Scargill: saviour to figure of fun: Paul Routledge biographer of Arthur Scargill, reflects on the man and the end of mining

IT WAS a sad, final commentary on a decade of despair in the coal industry.

Where once there were thousands of full-throated pitmen proclaiming their political messiah, yesterday fewer than 200 people turned out in the rain-swept streets of south Wales to welcome Arthur Scargill on the 10th anniversary of the great miners' strike.

Protesters trudged through Maesteg, mid-Glamorgan, behind the banner of the NUM lodge at Tower Colliery, British Coal's last working mine in south Wales, where once the valleys reverberated to the clatter of dozens of pits.

After a quarter of a century writing about miners, and being drawn time and again to the industry of my native Normanton in Yorkshire, just for once I was glad not to be there. Being there when the men were starved back in 1985 was bad enough. Now there is nowhere to go back to, and virtually nobody to do the going. It would have been heart-breaking.

In the traditional heartland of mining militancy, the dwindling ranks of pitmen - 20,000 have lost their jobs in the valleys since the strike ended, and only 272 remain - had to be filled out yesterday by Labour Party supporters from Cheltenham, Oxford and London, once derided as 'Clapham colliers'.

Phil White, the lodge chairman at Tower, said: 'We are not celebrating the anniversary of the strike because it was a defeat. But we wanted to show there is still active opposition to the way British Coal has betrayed our valley communities.'

The industry may be altered out of recognition, but some things never change. Mr Scargill has never conceded defeat in the year-long 'Strike for Jobs', insisting that 'the struggle is the victory'. Yesterday, he embarked on a seven-date national coalfield tour to commemorate the strike.

On his first Grand Tour, standing for the presidency in 1981, the miners' leader had enough members to fill Wembley stadium twice over, and he pulled capacity crowds wherever he spoke. Those were ecstatic times. Like others on the left, I thought he was the future. Now we know better. After the ecstasy came the agony. Around 155 of the 170 pits have shut. All his members could fit comfortably into a third-division ground. The NUM is marginalised, ignored and bust.

Two days ago, while on his home ground in Yorkshire, he claimed to have reached a secret deal with Tory ministers in October 1984, but had victory snatched from his grasp by the perfidy of the pit deputies' union, Nacods. No supporting detail of this astonishing secret fetched out after 10 years, of course. With Arthur, you either believe or you are a traitor.

That act of faith was nowhere more evident than in south Wales a decade ago, when the men voted not to strike, but walked out when their lodge officials begged them not to cross picket lines. Today, the coalfield NUM leaders are not among the faithful, and are treated accordingly.

Dr Kim Howells, Labour MP for Pontypridd and former south Wales NUM research officer, was also an absentee at yesterday's rally. Reflecting on the strike, Dr Howells said: 'We didn't have the national leadership that was worthy of the great courage and determination of the south Wales miners. It was a leadership that didn't know when the time was right to make a deal.'

Between them, Scargillism and Thatcherism have done for Maesteg. Ivy John, who headed a wives' support group in the town during the strike, said: 'Emotions are still running high after what has happened to the miners. Our town once had 10 pits, now it is just a dormitory area, run-down with nothing to replace the coal jobs.' Her sentiments could be echoed across the land, but nobody is listening any more.

Not even to Arthur's famous rant. Yesterday, he demanded that the next Labour government renationalise all the pits soon to be sold off in the Tories' 'ultimate privatisation'. But John Smith's Labour Party is heading in a different direction, abandoning its ideological baggage as it goes. Public ownership is off the agenda.

That will not stop Mr Scargill demanding it. Perhaps the worst of it is that he ends up as a figure of fun, owner of an inexhaustible supply of the world's cheapest deep-mined cliches. In the words of a former NUM official in south Wales: 'We didn't realise that Arthur's ego was even bigger than the office he was taking on.'

'Scargill: The Unauthorised Biography' (HarperCollins) comes out in paperback later this year

(Photograph omitted)