Conceptual Framework

There has been rising interest in Karl Polanyi from authors analyzing changes in employment and industrial relations, such as Guy Standing. ^{Footnote 4} Polanyi’s 1944 work, The Great Transformation, argued the development of industrial capitalism imposed the logic of accumulation and the maximization of narrowly defined economic utility over the social values and political objectives that had directed preindustrial economies. However, this process was never complete. The economies of capitalist societies are not entirely disembedded from society, and this was paramount in the resistance to the marketization of “fictitious” commodities: labor, land, and money. These areas were the contested ground of the “double movement,” as moves toward liberalization met continual opposition to commodification. This took the form of attempts to maintain the embeddedness of markets through the imposition of social and political priorities by workers’ organizations in both confluence and conflict with the state, which came to full fruition in the social and political crises of the 1930s. ^{Footnote 5}

Polanyi provides an important vantage point for a historically informed analysis of labor markets, giving a long-run perspective on the forces and institutions that have continually reshaped their operation. Strangleman’s account of deindustrialization demonstrates the vitality of understanding the double movement as a process rather than an event. The disembedding of the economy from society can be read as “a trend against which various groups reacted to during the early and later stages of industrialization.” ^{Footnote 6} Polanyi’s analysis has been criticized for tending toward an absolute reading of the disembedded market. ^{Footnote 7} This article adopts an approach influenced by Block’s observation of the continually “ongoing” nature of the double movement, which recognizes “the always embedded economy.” ^{Footnote 8} Looking to Block’s and Laasser’s sophisticated development of the double movement, it utilizes the concept of “marketness” to consider how the coal industry developed between “thin” and “thick” levels of embeddedness. Marketness relates to the extent to which the operation of markets is determined by profit motives, with either low (“thickly” embedded within social norms) or high (“thinly” embedded) possibilities. ^{Footnote 9} The reading in this case is broadly consistent with Dale’s perspective of shifts toward a more thickly embedded labor market over the mid-twentieth century as national states took an increased responsibility for economic management, before a thinning as liberalized markets were asserted from the late 1970s. ^{Footnote 10} In accordance with Silver and Arrighi’s critique, ^{Footnote 11} the necessity of identifying specific experiences, ideologies, and mechanisms of the double movement are addressed. This extends to the analysis of the dissolution of the coalfield moral economy’s practices via the NCB’s provision of financial compensation through large redundancy payments. These developments were evidence of the “constraining influence of subordinate social forces” during the neoliberal era when states continued to exercise responsibility for social welfare. ^{Footnote 12}

Historical analysis of the moral economy originates with E. P. Thompson’s writings on the “crowd” of eighteenth-century plebeian consumers who opposed the commodification of foodstuffs by enforcing customary practices of open market selling through disciplined direct action. ^{Footnote 13} Thompson emphasized the role of “custom, culture and reason” with regard to methods deployed to protect communities from disruption by market forces. ^{Footnote 14} He later summarized the moral economy at a theoretical level, which centered on claims of “non-monetary rights” to resources, predicated on “community membership [that] supersedes price as a basis of entitlement.” ^{Footnote 15} Thompson’s conception has been deployed to study resistance to liberalized markets elsewhere. Examples include peasant studies from colonial South East Asia, in which varying methods were used to enforce customary rights to rice and other foodstuffs. ^{Footnote 16}

The emergent historiography of coalfield deindustrialization in Scotland uses a Thompsonian approach, emphasizing how “customs and expectations” shaped the management of pit closures under the nationalized industry. Perchard and Phillips highlight requirements of consultation and the provision of alternative employment. ^{Footnote 17} Phillips has developed this perspective, emphasizing that, “Restructuring raised the expectations of Scottish workers, who anticipated a well-paid and stable future in return for relinquishing their jobs in established industries.” ^{Footnote 18} Closures were accepted as a price of rationalizing coal through concentration into economically viable “super pits.” The acceptance of closures further related to industrial modernization by releasing labor into the higher value-added engineering sectors being brought to Scotland through regional policy. These developments promised safer work and higher living standards, partly through creating employment opportunities for women. ^{Footnote 19}

