Arthur Scargill

Arthur Scargill (born 11 January 1938) is a British trade unionist who was President of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) from 1982 to 2002. He is best known for leading the 1984–1985 UK miners' strike, a major event in the history of the British labour movement.

Joining the NUM at the age of 19 in 1957, Scargill was one of its leading activists by the late 1960s. He led an unofficial strike in 1969, and played a key organising role during the strikes of 1972 and 1974, the latter of which played a part in the downfall of Edward Heath's Conservative government.

Thereafter Scargill led the NUM through the 1984–1985 miners' strike. It turned into a confrontation with the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher in which the miners' union was defeated. Initially a Young Communist League member, then a Labour Party member, Scargill is now deputy leader of the Socialist Labour Party (SLP), having founded the party in 1996 and served as its leader from the party's foundation until 2024.

Scargill was born in Worsbrough Dale near Barnsley, West Riding of Yorkshire. His father, Harold (died 1989), was a miner and a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. His mother, Alice (née Pickering), was a professional cook. He did not take the Eleven-Plus exam and went to Worsbrough Dale School (now called the Elmhirst School). He left school in 1953 at fifteen years old to work as a coal miner at Woolley Colliery, where he worked for nineteen years.

Scargill recalled how after becoming a miner, the poor working conditions and "people who should never have been working, having to work to live ... on that first day I promised myself I would try one day to get things changed". He joined the Young Communist League in 1955, becoming its Yorkshire District Chair in 1956 and shortly after a member of its National Executive Committee. In 1957 he was elected NUM Yorkshire Area Youth Delegate, and attended the 6th World Festival of Youth and Students in Moscow as a representative of the Yorkshire miners. In 1958, he attended the World Federation of Trade Unions youth congress in Prague. In a 1975 interview with New Left Review Scargill said:

I was in the Young Communist League for about six or seven years and I became a member of its National Executive Committee responsible for industrial work. The secretary at this time was a very good friend of mine called Jimmy Reid, and we're still close friends. A lot of other people on the National Executive at that time went on and became very respectable Labour MPs in Parliament. Many of us started in the 1950s in the Young Communist League. So that was my initial introduction into socialism and into political militancy. My father was a Communist. My mother was strictly non-political. But my father never forced me to be involved in politics at all.

In 1961, Scargill was elected a member of the Woolley NUM Branch Committee. Scargill joined the Labour Party in 1962. He regularly attended Workers' Educational Association (WEA) classes and Co-operative Party educational programmes, and in 1962, undertook a three-year, part-time course at the University of Leeds, where he studied economics, industrial relations and social history. In 1965 he was elected Branch Delegate from Woolley to the Yorkshire NUM Area Council, and in 1969 was elected a member of the Yorkshire NUM Area Executive Committee. Although he never worked at Barrow Colliery in his home village, he was involved in the politics of the branch, where the membership was much more left-wing than in the conservative Woolley Colliery. In 1970, he was elected a member of the regional committee of the Co-operative Retail Services in Barnsley and a delegate to its national conference. He also represented the Barnsley Co-op at Cooperative congresses.

Scargill opposed civilian nuclear power and, during the first Wilson ministry, became highly critical of the government's energy policy. After a Labour Party conference speech on energy policy by Richard Marsh in July 1967, Scargill said: