Scargill the hypocrite
He shamelessly exploits Thatcher right-to-buy law to snap up his own £2m London flat at half price
AS the militant leader of the miners, Arthur Scargill fought Margaret Thatcher’s government in the 1980s.
Yet that has not stopped the ardent communist exploiting one of her flagship policies to feather his own nest.
The Daily Mail can reveal that he used right-to-buy laws to acquire his City of London council flat for £1million – half its value.
Mr Scargill, now 78, who lives in a £600,000 three-bedroom home in Yorkshire, was given use of the flat in the Barbican when he became president of the National Union of Mineworkers in 1982.
He tried to buy it under right to buy in 1993 but was turned down because the property was not deemed to be his main residence.
It is unclear why the owners, the City of London Corporation, sanctioned the discounted sale second time round in January 2014.
Rules state a tenant is eligible to buy a council home only if it is their ‘only or main home’. Sources told the Mail this week that Mr Scargill is rarely seen at the £2million flat and it is usually empty. He set up the obscure Socialist Labour Party in 1996 after being booted out of the NUM.
Its housing policy calls for an end to the transfer of public housing stock to the private sector.
Chris Kitchen, national secretary of the NUM, said Mr Scargill’s purchase was ‘deeply hypocritical’.
‘There is his public image as a socialist and a trade unionist that Arthur likes to portray, but the reality is he is a capitalist,’ he said.
‘If the man hated Thatcher that much, you would think that he would refuse to take the flat on principle.’
The NUM paid rent of £34,000 a year on the property between 1991 and 2011. But when it stopped doing so Mr Scargill went to the High Court. He said the union should cover the rent until he died and for longer if his partner survived him. He also insisted fuel bills be met, plus his accountant’s fees for filing his annual tax return. The judge ruled against him.
When news of his first attempt to buy the flat emerged in 2014, Mr Scargill said he had planned to transfer ownership to the NUM. He bought the property two days later for £1,050,000, according to Land Registry records.
Property experts who examined the documents said some of the funds for the purchase came from Mr Scargill’s daughter Margaret Logan, a 54-year- old GP, and her 61-year-old husband Stephen.
A month before the sale they bought Mr Scargill’s Yorkshire home, which he still lives in. Sources say this transaction will have helped his application for the London flat.
Speaking from Yorkshire, Mr Scargill refused to respond to questions. He said: ‘I do not talk to the Daily Mail, good day.’
His daughter also refused to comment on the suggestion that she and her husband had helped with the London acquisition. Speaking
‘The reality is he is a capitalist’
at her sprawling stone farmhouse in Yorkshire, Mrs Logan said: ‘I don’t speak to the Press. I think you know that.’
A spokesman for the City of London Corporation said: ‘We check all applications to ensure that they comply with the terms of the rightto-buy scheme. Those who are considered eligible may be successful in their application.’
Details of the purchase emerged just days after plans for a public inquiry into the Battle of Orgreave in 1984 during the miners’ strike were scrapped following an outcry. Lord Tebbit, a key Cabinet minister at the time, said an inquiry would serve only to please Mr Scargill. It is believed the Home Office will simply make more key documents from the strike public and possibly appoint a lawyer to review them.
It was claimed South Yorkshire Police orchestrated violence between officers and miners at Orgreave and falsified evidence against pickets.
Officials said the incident had not met the threshold for spending large sums of public money.