This article extends analysis of the coalfield moral economy through theoretically and historically situating it and outlining specific practices enacted upon closure: transfers to pits within travel distance and finding workers employment at appropriate grades. These are placed within the Polanyian double movement and the nationalized industry’s system of industrial citizenship. Industrial citizenship embedded colliery employment by instilling rights and responsibilities held by workers and management. In moral economy terms, it underlined the social responsibilities of the NCB, especially its obligation to enter consultation with trade unions and the workforce over the future development of the industry. This represented a response to the economic and social dislocation of the interwar British coalfields, and the conceptualization of novel forms of industrial relations during the thickening of market embeddedness of the 1930s and 1940s. Emphasis is placed on workforce and community expectations of nationalization, which are understood as the products of historical experience, especially interwar unemployment, the victimization of trade unionists, and the neglect of health and safety.

Coalfield History

Coal’s strategic status as Britain’s prime energy source and the conditions of underground work conditioned early episodes of state intervention. Health and safety regulations during the nineteenth century included characteristic elements of the double movement. The assertion of norms and values into the market’s operations came via the “tangle of interests” Polanyi analyzed as typical of social reform. ^{Footnote 20} Aristocratic politicians and state officials, alongside organized workers, were central in reforming mining conditions in line with prevailing moral standards. The 1842 Mines Act regulated the labor market by prohibiting all women and any boys under the age of ten from working underground. Parliamentary arguments in favor largely focused on the morality of women and children working in an underground setting and mixing with the coarse culture of colliers. ^{Footnote 21} Legislation was gradually extended to health and safety and the length of the working day. The state set standards for minimum conditions, which were highly contested by coal owners and trade unions. ^{Footnote 22}

When British coal production peaked in 1913 at 287 million tons, one-third of which was exported, more than 1.1 million worked in the sector, which was 10 percent of the British male workforce. ^{Footnote 23} The protracted decline that followed during the 1920s was associated with the inhibited attempts to reestablish liberal market norms following World War I, which Polanyi saw as the harbinger of social strife and the rise of fascism and autarky. The “complete destruction of the national institutions of nineteenth century society” was visible in counter-movements, which included protectionist barriers and the dislocation of free trade on which British industrial development had depended. ^{Footnote 24} Within Britain, the challenge to the liberal order was marked by the depression in regions reliant on heavy industry and included two major episodes of coalfield class struggle: the miners’ lockouts of 1921 and 1926. These disputes involved more than one million workers and their families, and ultimately led to government interventions. Supple’s account of growing state involvement in coal mining during the 1930s, which reshaped industrial relations and business organization, indicates the thickening of embeddedness that cumulated in nationalization in 1947. Thus, coal was not only more than a crucial case in which “business and politics could not be kept apart” but also its experience was “a test case for the embryonic mixed economy.” ^{Footnote 25}

Fine’s critique of the operation of government intervention during the interwar period contends that price setting and control of investment amounted to a situation whereby conventionally understood “capitalist relations of production had been eroded.” ^{Footnote 26} This related to the cushioning of unviable firms through the complex privately owned royalties system, which was a disincentive to investment necessary to take advantage of economies of scale. ^{Footnote 27} Fine has been countered by Greasley, who argues: “British coalmining did not fail to reap substantial pit-level scale economies between the wars because these were unavailable.” ^{Footnote 28} The potential for improvement lay in wholesale investment in mining systems, but that was not viable in the depressed conditions of the interwar period or in an industry that was, in reality, a complex multiplicity of industries and markets. Dintenfass’s detailed account of four firms during the interwar period emphasizes the distinction between the export-oriented Northumberland coalfield, which suffered from foreign competition and protectionist trends, and Yorkshire’s relatively privileged position in serving domestic power station markets. ^{Footnote 29} Coalfield development was marked by shifting geographical patterns of colliery closures and new sinkings as profitable reserves were exhausted or found elsewhere. The concentration of investment in Yorkshire and the Midlands resulted in increased unemployment and community dislocation within the Scottish, Welsh, and North East of England coalfields. State intervention was spurred by the “severe social problem, its wounds raw and obvious” in regions highly dependent on contracting coalfields. ^{Footnote 30}

