FROM THE PITS TO PARLIAMENT
Sir Kevin Barron will be the final Yorkshire miner elected to Parliament. He tells Chris Burn how the Miners’ Strike made him a Labour moderniser – and his worries about Corbyn.
THE SIGN proudly proclaiming the constituency office of Sir Kevin Barron MP has been taken down and boxes are packed in the front room. Thirtysix years after entering Parliament as MP for Rother Valley, Sir Kevin has now retired and is preparing to sell the property in Dinnington he and his team have been based in for more than three decades.
But still hanging on the walls, for now, are pictures of the former collieries which once stood in his constituency. Maltby Colliery has been particularly central to his life – the site where he got his first job at 15, the location where he was beaten by police during the Miners’ Strike and, tragically, the place where his first wife Carol suffered a heart attack that took her life in 2008 at the age of 59.
Sir Kevin says the impact of the Miners’ Strike on his constituents was pivotal to his controversial political conversion from a self-confessed ‘Scargillite’ into a Labour moderniser under Neil Kinnock and Tony Blair. “The Miners’ Strike made me the politician that I am,” he says. “I had to go through that with these communities and I came out a better politician than I went in – a lot of people wouldn’t agree with that but that is certainly my view.”
He will be voting for Labour on December 12 but his view of the party’s current leader is distinctly lukewarm – perhaps no surprise given his support for Owen Smith’s unsuccessful attempt to replace Jeremy Corbyn after the 2016 referendum. “I didn’t support Jeremy but he is a legitimate leader of the Labour Party. How he will turn out as Prime Minister if we win this General Election we will have to wait and see. I do have misgivings about him and people around him. I don’t want to name individuals but the party is potentially moving in the wrong direction. The right are leaving our party and the left are leaving the Tory party – this is the end of major parties being a broad church.”
Whatever the outcome of the election, a new MP for the first time since 1983 awaits Rother Valley with the two frontrunners – 23-year-old Sophie Wilson who became a Sheffield Labour councillor when she was still at university and 32-year-old West London councillor Alexander Stafford for the Conservatives – cut from a very different cloth than Sir Kevin . One of six children, he left school at 15 to work as a colliery electrician. Sir Kevin also became more political – participating in strike action in the 1960s and 1970s as a member of the National Union of Miners as well as joining the International Socialists, which Sir Kevin admits was a “Trotskyist party”. “Hard-left politics in the end – and we’ve got a bit of it around now – is more to do with political purism than getting power,” he says. “I fell out with them and I resigned.”
He joined Labour in 1974 and backed by the NUM after helping Arthur Scargill become the union’s president in 1981, Sir Kevin was chosen as the Labour candidate for Rother Valley in 1983. Just months after becoming an MP, the 1984 Miners’ Strike began. Miners’ strikes in the 1970s had been a key factor in bringing down Ted Heath’s Conservative Government and Margaret Thatcher was determined to avoid the same fate when the strike began in March 1984 following a Government announcement that 20 pits were to be closed, resulting in the loss of 20,000 jobs.
In September 1984, Sir Kevin observed strike action at Maltby Colliery after previously publicly criticising both the police and pickets who had thrown stones at officers. Sir Kevin says as he was leaving the site with a group of others, policemen came out of nearby woods and started attacking them with batons. “I was chatting to the local vicar, hundreds of yards from any activity. These policemen came running out of the woods and started lashing out. I put my arm up else they would have hit me on my head which they were aiming for. There was a guy who ended up with 18 stitches in his head. It was pretty brutal.”
Sir Kevin ended up successfully suing the police after being left with a badly bruised arm. But the incident also set him on a collision course with Scargill at the Labour Conference a few weeks later.
“I was on my own with my arm in a sling and he had got his clique with him. Scargill said to me ‘I’ve not seen anybody throwing stones’. I said ‘Arthur you can see what you want to see or don’t see, don’t you tell me what I see or don’t see’. And I walked off. They were all aghast that anyone would talk to Scargill like that at the height of the Miners’ Strike. I have always said that him and Thatcher deserved one another but these communities deserved neither of them.”
Having once helped Scargill get elected as NUM president in the early 1980s, Sir Kevin ’s politics began heading in a very different direction. Sir Kevin was asked to become Kinnock’s Parliamentary Private Secretary in 1985. He says he shared Kinnock’s analysis that Scargill and the NUM had got it wrong – especially in regard to the failure to nationally ballot members on strike action and the intimidation of those who did cross picket lines. “Because of the lack of a national consensus to have a strike it was miner versus miner. It was bad leadership. When the strike ended in March 1985, I remember walking back with Maltby miners to the colliery. It was just dreadful, it was a massive defeat.”
In the 1990s, Sir Kevin played a leading role in the campaign to rewrite
Clause Four in Labour’s constitution which then called for common ownership of industry, which Sir Kevin says was a “stick for political enemies to beat you with”.
The definition was changed in 1995 to a broader set of values about democratic socialism and New Labour went on to win a landslide victory in the 1997 election.
Sir Kevin later became Health Select Committee chairman and played a key role in what he says is his proudest moment in politics – England’s smoking ban in public places which started in 2007. He was made an honorary fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and his work contributed the knighthood he was awarded in 2014.
But the political triumph was soon followed by personal tragedy. In 2008, as they attended a centenary celebration at Maltby Colliery together, Sir Kevin ’s wife Carol suffered a heart attack and died the following day. “It was awful,” he says. “It is difficult to explain how it affects you. Initially you look for the answer at the bottom of a bottle of alcohol. It was just horrendous.”
Sir Kevin eventually went on to find love again after meeting fitness expert Andree Deane through his work on the Health Select Committee. The pair married in 2012. Sir Kevin says this election is difficult to call. But when asked whether the argument he made for Labour to move to the centreground has been lost for now, he says: “I think it has. But it is not what we think about it that should determine the direction of travel, it is what the electorate think.
“In three weeks’ time we will have a judgement on that. I’ll wait and keep my powder dry to see the outcome.”