, or approximately 2 million tonnes per annum. F. B. Harrison, a Board official, was keen to stress that, rather than a policy of ‘coal at any price’ in the context of high demand, the NCB was in fact concentrating production within economically viable collieries.¹⁰⁷ Indicating continuity with the Benn period, during June 1979, Derek Ezra wrote to the new secretary of state for energy, David Howell, to confirm attendance at a tripartite meeting which would discuss ‘the role of coal in helping to diminish the consumption of oil’.¹⁰⁸ However, the meeting’s focus on the coal industry’s finances was an indicator of the priorities which Howell and his successors would pursue over the decade and a half to follow.¹⁰⁹

Before the strike began in 1984, energy policy was shaped by deliberations over the tolerable extent of colliery closures and the imposition of more stringent financial expectations onto the NCB within an increasingly liberalized market setting. Until the NCB’s anti-union turn was consolidated under MacGregor, there was a similar joint position between unions and the Board to when they had articulated its opposition to the direction of energy policy during the 1960s. These contentions related to views of finances, but also policies on coal importation: with restrictions lifted, the British Steel Corporation had begun to replace British-mined coal with foreign coke. Michael McGahey expressed outrage at economic vandalism which threatened viable collieries and undermined commitments to national self-sufficiency, stating that ‘it would be like Alice in Wonderland to replace dependency on oil with dependency on Polish coal’.¹¹⁰ Howell insisted that the Coal Industry Act represented a continuation of the Plan for Coal when he met the Board and unions in April 1980. The first Thatcher government’s scaling back of regional policy, including the end of regional grants for industrial enterprises, was another concern to both the other parties. Ezra emphasized that the NCB made significant contributions to Development Areas, emphasizing its Scottish presence, and underlining that its operations were threatened by the removal of support from government. He was echoed by Gormley.¹¹¹

On 10 February 1981, a large unofficial walkout across the British coalfields was triggered by the NCB’s announcement of closures which aimed to achieve significant financial savings. The list was withdrawn in the aftermath of the strike. NUM representatives did not object to pit closures in principle, but rather to the disruption of the nationalized industry’s consultative machinery and threats to coal’s place in a mixed energy policy. Gormley asserted fifteen days after that, ‘Our aim is to have the Plan for Coal fully implemented and for the industry to be able to sell all it produces, and we are having talks with the Government to this end’.¹¹² By this point, the commitment to coal upon which tripartite arrangements had been founded during the 1970s was being severely stretched. During the summer of 1981, the future of the Ayrshire coalfield was called into question when the Northern Irish Electricity Service was granted the option to use imported coal from outside the UK.¹¹³

By 1983, these developments had led the Coal Board under MacGregor to assume that both major remaining collieries in Ayrshire, Barony and Killoch, would close in the immediate future. The Board worked to an agenda of closing seventy-one collieries and eliminating 25 million tonnes of production per annum by 1987–8. As part of this forecast, the NCB also foresaw the closure of a swathe of modernized electricity pits in the Lothians and Fife, as well as Lanarkshire’s only remaining colliery, Cardowan.¹¹⁴ These steps provided the tinder for the 1984–5 miners’ strike. In 1982, the NUM’s newly elected left-wing president, Arthur Scargill, referred to the closure plans as a ‘hit list’.¹¹⁵ These projections originated in the government’s rejection of the Plan for Coal’s emphasis upon the use of indigenous resources and the effect which the deep recession of 1979–81 had upon the energy demand projected during the mid 1970s. The Thatcher government’s disregard for concerns with the balance of payments and preserving industrial production within the UK were pivotal to shaping the emergent energy policy regime.¹¹⁶ A symptomatic example was the closure of one of Scotland’s principal energy users, the aluminium smelter at Invergordon, in December 1981. NCB analysts noted the closure had a long-term downwards impact on anticipated electricity demand.¹¹⁷