While coastal coalfields, such as Fife, prospered based on serving export markets, the inland Lanarkshire coalfield developed as the principal supplier for the county’s steelworks. It was a key component of the heavy industrial nexus, which characterized West Central Scotland’s economic development during the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. This included integrated ownership structures that linked coal, steel, and shipbuilding. Lanarkshire firms such as Bairds and Colvilles were coal owners as well as steel magnates. ^{Footnote 31} Coal mining employment peaked at nearly sixty thousand in 1921, employing one in three men, after which this industrial structure entered drawn-out crises during the 1920s and 1930s. ^{Footnote 32} In the Lanarkshire context, it was “depression in the major coal-consuming industries at home,” particularly marked in iron, steel, and shipbuilding, which contributed to a major fall in demand. ^{Footnote 33} The coalfield was also suffering from heavy geological faulting; its decline was accepted by trade union representatives as well as mining engineers during the 1944 Scottish Coalfield Commission. This strategy was developed under the NCB, which focused investment and manpower on “super pits” in the most productive coalfields. Plans were drawn up to transfer labor from Lanarkshire to Scotland’s more profitable eastern coalfields. ^{Footnote 34} As demonstrated in Tables 1 and 2, Lanarkshire endured major workforce contraction from the onset of nationalization, before major closures took hold across Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom, starting in the late 1950s.

Table 1 Lanarkshire coalfield employment

Census 1951 Scotland, Table 13, 433–469; Census 1961, Table 3, 16–21; Sample Census 1966, Table 3, 33–44; Census 1971, Table 3; Census 1981, Table 3

Table 2 Scottish coalfield employment

Source: Oglethorpe, Scottish Collieries, 20.

The nationalization of coal mining in 1947 was part of the broader post-World War II thickening of labor markets; a heightened element of “social control was restored over the economy,” as the objective of full employment underpinned an enhanced role for state intervention. ^{Footnote 35} The construction of an NCB structure based on union recognition and joint regulation at the workplace level and upward represented a developed variety of the industrial citizenship that Standing discusses as characterizing developed economies after World War II. ^{Footnote 36} This shift toward “humanized” industrial relations emphasized consultation with workers and their trade unions over major decisions, including pit closures, which were discussed by consultative committees comprising management and workforce representatives. ^{Footnote 37}

Robson’s 1962 assessment of British nationalized industries featured a section on industrial relations largely focused on coal that underlined the benefits of public ownership. He discussed the desire to combine miners’ expectations of “better treatment in every respect from nationalized industries than they received under private enterprise” with the NCB’s aim of “inculcating all who work in the organizations with a spirit of public service.” ^{Footnote 38} These values indicated not only the importance of social partnership in structuring moral economy understandings of colliery employment, but also the potential conflict between worker and colliery interests and those of the industry’s economic targets and performance. This is discussed below in relation to Lanarkshire’s experience of early closures when manpower and investment were diverted to more productive coalfields. Gildart’s analysis of mining autobiographies from North Wales indicated nationalization was universally seen as “a defining moment” in achieving material improvements and a more democratic, “consensual” workplace culture. Gildart considers the role of written histories and public discourses in influencing miners’ own perspective. As discussed below, these themes were present in the Lanarkshire testimonies. Within a Scottish setting, the NUMSA’s institutional narrative emphasized both historical injustices and the achievements of the nationalized industry. This transmitted within community and workforce memory to shape expectations of public ownership and narratives of NCB employment. ^{Footnote 39}

