Before the Storm: the Experience of Nationalisation and the Prospects for Industrial Relations Partnership in the British Coal Industry, 1947-1972 - Rethinking the Militant Narrative

Ackers, Peter and Payne, Jonathan 2002. Before the Storm: the Experience of Nationalisation and the Prospects for Industrial Relations Partnership in the British Coal Industry, 1947-1972 - Rethinking the Militant Narrative. Social History 27 (2) , pp. 184-209. 10.1080/03071020210128391

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Abstract

British coal mining historiography is still dominated, whether consciously or unconsciously, by a militant narrative running from the 1926 General Strike to the national disputes of the 1970s and 1984/5. Any exceptions to this, most notably the behaviour of the Nottinghamshire miners, has to be explained as deviation from a conflict-ridden norm. In most accounts, the period of nationalization and attempted industrial relations partnership between the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and the National Coal Board (NCB) barely interrupts this picture of inexorable and ubiquitous class conflict. This article focuses on the decades after nationalization and before the 1972 national strike. We argue that, during this period, not only did nationalization improve industrial relationships at national level, but also at many collieries. Using a wide, impressionistic range of testimony from autobiographies, earlier studies and our own interviews with former Coal Board workers (mostly from the Midlands), we challenge four New Left myths about nationalization: 1 that there was a crisis of (radical) expectations among ordinary miners following nationalization; 2 that the NCB management failed because it merely continued discredited capitalist management policies; 3 that there was only phantom worker participation; 4 and that pay and payment systems were at the sociological root of conflict where it occurred. We conclude by sketching an alternative scenario, as a basis for further research. Accordingly, something close to industrial partnership did emerge at many collieries, particularly in the prosperous Midlands coalfields, but the habit of strike action spread from declining collieries in Scotland and South Wales, as the economic scope for compromise narrowed.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Social Sciences (Includes Criminology and Education)
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HC Economic History and Conditions
Publisher:	Routledge
ISSN:	0307-1022
Last Modified:	19 Mar 2016 22:06
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/3165

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