MI5 and the Miners' Strike
A march at Port Talbot in Wales during the 1984 Miner’s Strike (Alan Denney, CC.2.0).
Welcome! I’m Tom Griffin and this is my intelligence history newsletter. Feel free to share this post with the button below.
One of the climactic struggles of recent British social history began 40 years ago this month. On 6 March 1984 the National Union of Mineworkers began a year-long strike against the closure of pits by Margaret Thatcher’s Government.
The strike had a significant intelligence dimension. Christopher Andrew’s authorised history of MI5 describes it as the climax of the Thatcher government’s fear of subversion through industrial disruption.1
The head of MI5’s counter-subversion wing, F Branch, concluded on 13 March that ‘there did not appear to be significant subversive involvement’ in the dispute, though Thatcher remained unconvinced.2
MI5 nevertheless maintained wiretaps on NUM leaders Arthur Scargill and Mick McGahey under Home Office Warrants. This operation was overseen by Stella Rimington, head of F2 section, responsible for counter-subversion in the trade unions.3 Britain’s mole in the KGB London residency, Oleg Gordievsky provided intelligence on Soviet funding for the miners.4
One key question is what action MI5 took on the basis of the intelligence it collected. Andrew notes that ‘a best-selling history of the miner’s strike later claimed that Rimington was heavily involved in orchestrating dirty tricks against the NUM.’5
Strikingly, Andrew does not directly deny this claim. The history he refers to, Seamus Milne’s The Enemy Within, recounts allegations of MI5 agent-running in the coalfields as well as of the involvement of the the intelligence services in tracking NUM funds.6
The latter aspect is the best documented. After GCHQ whistle-blowers approached the Guardian in late 1990, John Major admitted that the Government had passed information to sequestrators targeting the NUM’s finances.7
More details emerged when journalist Mark Hollingsworth uncovered a February 1985 memo by the Cabinet Secretary, Robert Armstrong.
Armstrong detailed a series of secret meetings in Whitehall with an unnamed MI5 officer. Their conversation did not concern foreign spies, subversion, national security or official secrets. The agenda was how to find the funds and assets of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). A lawsuit – orchestrated by David Hart, the machiavellian political adviser to Thatcher – had succeeded in declaring the dispute illegal because a national ballot had not taken place. When the NUM refused to call off the strike, the high court found the union guilty of contempt of court and issued a £200,000 fine. And when the NUM refused to pay up, a judge ordered its funds to be seized by the court-appointed sequestrator.
The sequestrator, Brian Larkins of Price Waterhouse, was provided intelligence about the location of NUM funds in return for information on potential foreign funding. Armstrong himself had doubts about the defensibility of this operation if it became public.
“It could be argued it was a legitimate use of interception to seek to discover what assistance the NUM was receiving from overseas in the provisional movement of funds,” Armstrong wrote. “It would be more difficult to justify the use of information obtained by interception to assist the searches of the sequestrators.”8
One striking feature of this episode is how the intelligence services were enlisted in support of a court action which began with the private counter-subversion lobby. David Hart later become the proprietor of British Briefing, a right-wing periodical on subversion, whose writers included former F Branch officer Charles Elwell.
According to a recent Searchlight report, a number of articles from British Briefing were read and approved by Mrs Thatcher during the mid-1980s.9 The influence of figures like Hart may be one reason why Thatcher discounted the more sober assessments recorded by Andrew.
The defeat of the miners’ strike marked the end of an era in which counter-subversion was the key focus for MI5. With the replacement of John Jones by Antony Duff as Director General, counter-terrorism increasingly moved to the forefront.
A private counter-subversion lobby continues to exist in 21st century Britain. Indeed, under the even vaguer label of counter-extremism, it has prospered in recent times, shaping official rhetoric as belligerent as anything from the era when Thatcher labelled the miners ‘the enemy within.’
Christopher Andrew, Defence of the Realm, The Authorized History of MI5, Allen Lane, 2009, p.676.
Andrew, p.676.
Andrew, p.677.
Andrew, p.679. According to Gordievsky, money from the Soviet trade unions was actually approved by the Communist Party, against KGB advice.
Andrew, p.677.
Seumas Milne, The Enemy Within: The Secret War Against the Miners, Verso, 2004.
Milne, p.307.
Mark Hollingsworth, For years, I suspected MI5 interfered in the miners’ strike. The truth was even more shocking than I thought, Guardian, 7 March 2024.
Exclusive: How Margaret Thatcher approved right-wing smear sheet attacking Searchlight editor, Searchlight, 3 March 2024.