The effects of these policies are underlined by the unemployment rates shown in table 1.3, and the steep reduction in coal employment between 1977 and 1987 in table 1.4, as well as the reduction in steel and engineering employment (tables 1.1 and 1.2). Given major changes to the census industrial occupation categories, it is not possible to generate comparative figures for 1991, but it is clear the trends apparent in the 1981 figures continued. Large-scale steel production in Scotland ceased in 1992 with the closure of Ravenscraig strip mill in Motherwell, North Lanarkshire, which was anticipated by a series of major layoffs in the preceding years.¹¹⁸ The engineering sector was affected by the ‘retreat’ of multinationals from Scotland. Major 1980s factory closures in North Lanarkshire alone included Burroughs’ office machinery in Cumbernauld in 1986 and Caterpillar’s tractor factory at Tannochside in 1987.¹¹⁹

Debates over the development of Scotland’s economic structure had become enmeshed with the growth of support for autonomy via ‘home rule’ or devolution through the experience of deindustrialization. An initial stimulus was provided by the onset of Scotland-wide coalfield contraction and the closure of modernized collieries during the 1950s. From the late 1960s, the inability of regional policy to successfully generate employment at a rate surpassing the loss of jobs in heavy industry generalized concerns. The effect of intensified deindustrialization accentuated demands for Scottish autonomy. McGahey explicitly linked the two at the 1983 NUMSA conference and made use of the term deindustrialization, indicating a view that Scotland was now enduring the loss of its industrial base rather than just sectoral contraction. He stated that Conservative ‘policies had led to the deindustrialization of the country, to the decimation of the coal, steel and railway industries, to the threat to the shipbuilding industry and to the attacks on social services’. In light of the 1983 election results, where a majority Conservative government was elected across the UK while Labour topped the poll in Scotland, McGahey stated that, ‘[t]he Conservative government does not represent Scotland’. He called on the Scottish Labour party leadership ‘to reconsider their position of refusing to take part in a broad-based campaign for a Scottish Assembly’ which could mobilize ‘all progressive and democratic opinion in Scottish society’. A motion in favour of a Scottish Assembly was passed unanimously. Articulating a sentiment which strengthened over the 1980s, David Hamilton, the NUM delegate for Monktonhall colliery in Midlothian, argued that ‘[t]he Tories did not have a mandate in Scotland’.¹²⁰ Hamilton’s words are significant in anticipating the more prominent articulation of the ‘mandate’ argument following the 1987 general election, when Conservative representation fell from twenty-one to ten Scottish seats.¹²¹

By 1983, as the great strike for jobs approached, the NUMSA articulated its opposition to Thatcherism in terms that fused national and industrial or class-centred perspectives which were conjoined through the coalfield moral economy. This outlook was the outcome of the long experience of economic restructuring in the Scottish coalfields, and the product of industrial relations within the nationalized industry, especially its consultative structure and consensual culture. The application of a national framing to Scottish coalfield development had origins at least as far back as the NCB itself, in the form of its relatively autonomous Scottish Division. Opposition to closures from the late 1950s onwards took on an increasingly pronounced national, rather than merely localized, mantle as the future of the coal mining industry itself was questioned. These developments also converged with the growing domination of coal consumption by power station usage, which firmly connected the sector’s fate to key government policy decisions. Both the Scottish national and class facets of the NUMSA’s opposition to Thatcherism were grounded in an understanding that colliery closures were illegitimate, which bolstered its opposition to the broader accelerating process of deindustrialization. Closures were imposed without popular assent, ignoring establishing customs, and withdrawing the safeguarding of communal economic security that both the governance of the nationalized industry and the regional policy regime had broadly provided between the 1940s and 1970s. It was the transgression of these norms which differentiated the 1980s from the four previous decades. This culminated not only in increasing colliery job losses, but also the closure of assembly plants brought to Scotland through UK regional policy. These experiences disembedded industrial employment from the communitarian norms through which coalfield deindustrialization had been managed under public ownership hitherto.