Foundations of the Moral Economy

An understanding of the importance of coal was articulated in the testimonies. Billy Maxwell, from Muirhead, in North Lanarkshire, who worked at Cardowan colliery between 1957 and 1979, stated during the Moodiesburn focus group: “Miners for centuries, as I said to you before, were fuelling the industry ae (of) Great Britain. They were the most important ingredient in the making of wealth.” He also claimed that “deep mining in the Industrial Revolution financed the world we have today,” and he underlined that this was “at the cost ae a lot of miners.” An awareness of the true “price of coal,” juxtaposing arguments relating to financial costs to that of lost miners’ lives, was compounded by the claim that miners did not abuse their power: “The miners could ae held the country to ransom at that time [during the 1950s] and didnae dae (did not do) it cause they were too decent a people.” ^{Footnote 55} As well as relaying his own experience, Billy had undertaken research into local mining experiences and pit disasters during the nineteenth century. His perspective was framed by the cultural circuit’s emphasis on the long endurance of injustice and collective mobilization by miners. A sense of the social and economic importance of coal was combined with an awareness of the dangers endured by the workforce. This furthered a moral economy perspective based on the obligation of the state as an employer to reciprocate the miners’ “decent” conduct.

Billy’s moral argumentation is indicative of how historical memory shaped understandings of public ownership’s regulated, thickened labor markets. Interwar experiences of social dislocation—especially unemployment, the victimization of trade unionists, neglectful health and safety, and the treatment of disabled miners—conditioned expectations of the nationalized industry. Jessie Clark is from Douglas Water, South Lanarkshire. The daughter and wife of Communist miners, she was an active Party member herself when she worked in the Douglas colliery’s canteen during the 1940s. Jessie recalled that within the village during the 1930s, the Coltness Iron Company victimized trade unionists and attempted to divide the community through discriminatory employment practices, which favored members of the Masons, a Protestant secret society:

Jessie summarized nationalization as social justice, underlining the importance of workplace participation and consultation: “Getting rid of the coal owners and there was going to be a bit more democracy, you know, within the, the, eh, working area.” ^{Footnote 57}

Respondents who lacked Jessie’s direct connection with the interwar period still mentioned memories of the private industry’s injustices. This was indicative that the NUMSA’s institutional narrative and historical perspective, encapsulated by Arnot, transmitted intergenerationally. Mick McGahey, a third-generation Communist miner, and the son of the trade union leader of the same name, recalled that victimization uprooted his family and prevented them from settling stably elsewhere. In line with the constellation of industrial relations and geological and investment factors pointed to above, these circumstances led Mick’s family to leave the declining Lanarkshire coalfield for the expanding Kent coalfield in the south of England:

Mick’s testimony exemplifies Campbell’s “genealogies of victimization and radicalism” ^{Footnote 59} that reinforced the moral economy view of coalfield employment as a community resource that was struggled for through decades of mobilization. His father was victimized in 1943 when involved in a strike at Gateside, in Cambuslang, and Mick himself was sacked during the 1984–1985 miners’ strike. ^{Footnote 60}

However, these recollections were not exclusive to Communists. Peter Downie, during the Moodiesburn focus group, emphasized the impact of injury and unemployment. Peter’s political stance was influenced by a history of involvement in Orange Order activities, and his narrative included a deferential view toward the royal family. Nevertheless, Peter framed his own experience within the cultural circuit’s emphasis of injustice and the struggle for nationalization. Peter’s father was involved in an accident in 1938 at the Bedlay colliery, in North Lanarkshire, and was not provided with either adequate social security or work to suit his condition. His family grew up in poverty and he was “raised on the parish.” In Peter’s view, this was part of a longer history of economic insecurity:

He summed this up in another discussion by stating: “Up to 1947, the men were living in deprivation.” ^{Footnote 61}

Practice and Dissolution of the Moral Economy: Lanarkshire, 1947–1983

The NCB’s structures of industrial citizenship were shaped by a commitment to the joint regulation of the industry with workforce representatives, as well as through efforts to maintain secure long-term employment and to improve both remuneration and conditions. Industrial citizenship was enthused by a moral ethos of workforce engagement that instilled the joint responsibilities that workers and management held to build a successful nationalized industry. Peter Mansell-Mullen, who worked in NCB management starting in the early 1950s, and became director for Manpower in 1971, recalled the perceived centrality of coal and the importance ascribed to its transformation under public ownership. However, in his view, the variety of workforce consultation within the nationalized industry was shaped from the beginning by the fact that unions continued to operate as organizations that represented worker interests vis-à-vis management. Thus, consultation was always qualified and never amounted to full socialization or workers’ control:

As elaborated below, these distinctions became important as unions continued to assert distinct workforce interests against the NCB’s perception of the industry’s requirement of rationalization during colliery closures.

