Scargill Quotes & Sayings

My father still reads the dictionairy every day. He says your life depends on your power to master words — Arthur Scargill

If you've got an industry where you've got massive investment, it doesn't matter whether you bring in alternative supplies. You still lose the money on that industry. — Arthur Scargill

Contrast that with the call of the Liberal Democrats in April, when they were prepared to call upon the British people to participate in a 24-hour strike. It shows how far to the right the Labour Party's gone. — Arthur Scargill

You may see the emergence of a new political party from the body of the trade union movement which represents a very clear-cut socialist alternative policy and which gives expression to the views of the trade union movement in parliament. — Arthur Scargill

I pledge no fudge of compromise', said Arthur Scargill, 'and no carrots of redundancy'. That would make a nice epitaph for him. 'He pledged no fudge'. — Tony Benn

I have never been an idealist - that implies you aren't going to achieve something. — Arthur Scargill

We will pave the way for a transformation and roll back the years of Thatcherism ... We will turn economic ruin into economic recovery, and above all pave the way for a General Election to elect a Labour Government. — Arthur Scargill

Yet what you need is not marches, demonstrations, rallies or wide associations, all of them are important. What you need is direct action. The sooner people understand that, the sooner we'll begin to change things. — Arthur Scargill

Only a fool wants a confrontation and only a fool wants a strike. — Arthur Scargill

Supercars are supposed to run over Arthur Scargill and then run over him again for good measure. They are designed to melt ice caps, kill the poor, poison the water table, destroy the ozone layer, decimate indigenous wildlife, recapture the Falkland Islands and turn the entire third world into a huge uninhabitable desert, all that before they nicked all the oil in the world — Jeremy Clarkson

There's a feeling that strength is determined by the size of a union. That clearly is nonsense. — Arthur Scargill

Arthur Scargill is the Labour movements nearest equivalent to a First World War General. — Neil Kinnock

The trade unions and the Labour Party ... failed miserably. Instead of giving concrete support, and calling upon workers to take industrial action, they did nothing. — Arthur Scargill

Parliament itself would not exist in its present form had people not defied the law. — Arthur Scargill

The trouble with the Labour Party leadership and the trade union leadership, they're quite willing to applaud millions on the streets of the Philippines or in Eastern Europe, without understanding the need to also produce millions of people on the streets of Britain. — Arthur Scargill

The labour movement had the best opportunity in 50 years to transform not merely an industrial situation and win an important battle for workers in struggle, but an opportunity to change the government of the day. — Arthur Scargill

All too often miners, and indeed other trade unionists, underestimate the economic strength they have. — Arthur Scargill

Arthur Scargill's leadership of the miners' strike has been a disgrace. The price to be paid for his folly will be immense. He will have destroyed the N.U.M. as an effective fighting force within British trade unionism for the next 20 years. If kamikaze pilots were to form their own union, Arthur would be an ideal choice for leader. — Jimmy Reid

Beneath Albright's office, the colliery sprawled across the hillside, red brick buildings scattered as though hurled from a great height, a hotchpotch of mismatched structures spattered on the valley floor. At the bottom stood the winding house, wheels motionless, above it, the engineering sheds and workshops, canteen and bath house. All lay empty. No buzz and hum of machinery. No voices raised in laughter or dispute. Gwyn found it unsettling: his lads had been out a month and a half and already the power had drained from the place. In the stillness, he caught the echo of footsteps. The crunch of boots on gravel. Generations of long-gone Pritchards clocking in and out. He was bound to Blackthorn by the coal that clogged his veins and by a bond of duty. The strike left him as diminished as his pit, day dragging after idle day. — Kit Habianic

I wouldn't vote for Ken Livingstone if he were running for mayor of Toytown. — Arthur Scargill