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¹ J. Phillips, Scottish Coal Miners in the Twentieth Century (Edinburgh, 2019), p. 64; Willie Doolan, interview with author, the Pivot Community Centre, Moodiesburn, 14 June 2019.

² C. Harvie, No Gods and Precious Few Heroes: Scotland’s Twentieth Century (Edinburgh, 1998), p. 55.

³ J. Phillips, ‘The moral economy of deindustrialization in post-1945 Scotland’, in The Deindustrialized World: Ruination in Post-Industrial Places, ed. S. High, L. MacKinnnon and A. Perchard (Vancouver, 2017), pp. 313–30, at p. 314.

⁴ R. Smith, ‘New towns for Scottish miners: the rise and fall of a social ideal (1945–1948)’, Scottish Economic and Social History, ix (1989), 71–9, at pp. 73–6.

⁵ The National Archives (TNA), Coal 31/168, Coal Demand (draft section of CIE Interim Report) (1974).

⁶ TNA, Coal 31/135 Part 2, Plan for Coal Review, 1981.

⁷ J. Walker ‘The road to Sizewell: the origins of the UK nuclear power programme’, Contemporary Record, i (1987), 33–50, at p. 44.

⁸ E. A. Cameron, ‘The stateless nation and the British state since 1918’, in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Scottish History, ed. T. M. Devine and J. Wormald (Oxford, 2013), pp. 620–34, at p. 629.

⁹ J. Tomlinson and E. Gibbs, ‘Planning the new industrial nation: Scotland, 1931 to 1979’, Contemporary British History, xxx (2016), 584–606.

¹⁰ J. Tomlinson, ‘A ‘failed experiment’? Public ownership and the narratives of post-war Britain’, Labour History Review, lxxiii (2008), 228–43, at p. 238.

¹¹ G. C. Cameron, Industrial Movement and the Regional Problem (Edinburgh, 1966), p. 1.

¹² British General Election Manifestos, 1900–1974, ed. F. W. S. Craig (London, 1975), p. 127.

¹³ Tomlinson, ‘Failed’, p. 239.

¹⁴ NCB Scottish Division, Scotland’s Coal Plan (Edinburgh, 1955), pp. 6–7.

¹⁵ NCB Scottish Division, Scotland’s Coal Plan, p. 6.

¹⁶ NCB Scottish Division, Scotland’s Coal Plan, pp. 6–16.

¹⁷ A. Taylor, The NUM and British Politics, i: 1944–1968 (Aldershot, 2003), p. 92.

¹⁸ National Mining Museum Scotland archives, Newtongrange, Midlothian (NMMS), National Union of Mineworkers Scottish Area (NUMSA), Minutes of Executive Committee and Special Conferences, 8 July 1946 to 11 June 1947, pp. 6, 37–8.

¹⁹ NMMS, NUMSA, Minutes of Executive Committee and Special Conferences, 8 July 1946 to 11 June 1947, pp. 79–84.

²⁰ P. Abercrombie and R. H. Matthew, The Clyde Valley Regional Plan, 1946 (Edinburgh, 1949), p. 96.

²¹ Abercrombie and Matthew, Clyde Valley Regional Plan, pp. 94–100.

²² Abercrombie and Matthew, Clyde Valley Regional Plan, p. 7.

²³ P. Payne, Growth and Contraction: Scottish industry, c.1860–1990 (Glasgow, 1992), p. 38.

²⁴ TNA, POWE 33/2156/54, brief for the minister’s meeting with the oil companies, 7 June 1955.

²⁵ TNA, POWE 33/2156/9, responses to ministry paper in dialogue with CEA, 1955.

²⁶ Walker, ‘Sizewell’, p. 48.

²⁷ TNA, POWE 33/2156, Ministry of Fuel and Power, Debate on the National Coal Board report for 1954: note for minister’s speech, 20 July 1955.