Discussion within the focus group in Shotts, a former coal-mining center in North Lanarkshire, demonstrated the association between public ownership and both improved pay and health and safety standards as fundamental in shaping mineworkers’ attitude toward nationalization:

Elements of nostalgia for communal pasts and working lives were apparent in this discussion. Other respondents also emphasized the self-worth and cohesiveness the NCB granted. For instance, Pat Egan, from Twechar, in North Lanarkshire, followed his father and grandfather by starting to work at the Bedlay colliery in the late 1970s. Pat recalled employment being found for men with physical or learning disabilities, who “were always looked after.” ^{Footnote 64} However, interviewees also indicated a capacity for critical nostalgia that noted the impact of nationalization in less positive tones. During the broadly favorable account of nationalization within the Shotts focus group, Bobby Flemming recalled major colliery closures when investment and manpower were concentrated on more profitable coalfields:

The Shotts experience was a formative period for the moral economy, which conditioned the more sensitive management of redundancy and transfer in future closures. Tension between the NCB’s economic priorities and community cohesion were summed up in 1950 by NUMSA President Abe Moffat, who responded to the proposed closure of Baton colliery by stating: “The Board should realize that they were not discussing a Mining Engineer’s opinion but the social life of a mining village.” ^{Footnote 66} The NCB’s strategy centered on encouraging labor mobility, and was signified by W. Drylie, the area industrial relations officer, who, upon the closure of Longlea colliery in 1949, advised “local men, particularly young men” to seek transfers within Scotland. ^{Footnote 67} Baldwin’s Reference Baldwin1955 appraisal of industrial relations within the NCB singled out the early experience of colliery closures in Lanarkshire as a major “test” of the nationalized industry. This pivotally related to closures that were “dictated by economics and not by nature.” ^{Footnote 68} Baldwin emphasized that the NUMSA was rhetorically committed to support coalfield rationalization, as the unions had been during the 1944 Coal Commission. However, before its headquarters moved from Glasgow to Edinburgh during the late 1940s, the NUMSA tended to tolerate local opposition to closures in the face of significant pressure. ^{Footnote 69} The findings from archival research detailed below suggest that there was an early contestation over principles governing investment policy within the nationalized industry.

The debate over investment during closures during the early nationalized period indicates an absence of consensus over the responsibilities of the NCB, as well as differences over the extent to which joint regulation merited worker and community control over the industry’s development and assets. J. Todd, the NUM pit delegate at Baton, summed up the moral economy argument: “If the NCB are making profits, surely they can spend some to save a district getting derelict. The profitable pits should help the others not doing so well.” ^{Footnote 70} However, the NUMSA’s grievances during the Shotts closures tended toward mechanics and procedure. Between the late 1940s and early 1950s, the coalfield moral economy’s operation was constructed in relation to securing employment for workers through transfer to appropriate work and the legitimation of closure through consultation with worker representatives. This was visible through episodes that sparked disagreement. In 1948, having provided seventy houses for transferees in Fife, the NCB began redundancies at Broomside colliery, in North Lanarkshire, before closure was agreed. Abe Moffat saw these actions as preemptive. He argued it went against stipulation, as closure had not yet been sanctioned by the trade unions. ^{Footnote 71} During the closure of Baton, grievances centered on moves toward closure without transfers to stated graded positions at other collieries, which the NCB acted to ameliorate after Moffat raised problems arising from recent closures. ^{Footnote 72}

