The writing was on the wall for the UK mining industry when, 35 years ago today, Ian MacGregor was named as the new chairman of the National Coal Board.
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and other senior Ministers in her Conservative government saw MacGregor as a visionary and a moderniser. Three years earlier been brought in to take control at the British Steel Corporation, tasked with returning it to profitability. He managed to stem the losses, but his hard-hitting reforms included widespread plant closures and slashing the workforce by almost half.
Despite being born and raised in Scotland, MacGregor had made his name as an industrialist in America. He had been posted there while working for the Ministry of Supply in the Second World War and chose to remain afterwards, becoming a naturalised American while also retaining British citizenship. For many of his opponents, this marked MacGregor as an outsider, a man who had turned his back on his own country and had little empathy with its workers.
Arthur Scargill, the belligerent president of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), called him “the American butcher of British industry”. MacGregor retorted that he was not a butcher, but a plastic surgeon trying to “rebuild damaged features”. However, he soon angered Yorkshire miners by telling them they were less productive than women miners in America.
MacGregor’s appointment was also criticised because the Government had to pay £1.5m. in compensation to an American bank to release him from his role as a director so he could take up his new post at the NCB. It had already paid £1.8m. to the same bank three years earlier for MacGregor to join British Steel.
Other critics said that MacGregor, at 70, was too old for such a big job and that a younger British-based executive would have been cheaper and more appropriate. Labour’s Shadow Energy Secretary John Smith said nobody in the mining industry, either in management or the unions, wanted to work with MacGregor.
“It is an extraordinarily foolish appointment,” he said. “First of all it is politically divisive, it is industrially divisive, the whole work force is more opposed to it and I think all the management in the National Coal Board.”
Nonetheless, MacGregor took up his NCB post in September 1983 and, just as predicted, soon began dismantling the UK mining industry. His actions led to widespread industrial unrest culminating in the bitter year-long miners’ strike, beginning in March 1984. NUM President Scargill said it was the clear policy of Mrs Thatcher’s government to destroy the coal mining industry and break the unions, and MacGregor was the man for the job.
His approach was the same as it had been at British Steel – closing unprofitable pits and making miners redundant. He also took a hard line with the unions, especially during the strike, refusing to compromise or back down on closures. After a year of conflict, the strike collapsed as desperate miners voted for a return to work.
His job done, MacGregor retired from the NCB in 1986 and was given a knighthood that same year. He re-joined the American bank as a non-executive director and enjoyed a variety of other company chairmanships. Some right-wing politicians pressed for him to take on the NHS or British Gas, but he was less in the public eye from then on.
Sir Ian MacGregor died in April 1998 at the age of 85 and while many obituaries praised his achievements, there were no fond memories from the miners. NUM vice-president Mick McGahey said: “It’s no loss to people of my ilk. MacGregor was a vicious anti-trades unionist, anti-working class person, recruited by the Tory government quite deliberately for the purpose of destroying trade unionism in the mining industry. I will not suffer any grief, nor will I in any way cry over the loss of Ian MacGregor.”