²⁸ TNA, POWE 33/2156/38, C. L. Wilkinson, Note to minister: coal policy, 13 July 1955.

²⁹ TNA, POWE 14/857, teleprinter message from senior Scottish officer, Edinburgh, to A. B. Powell, Coal Division, 1957. Electricity smalls refers to the variety of coal most commonly burned in power stations.

³⁰ B. Bluestone and B. Harrison, The Deindustrialization of America: Plant Closings, Community Abandonment, and the Dismantling of Basic Industry (New York, 1982), p. 15.

³¹ R. Stokes, Opting for Oil: the Political Economy of Technological Change in the West German Chemical Industry, 1945–1961 (New York, 1994), p. 96.

³² T. Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (London 2013), p. 15.

³³ P. Smith and J. Brown, ‘Economic crisis, foreign capital and working-class response, 1945–1979’, in Scottish Capitalism: Class, State and Nation from before the Union to the present, ed. T. Dickson (London, 1980), pp. 287–320, at p. 292.

³⁴ J. N. Randall, ‘New towns and new industries’, in The Economic Development of Modern Scotland, 1950–1980, ed. Richard Saville (Edinburgh, 1985), pp. 245–69, at p. 245.

³⁵ R. J. Finlay, Modern Scotland, 1914–2000 (London, 2004), pp. 259–65.

³⁶ J. Foster, ‘The twentieth century’, in The New Penguin History of Scotland: from the Earliest Times to Present Day, ed. R. A. Housing and W. W. Knox (London, 2001), pp. 417–96, at p. 469.

³⁷ J. N. Toothill, Inquiry into the Scottish Economy, 1960–1961: Report of a Committee Appointed by the Scottish Council (Development and Industry) under the Chairmanship of J. N. Toothill (Edinburgh, 1961), pp. 38, 155.

³⁸ Toothill, Inquiry into the Scottish Economy, pp. 36–8.

³⁹ National Records of Scotland, Edinburgh (NRS), SEP 4/567/42, Board of Trade, Scottish Office, 21 Apr. 1964, some notes relating to industrial development in Scotland as a contribution to the secretary of state’s speech at the opening of BNJ’s new factory at East Kilbride.

⁴⁰ NRS, SEP 17/70/15, training arrangement in the growth areas: note of a meeting held by the minister of state at 11am on Tues. 4 Feb. 1964.

⁴¹ I. Levitt, ‘The origins of the Scottish Development Department, 1943–1962’, Scottish Affairs, xiv (1996), 42–63, at p. 59.

⁴² TNA, PREM 13/1610, Ministry of Power, 27 Sept. 1967, notes for the prime minister’s meeting with the NUM on 29 Sept.; J. Tomlinson, ‘Inventing “decline”: the falling behind of the British economy in the postwar years’, Economic History Review, xlix (1996), 731–57.

⁴³ NMMS, NUMSA, Minutes of Executive and Special Conferences, 12 June 1961 to 6/8 June 1962, p. 283.

⁴⁴ NRS, SEP 4/1629, 3 Feb. 1970, Glasgow: report of a visit by Minister of State; G. Kaufman, ‘Varley, Eric Graham, Baron Varley’, ODNB <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/100192> [accessed 20 Oct. 2020].

⁴⁵ Fuel Policy (Parl. Papers 1967 [Cmnd. 3438]), p. 1.

⁴⁶ S. Taylor, The Fall and Rise of Nuclear Power in Britain: a History (Cambridge, 2016), p. 19.

⁴⁷ R. S. Halliday, The Disappearing Scottish Colliery: a Personal View of some Aspects of Scotland’s Coal Industry since Nationalisation (Edinburgh, 1990), p. 7.

⁴⁸ W. Ashworth, The History of the British Coal Industry, v: 1946–1982: the Nationalized Industry (Oxford, 1986) , p. 250.