A sense of policy-maker social responsibility was evident in August 1948, when H. S. Phillips, the Board of Trade researcher for Scotland, commenting on Shotts, argued: “The transfer method is only an additional and short term method of reducing male unemployment.” This related to social circumstances: “Quite a high proportion of unemployed persons are not prepared, or able, to move more than a short distance.” Phillips argued that the situation in Shotts justified a “take work to the workers” policy. ^{Footnote 73} Two years later, a Board of Trade research team studied Shotts and concluded that, although some emigration was desirable, limited success had already been attained in attracting light industry and that further developments were necessary “to preserve and balance the community on a smaller scale.” ^{Footnote 74} These conclusions were further supported by a 1953 study conducted by Hazel E. Heughan, of Edinburgh University. Heughan documented a reluctance to migrate despite promises of better living conditions and more secure employment in Fife, underlining that Shotts miners “shrunk from uprooting themselves because of the fear of loneliness in exchanging their friendly social life for one in which they are thrown upon their own devices.” ^{Footnote 75}

The failure of the NCB to secure the anticipated large-scale redeployment of miners across coalfields, and policy-maker acceptance of responsibility to provide employment, established the broad practice for colliery closures between the 1950s and early 1980s across Scotland that is outlined in the existing literature. Closures were ameliorated through consultation and by offers of transfer to appropriately graded positions within commuting distance of existing homes. Furthermore, labor market security was ensured through regional policy that directed manufacturing inward investment toward contracting coalfields. ^{Footnote 76} The moral economy was constructed within the broader Polanyian context of social embeddedness, but it also had a basis in the specific moral economy practices of negotiation and securing alternative employment. Demands for the maintenance of joint regulation were constant across the closure process, and their breach was pivotal in the collapse of the moral economy’s operation during the 1980s. However, there was also a major shift in the character of pit transfer over the period, as the definition of local radically altered through the shrinking of the industry and rising travel to work distances.

Following the Shotts experience, for the most part, migration was turned down in favor of extended travelling distances, either to larger pits, such as Cardowan and Bedlay, or to other industries. This acted to maintain residential communities but it came at the cost of longer daily commutes. The extension of traveling to work was an incremental process with waves of closures increasing distances. Figure 2 demonstrates this through the example of an individual miner, Peter Downie. His travel to work distance increased through a series of closures and transfers from employment at Glentore, a village pit adjacent to his home in Greengairs, North Lanarkshire, to a sixty-mile daily commute across central Scotland to Solsgirth colliery, in Clackmannan. ^{Footnote 77}

Figure 2 Peter Downie’s journey to work.

Source: Google Maps.

The NCB was restructured when coal employment’s decline accelerated during the 1960s, as detailed in Table 1. Growing authority passed to its London-based headquarters, Hobart House. ^{Footnote 78} Increasingly capital-intensive production methods bolstered pressure to concentrate investment and manpower in the most productive coalfields in the English Midlands. Along with falling demand for coal, this accelerated the rundown of the Scottish coalfield. ^{Footnote 79} This stretched the legitimacy of consultation. At proceedings in 1968 before the closure of Gartshore 9/11, in North Lanarkshire, a Colliery Officials and Staff Association representative articulated his discontent at the growing remoteness of control. Emergent geographical and social distances questioned the value of commitments to regulation by the customs of industrial citizenship, and therefore threatened the embedding of the industry’s operation within workforce and community conceptions of social justice: “It used to be that the Colliery Manager had to plan out his own Pit, then Area officials took control of this and now we find that the planning for the Pit is done 500 miles away. Handouts were all right, if unavoidable, but men wanted to work.” ^{Footnote 80}

Perchard’s research suggests that lower rungs of management shared these feelings. At colliery level, the imposition of centralized control increased from the late 1950s onward as the industry entered a period of contradiction and more stringent financial and output targets were imposed. ^{Footnote 81} The moral economy’s basis in local community bonds was also implicated by Lord Robens’s account of his chairmanship of the NCB from 1961 to 1971. He referred to “a Scottish pit with a very limited life” in which “a solid alliance of local management backed up by the local unions” resisted transfer schemes to the English Midlands. ^{Footnote 82}

