Arthur Scargill and allies 'expelled' from miner's union

The NUM has written to Arthur Scargill to say that the former president can no longer be a full financial member

Arthur Scargill's 57-year membership of the National Union of Mineworkers looked set to end in acrimony when he and a number of his allies in the union were in effect expelled after being told by letter that they no longer qualified for full union benefits.

The move follows increasingly bitter relations between Scargill, the NUM's honorary president now aged 72, and the union he led to disastrous defeat in the year long 80s miners' strike following a dispute over his continuing eligibility for a number of perks and benefits. Two months ago, he threatened legal action over the union's refusal to continue subsidising the fuel used at his Barnsley home or to contribute to the cost of a burglar alarm at the property. There has also been a falling out over his use of a union-subsidised flat in the Barbican Estate in London.

Chris Kitchen, the union's general secretary, said that Scargill could remain honorary president, or could become a life member, honorary member or retired member, but could not be a full financial member and had lost his voting rights. The letter sent to him apparently stated that he no longer qualified according to the union's own rulebook, which Scargill himself helped to draw up, and the decision was agreed by the Yorkshire area section of the union.

Ken Capstick, a Scargill ally and editor of the union magazine the Miner, who also received a letter, said: "We have been told that the reason we are being expelled is that we don't qualify under the union's rules. A number of us have been raising claims of financial irregularities in the union, and I believe we are now being subjected to a witch-hunt because of this. We will challenge this decision, which has been made on extremely spurious grounds. I believe this is the darkest day in the union's history. Chris Kitchen has brought nothing but shame to his office.

"I can tell you Mr Scargill is angry and he will fight this in the courts. The union is losing money hand over fist so why should it want to expel members who want to pay their subscriptions?"

He said that the different categories of membership being offered to Scargill, without voting rights, were illegal as he was still working for the union.

An indication of the NUM's membership decline is that, whereas at the time of the strike it had nearly 300,000 members, that figure is now down to about 1,500.

Scargill himself accused the union earlier in the summer of making an "unlawful and unconstitutional" investigation into his benefits, saying: "I receive, like every other full-time official, concessionary fuel. It has been stopped by somebody, wrongly. People have no right to interfere with a legally binding contract of employment." He insisted that all former leaders had had the right to use the London flat after their retirement.

The internecine union struggle appears to mark an erosion of the ex-leader's formerly devoted support bases in Yorkshire, Scotland and Wales.

Scargill retired from daily leadership of the NUM in 2002, but has remained its most visible figure while also devoting his energies to leading the Socialist Labour Party, for whom he regularly speaks.

He remains the most controversial and arguably disastrous trade union leader of modern times, presiding over a precipitous decline in membership of the once mighty union following widespread pit closures in the wake of the NUM's split and defeat during the 1984-5 strike. Recruited to work in the south Yorkshire pits as a teenager in 1953, he had been a union official since 1960 and first came to national prominence during the 1974 miners' strike, which contributed to the fall of Edward Heath's Conservative government.

A decade later, the Thatcher government was better prepared to take on the union over pit closures, and had the resolve to overcome the strikers in the face of a divided union, whose Nottinghamshire members declined to accept Scargill's call for a national strike without a membership ballot. Scargill's strategy and tactics in leading the strike – he was arrested at one stage during the notorious "battle" of Orgreave where an army of pickets confronted mounted police – were widely, if quietly, questioned by others in the union and in the wider labour movement both at the time and subsequently.

Francis Beckett, co-author of Marching to the Fault Line, the most recent history of the dispute, said: "Arthur Scargill took a proud and powerful trade union, and, by sheer hubris and a failure to think through what he was doing, turned it into a shadow of its former self. He created sectarianism and gave rise to a union that was so divided that it started turning in on itself."

Neither Scargill nor the union were available for comment.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/aug/25/arthur-scargill-expelled-num-finances