⁴⁹ E. Gibbs and J. Phillips, ‘Remembering Auchengeich: the largest fatal accident in Scottish coal in the nationalised era’, Scottish Labour History, liv (2019), 47–57, at pp. 47–9.

⁵⁰ TNA, POWE 37/481, 24 June 1959, Ministry of Power Coal Division, note on the strike at Devon Pit.

⁵¹ TNA, POWE 37/481, R. Corley, Draft brief for the parliamentary secretary’s meeting with the delegation from the Scottish NUM on Thurs. 26 Feb. 1959.

⁵² TNA, POWE 37/481, R. Corley, Draft brief.

⁵³ TNA, Coal 31/96, 25 Apr. 1962, Glenochil drift mine (aide memorandum for the board’s side).

⁵⁴ TNA, Coal 31/96, 29 March 1962, Memorandum: Glenochil and Rothes Closures.

⁵⁵ TNA, Coal 31/96, 16 March 1962, E. H. Browne, Rothes colliery: investigation into expenditure on development drivages; Coal 31/9612, March 1962, A. J. O Davis, Further report into the finance on expenditure against authorisation on five feet foot dook drives, Rothes colliery, East Fife Area, Scottish Division.

⁵⁶ Halliday, Disappearing, p. 3.

⁵⁷ TNA, Coal 31/96, NCB, London, 14 March 1962, G. Middleton, STUC, Glasgow to Lord Robens.

⁵⁸ TNA, Coal 31/96, NCB, London, 1963, William Wolfe, SNP, to Lord Roben.

⁵⁹ TNA, POWE 14/1495/6, Ministry of Power, London 16 Aug. 1962, J. L. Warrander, Ministry of Power, Edinburgh to R. E. Dearing.

⁶⁰ TNA, POWE 14/1495/5/3, 11 March 1963, NCB Ayrshire Press Office, ‘Barony colliery’.

⁶¹ TNA, POWE 14/1495, 13 March 1963, M. Stevenson to M. Cairns.

⁶² TNA, POWE 14/1495, 6 Feb. 1963, Ministry of Power General Division, TUC and Fuel and Power policy brief for minister’s meeting on 12 Feb. 1963.

⁶³ TNA, Coal 74/1287, 25 Jan. 1962, W. J. S. McKinnell to secretary, Memorandum: departmental committee on electricity in Scotland.

⁶⁴ TNA, Coal 74/1287, 1 May 1962, Departmental Committee on electricity in Scotland: oral evidence by the NCB.

⁶⁵ TNA, POWE 52/17/38A, Digest of report by Merz and McLellan on proposed new station in Scotland, 1963.

⁶⁶ TNA, Coal 31/120, Lauriston House, Edinburgh, 22 June 1967, NCB note: the pattern of output of coal for electricity generation in the 1970s from the Scottish coalfields; R. Saville, ‘The coal business’, Scottish Economic and Social History, viii (1988), 93–6, at p. 93.

⁶⁷ J. Winterton and R. Winterton, Coal, Crisis and Conflict: the 1984–85 Miners’ Strike in Yorkshire (Manchester, 1989), pp. 11–17.

⁶⁸ TNA, POWE 52/278, Scotsman, 25 July 1968, ‘Productivity in coal industry continues to rise’.

⁶⁹ TNA, Coal 31/123, Times, ‘Sign of a new battle over coal’, in NCB Press Office, What the papers say, 8 May 1967; Coal 31/96, 25 Apr. 1962, Note: Glenochil drift mine (aide memorandum for the board’s side).

⁷⁰ TNA, Coal 30/629, Manpower and social implications (1967).

⁷¹ TNA, Coal 30/629, preliminary report of the working party on fuel policy (1967).

⁷² TNA, Coal 31/123, A. Robens, NCB, London to R. Marsh, Ministry of Power, London, 12 June 1967.

