For want of a ballot, the fight was lost

It is just over 20 years since I was awarded the last gold medal of the Boilermakers' Society - an honour bestowed upon me because Neil Kinnock was otherwise engaged on the day of presentation.

The ceremony was held in Manchester under the auspices of the General and Municipal Workers' Union, into which the old craft guild had been absorbed. David Basnett, the general secretary of that conglomerate, spent the evening - in public and private - agonising about the miners' strike.

At about nine o'clock, I got my usual telephone call from Newsnight. The Labour party was maintaining what the cliche calls a studied silence on the subject - apart from Stan Orme (our official spokesman) whose House of Commons performances were his finest hour. But every day, members of what was laughingly called the Labour leadership were invited to appear on all the news programmes. We always declined with thanks. But on gold medal day - encouraged by Basnett - I accepted.

I am still not sure whether or not I broke the party line. For the party line was by no means straight. But I said, and I meant, that Arthur Scargill should ballot his members and that - were I a miner given the chance to vote - I would unhesitatingly support the proposition that the strike should continue. I was convinced - though I am not sure that I described my conviction -that holding a ballot would make the difference between defeat and victory.

The victory would not have been complete. The unstoppable advance of the global market would have made pit closures inevitable, and the balance sheet of profit and loss would have guaranteed an accelerating decline in output. In Britain, only farmers are allowed to defy the market with subsidies and weirdly constructed prices. But the job losses would have been slowed down, and the mining towns and villages - some of which still show the signs of devastation - would have been given time to adjust to the end of an industry that dominated their whole lives.

Of all the myths that have surfaced to mark the strike's 20th anniversary, the explanations of Arthur Scargill's refusal to hold a ballot have been the most fanciful. I accept Scargill's own - honourable but unrealistic - account of his motives. Holding a ballot would have allowed miners, whose jobs appeared safe, to vote against a strike that was intended to protect employment in more vulnerable coalfields. He was sure that Nottingham would think only of its own future, and even feared south Wales might do the same. According to his logic, a ballot was an invitation to leap into the lifeboat and watch the ship sink.

Everyone I knew in Wales said that it would be solid, both north and south, for protecting the whole industry. And, since it should have been obvious that the miners could not win without a ballot, Scargill should have grasped the best chance of victory that he had. A majority for a strike would have legitimised the battle. Nottingham would have lost its excuse to renege. The TUC would have felt an obligation to offer its help and the Labour party would have felt free to speak out. Most important, public opinion would have remained firmly on the miners' side.

All the forces ranged against the miners, from Margaret Thatcher to the Metropolitan police officers drafted into South Yorkshire, would have adjusted their attitudes if the swell of support and sympathy had continued. Two aspects of the strike prevented that - Scargill's personality and performance, and the failure to ballot. One of them could have been neutralised.

Until I went to Corton Wood at the end of the strike, I had forgotten how detached mining communities were from the world outside the coalfields and how much their esprit de corps made them reluctant to accommodate their candid friends. I should have remembered. One of the features of my childhood was my mother's abiding resentment against the railwaymen, whom she held responsible (with dubious justification) for the miners' defeats in 1912 and 1926. I inherited many of the romantic notions that she had acquired in a prewar pit village. They included the conviction that miners only lose when they are betrayed. By 1984 we should have realised that, in the modern world, cunning has to match courage.

Whatever else can be said about Scargill, no one can accuse him of being the Barnsley Machiavelli. Almost all he did - from the timing of the strike to his pubic appearances - might have been planned by government strategists. And yet, fundamentally, he was right. Thatcher was determined to break the miners as a salutary lesson to other trade unions. She did want to accelerate the end of coal. It makes it all the more frustrating that he, and his colleagues in the NUM leadership, should have failed to do the one thing that might have enabled them to stop her in her tracks.

comment@guardian.co.uk