Joint regulation and the organizing of transfers were fundamental factors in the final dissolution of the moral economy. The closure of Bedlay colliery in 1982 was the last moral economy closure in Scotland. After extensive discussions with trade unions over “several months” and a “joint examination of all possible areas of reserves,” closure was agreed due to “insurmountable geological conditions.” ^{Footnote 83} Employment at other Scottish collieries was found for those in the workforce who did not wish to retire. Although the NCB undertook these costs, its accountants objected to a net loss of £3.3 million through redundancy, transfer, and pension payments, but their graver concerns were at taking on 340 extra workers without increasing production, thus they prescribed solution of an additional 340 redundancies. ^{Footnote 84} This is indicative of the economic disembedding associated with neoliberal restructuring, which included the imposition of unitary industrial relations practices and the abandonment of an economic policy of full employment. Within the NCB, this had greater resonance following the Coal Industry Act 1980. Ashworth concluded that its removal of subsidies and disavowal of long-term energy policy and coalfield investment planning meant it has been “drawn so as to make it almost impossible to operate the industry in the way it had been operating until then.” ^{Footnote 85} Thus, the coal industry moved toward a thinned market and removal from the social norms in which its employment practices had been embedded under nationalization.

The NCB accountants’ mentality at Bedlay preceded a more aggressive management style at the closure of Lanarkshire’s last colliery in 1983, Cardowan. It took place on economic grounds, a far more contentious basis than exhaustion, and was a key episode preceding the outbreak of the 1984–1985 miners’ strike. ^{Footnote 86} In 2014 Nicky Wilson, a former electrician at Cardowan and current Scottish president of the NUM, echoed NUMSA President Mick McGahey’s comments from a consultative committee meeting both attended in 1983. Cardowan’s “high grade coking coal” lost British Steel Corporation’s contract to supply the nearby Ravenscraig steelworks, which followed thinning market logic by switching to imports during the early 1980s. This resulted in a situation in which the NCB had to “mix it wi (with) a lotta rubbish” for lower value power station use. ^{Footnote 87} However, the fundamental contention was the subversion of joint regulation. Albert Wheeler, the NCB’s Scottish area director, made this clear at the same Consultative Committee meeting when he stated that he “wanted the opinion of the 1090 men employed at the colliery and not just the few who attended branch meetings.” ^{Footnote 88}

In place of negotiation with trade union representatives, he made an “offer” of redundancy payments, including a lump sum payment of up to £20,000, and pensions of up to £100 a week for men over the age of 50, and promised protected earnings and transfer allowances for younger men. ^{Footnote 89} Wilson’s comments on the quality of Cardowan’s product underline that joint regulation was stimulated by occupational pride and recognition of the vital role coal played in sustaining the British economy. Cardowan’s closure disavowed industrial citizenship as joint regulation and was jettisoned in favor of aggressive antitrade unionism. Compensation was provided to individual workers for transfers and redundancies in return for the acceptance of managerial prerogative. This confirms the moral economy amounted to more than redress for those suffering from the impact of labor market instability. The moral economy was defined by assertions of community control of resources, collieries and the employment they provided, and conferring legitimacy on decision making within the NCB through dialogue with worker representatives and trade unions.

By the time of the trade unions’ appeal against closure in September 1983, three hundred men had already left Cardowan, which both Mick McGahey and Arthur Scargill (national NUM president) argued went against closure procedure. Transfers were used to undermine workforce solidarity and collective agreements across the Scottish coalfields, leading to far greater incidents of inter-workforce disputes than the tensions unearthed at previous transfers over access to skilled positions. Grievances centered on the undermining of joint regulation, with strikes following the entrance of unnegotiated transferees. ^{Footnote 90} The most serious moral economy transgression took place at Polmaise, in Stirlingshire, where Cardowan men were transferred in June 1983 while the pit was undergoing reconstruction. This breached promises to local miners, who had been assured of first refusal on employment at the redeveloped colliery and led to the NUM branch pursuing a policy of noncooperation with unnegotiated transferees, which contributed to a lockout at the pit. ^{Footnote 91}