⁷³ TNA, POWE 14/2501, Miss K. M. Tait to Mr Emmett, draft cabinet paper on energy policy, 7 Oct. 1971.

⁷⁴ NRS, SEP/4/4251/5, H. J. Henson, Board of Trade Office for Scotland, Glasgow, to J. H. Brown, Department of Industry Division of the Board of Trade, London, 22 Sept. 1969.

⁷⁵ P. Scott, ‘Regional development and policy’, in The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, iii: Structural Change and Growth, 1939–2000, ed. R. Floud and P. Johnson (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 332–67, at pp. 353–4.

⁷⁶ NRS, SEP/4/3791/26/3, background note for the meeting between the minister for industry and R. W. Macdonald, president of the Burroughs Corporation, to take place on 24 July 1972.

⁷⁷ Scottish Council Research Institute, US Investment in Scotland (Edinburgh, 1974), pp. 3, 8.

⁷⁸ Scottish Council Research Institute, US Investment in Scotland, pp. 2, 8.

⁷⁹ NRS, SEP 4/2337, A. W. Teel to Mr Grant, SEPB, Edinburgh, subject: redundancies and unemployment change, 6 Sept. 1967.

⁸⁰ S. Holland, The Regional Problem (London, 1976), pp. 29–36.

⁸¹ NRS, SEP 4/13/32, E. Reoch, SEPD, Edinburgh to J. A. Scott, SEPD, Edinburgh, subject: secretary of state’s engagement at Messrs Hoover, 23 Jan. 1970.

⁸² NRS, SEP/4/3550, Scotsman, 21 June 1972.

⁸³ J. Phillips, The Industrial Politics of Devolution: Scotland in the 1960s and 1970s (Manchester, 2008), pp. 109–10.

⁸⁴ M. Chick, Electricity and Energy Policy in Britain, France and the United States since 1945 (Cheltenham, 2007), p. 25.

⁸⁵ J. North and D. Spooner, ‘The great UK coal rush: a progress report to the end of 1976’, Area, ix (1977), 15–27, at pp. 15–19.

⁸⁶ North and Spooner, ‘The great UK coal rush’, pp. 15–19.

⁸⁷ TNA, Coal 31/96, J. H. Plumptre, NCB South East Area, Dover, to A. Robens, NCB, London, 11 May 1962; J. McIlroy and A. Campbell, ‘Beyond Betteshanger: Order 1305 in the Scottish coalfields during the Second World War, part 1: politics prosecutions and protest’, Historical Studies in Industrial Relations, xv (2003), 27–72.

⁸⁸ TNA, POWE 14/2501, Miss K. M. Tait to Mr Emmett, subject: draft cabinet paper on energy policy, 7 Oct. 1971.

⁸⁹ TNA, POWE 14/2501, B. D. Emmet to Mr Thomas, subject: energy policy, 5 Oct. 1971.

⁹⁰ Scottish Trades Union Congress (STUC), Annual Report 1972–1973, lxxvi (1973), 286.

⁹¹ TNA, POWE 14/2501/38, B. Jones, Draft report D, 30 Sept. 1971.

⁹² TNA, PREM 15/1144, note for Prime Minister: energy policy, 25 Feb. 1971.

⁹³ TNA, PREM 15/1144/10A, Central Policy Review Staff, A coal strategy for the United Kingdom, Jan. 1972.

⁹⁴ TNA, Coal 31/166, NCB memorandum: Coal industry tripartite discussion: review of Plan for Coal, 6 Oct. 1976.

⁹⁵ TNA, Coal 31/166/13, Department of Energy paper 14: Tripartite energy consultations, London, 20 Feb. 1976.

⁹⁶ TNA, Coal 31/166/13, Department of Energy paper 14: Tripartite energy consultations, London, 20 Feb. 1976.

