The Splits

Taking a beating at Blackpool

Even before the 3,000 delegates arrived at Blackpool's Winter Gardens, the annual Labor Party conference in the Irish Sea resort was shaping up as a struggle between militant leftists and the party's centrists. On one side, determined to win more support for Britain's unpopular 30-week coal miners' strike, was Arthur Scargill, 46, the Marxist president of the National Union of Mine workers. On the other, with an eye on Labor's sagging ratings in the polls, was Party Leader Neil Kinnock, 42.

The outcome was not long in doubt: Scargill and his leftist followers dominated the proceedings.

The participants in the five-day conference denounced the government of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and urged the banning of nuclear weapons in Britain, but their main preoccupation was the bitter coal strike. The miners want to force the National Coal Board to rescind plans that would close 20 uneconomic pits and pension off 20,000 miners. About 50,000 of the country's 180,000 miners are still working despite the union walkout. So far, 817 police have been injured and 7,000 strikers arrested. As he sat with his N.U.M. delegation on the conference floor in Blackpool, Scargill was served with a contempt of court order for his failure to allow a strike vote. He dismissed the citation as an attempt "to take away the democratic right of our union to deal with our own affairs."

Scargill spoke passionately for a motion to condemn police, not the strikers, for the violence on the picket lines. The measure passed amid tumult and cheers for the N.U.M. president and hoots of derision for moderate union leaders. Then Kinnock lost another battle, this one over an arcane party rule giving local constituency committees--usually a stronghold of party leftists--the power to decide whether their parliamentary representatives should be allowed to stand for reelection. Kinnock wanted all Labor Party members, not just the tightly held local committees, to have a vote in the process. The conference rejected his proposal.

That showed just how far Kinnock's star has fallen. Only a year ago, he was elected to unite the divided party and lead it away from its 1983 election defeat, Labor's worst showing in 50 years. Since then, the "Scargill factor," the link in the public mind between Labor and the miners, has lowered Kinnock's approval rating from 58% to only 37%.

As the tensions surrounding the coal strike continued, concern was focused on a possible walkout by the 16,000-member mine supervisors union, which is angry over a Coal Board decision to withhold pay of members who honor the mineworkers' strike. If the supervisors, who are essential to mine safety, walk out as well, the industry could be shut down completely. At week's end the supervisors had not yet struck, and were pushing for arbitration to settle the broader dispute. For now, though, to Kinnock's discomfort and the nation's unease, the Coal Board and its workers seem to prefer fighting to talking.