3 days ago
Sir Bill O'Brien, miner and Labour MP who twice took on Arthur Scargill and won
Sir Bill O'Brien, who has died aged 96, was a Yorkshire miner who became a Labour MP and front-bench spokesman after twice getting the better of Arthur Scargill.
A face worker at Glasshoughton Colliery, branch secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers and a political moderate, O'Brien first fell foul of the Yorkshire miners' Marxist leader in 1976 when he co-operated with the Sheffield Star in a libel case brought against it by Scargill over alleged favouritism in his deployment of pickets during a strike two years before.
The NUM's Scargill-dominated Yorkshire executive accused O'Brien and Tom Roebuck, former branch secretary at Manvers Main Colliery, of letting the paper's solicitors see confidential correspondence between Scargill and their branches, and suspended them from office for two years.
O'Brien and Roebuck took the NUM to court. Representing them, Derry Irvine, the future Labour Lord Chancellor, argued that Scargill had been out for 'a conviction at all costs' to punish them for their 'temerity'. He had compiled a report on their actions five days after winning his case – and £3,000 in damages – then chaired the disciplinary hearings himself.
Judge Rubin ruled that the suspensions were a contempt of court, and granted injunctions lifting them. The executive retaliated by ignoring an order to pay the men's costs.
O'Brien took on Scargill again in the run-up to the 1983 election, when the veteran Labour MP for Normanton, Albert Roberts, retired. The hard Left in the NUM saw a chance to boost its influence at Westminster by replacing Roberts, who had supported the Spanish dictator General Franco, with one of their own. But O'Brien, who listed one of his recreations in Who's Who as 'organising', rounded up delegates to defeat Scargill's nominee, Henry Daley, and instal O'Brien himself as candidate instead; he was duly elected.
Despite his antipathy to Scargill, O'Brien steadfastly supported the miners during the painful and divisive strike of 1984-85. He condemned pit closures as stemming from lack of investment in 99 per cent of cases, and pressed for arbitration to bring the dispute to an end.
O'Brien had nine years on the Labour front bench, as a spokesman first on the environment and then Northern Ireland. A solid performer – though some said bumbling – he staunchly opposed abortion, and voted against televising the Commons. He was also one of the MPs who in 1988 could not help overhearing the 'high old time' enjoyed by their colleague 'Afghan' Ron Brown and his female researcher in a male-only Commons shower cubicle.
William O'Brien was born in Castleford on January 25 1929 and brought up in the town, attending St Joseph's Roman Catholic school (he would later gain an education degree from Leeds University). He went down the pit at 16, joining the Labour Party as well as the NUM.
He first took on the Left in the union in 1973, when he stood for Yorkshire secretary against Owen Briscoe, a Scargill ally. He lost, but his challenge was not forgotten. O'Brien was elected to Wakefield council the same year, chairing its finance committee and becoming its deputy leader. He was also a Wakefield JP.
He became MP for the heavily redrawn Normanton constituency in 1983, when Labour's majority of 4,143 was its lowest for half a century; the outcome was never that close again. His first action at Westminster was to nominate Roy Hattersley as leader against Neil Kinnock.
In 1987 he was one of 16 defiantly working-class MPs to join the 'Rambo tendency' semi-humorously founded by Joe Ashton to offset the number of academics and the like on the Labour benches.
He had put in sound work on the Public Accounts Committee and the Energy Select Committee, and that summer Kinnock made him an environment spokesman. O'Brien led the charge against a Bill restricting the rights of council employees to take part in party politics, a measure he said infringed civil liberties.
In November 1990, between Sir Geoffrey Howe's dramatic resignation speech and Michael Heseltine's challenge that toppled Margaret Thatcher, O'Brien urged Michael Portillo, the local government minister, to 'line up with Heseltine and say let's scrap the poll tax altogether'.
Around this time, he helped win £14,000 compensation from the Home Office for a woman constituent with psychiatric problems who had been detained for 16 months for a murder she did not commit. She had been remanded on charges of killing her father, and was only transferred from prison to a secure mental unit after protests from O'Brien. After her conviction was quashed she was moved to a hospital.
Replacing Kinnock after the 1992 election, John Smith moved O'Brien to Labour's Northern Ireland team. By the time Tony Blair returned him to the back benches in 1996, government contacts with Sinn Fein – supported by Labour once they became public – had made peace in the province a real possibility.
Pit closures continued throughout O'Brien's 22 years in the Commons. In 1993 he took up complaints from householders near Sharlston Colliery about subsidence caused by work on the final seam before it was to close.
From 1997 to 2005, he served on the Environment, Transport and Regions Select Committee. He gave up his seat aged 76 at the 2005 election, with Ed Balls, Gordon Brown's right-hand man, taking his place. He was knighted in 2010, in Brown's resignation Honours.
Bill O'Brien married Jean; they had three daughters.
Bill O'Brien, born January 25 1929, died May 18 2025
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