⁹⁷ TNA, Coal 31/166/13, Department of Energy paper 14: Tripartite energy consultations, London, 20 Feb. 1976; A. Ebke, ‘The decline of the mining industry and the debate about Britishness of the 1990s and early 2000s’, Contemporary British History, xxxii (2018), 121–41, at pp. 129–32.

⁹⁸ TNA, Coal 31/166, Tripartite meeting on electricity coal burn in Scotland, 5 Feb. 1976.

⁹⁹ NMMS, NUMSA, Executive Committee Minutes, 27 June 1977 to 14–16 June 1978, p. 601.

¹⁰⁰ J. Hoskyns and N. Strauss, ‘Stepping Stones’ (1977) Centre for Policy Studies <https://www.cps.org.uk/files/reports/original/111026104730-5B6518B5823043FE9D7C54846CC7FE31.pdf> [accessed 21 Nov. 2019].

¹⁰¹ TNA, Coal 31/138, Coal Industry Act (1980).

¹⁰² M. Parker, Thatcherism and the Fall of Coal (Oxford, 2000), p. 210.

¹⁰³ J. Meadhurst, That Option No Longer Exists: Britain, 1974–76 (Arelsford, 2014), p. 2.

¹⁰⁴ Chick, Electricity, p. 103.

¹⁰⁵ J. Phillips, ‘Containing, isolating and defeating the miners: the UK cabinet ministerial group on coal and the three phases of the 1984–85 strike’, Historical Studies in Industrial Relations, xxxv (2014), 117–41, at p. 125.

¹⁰⁶ TNA, Coal 31/138, F. B. Harrison, Plan for Coal review: summary of main points for discussion with M. J. Parker, 13 Feb. 1979.

¹⁰⁷ TNA, Coal 31/138, Short-term proposals for the industry, 4 July 1979.

¹⁰⁸ TNA, Coal 31/138, D. Ezra, NCB, London, to D. Howell, Department of Energy, London, 20 June 1979.

¹⁰⁹ TNA, Coal 31/138, D. Ezra, NCB, London, to D. Howell, Department of Energy, London, 20 June 1979.

¹¹⁰ TNA, Coal 31/138, D. Ezra, NCB, London, to D. Howell, Department of Energy, London, 20 June 1979.

¹¹¹ TNA, Coal 31/138, note of a meeting held at 3pm on Wednesday 23 Apr. 1980 in House of Commons, 30 Apr. 1980.

¹¹² TNA, Coal 31/138, meeting held at 11am on Wednesday 25 Feb. 1981, Thames House South, London.

¹¹³ TNA, Coal 31/38, meeting held at 11am on Tuesday 16 July 1981, Thames House South.

¹¹⁴ TNA, Coal 31/138, R. J. Price, S. Medley and K. Hunts, Memorandum: NCB general purposes committee area: five year strategies, 21 July 1983.

¹¹⁵ TNA, Coal 31/433/5, Second report from the Energy Committee: pit closures, 21 Dec. 1982.

¹¹⁶ J. Tomlinson, ‘De-industrialisation not decline: a new meta-narrative for post-war British history’, Twentieth Century British History, xxvii (2016), 76–99, at p. 87.

¹¹⁷ TNA, Coal 101/580, The effects of introducing Scottish Coal into the CEGB System in 1982–3.

¹¹⁸ P. Payne, ‘The end of steelmaking in Scotland c.1967–1993’, Scottish Economic and Social History, xv (1995), 66–84, at pp. 76–7.

¹¹⁹ C. Woolfson and J. Foster, Track Record: the Story of the Caterpillar Occupation (London, 1988), p. 33; N. Hood and S. Young, Multinationals in Retreat: the Scottish Experience (Edinburgh, 1982).

¹²⁰ NMMS, NUMSA, Executive Committee Minutes, July 1982 to June 1983, pp. 702–3.

¹²¹ D. McCrone, The New Sociology of Scotland (London, 2017), p. 121.