BRITAIN: The Miners' Tough Choice

The meeting room upstairs at the Ollerton colliery welfare building in the Nottingham-Midlands coal field looked like a converted high school gymnasium. After an hour and a half downstairs of lager and bitter at a small communal bar, the miners filed into the room, noisy and nervous. Pea green was the color in vogue and woolen socks topped off waterlogged boots. A few sport jackets, an occasional tie, and two or three old brown frayed Stetsons dotted the crowd.

An electric apprehension filled the room as Joe Whelan, a member of the National Union of Mineworkers (N.U.M.) national executive, rose to speak. "As far as I'm concerned," he began, "I'm preachin' to the converted. But let us pray: O Lord above, send down a dove, and on his wings place razors, to cut the throats of those nasty blokes, who cut down miners' wages."

Like Whelan's gallows humor, the mood was black last week in Nottingham. Along with the rest of Britain's 270,000 mineworkers from Scotland to South Wales, they cast ballots on whether to go on a strike that could throw the country into chaos. The outcome will not be known until this week, but the confrontation between the miners and the government has already been joined.

Both sides were preparing for the worst. While union locals were laying away food and provisions for their members, N.U.M. leaders mapped plans to picket power stations, docks and railyards in an effort to halt other union-run industries. Movement of pickets will be coordinated from a strike center in London. Huge sheets will be draped across railroad bridges near power stations, informing train engineers: "This is the picket line. Please do not cross."

The government quietly organized tough contingency plans of its own, including a new centralized intelligence unit and mobile police flying squads. It was also considering whether to revive the old Conspiracy and Protection of Property Act of 1875 in order to impose long prison sentences on disruptive pickets. In a television interview, Prime Minister Edward Heath talked of asking Parliament to deny Social Security benefits to wives and children of strikers.

The political rhetoric escalated as well. N.U.M. Vice President Michael McGahey, a Scottish union militant and a Communist, told a rally that if troops were used, "I would appeal to them to assist the miners." Heath seized on the statement as evidence that McGahey was trying to bring down his government. The Labor Party leaped into the fray with a statement repudiating "any attempt by Communists or others to use the miners as a political battering ram." Then, to a burst of cheers from Labor benches in Parliament, Opposition Leader Harold Wilson declared that "the extremists in the situation are the vice president of the N.U.M. [McGahey] and Mr. Heath." The heated exchange caused a flurry of partisan name calling but hardly helped solve the miners' problem.