Sir Bill O'Brien obituary: miner and Labour MP who clashed with Scargill
Bill O'Brien went down the mines as a teenager, but it was through opposing the miners' leader Arthur Scargill, not supporting him, that he found his way to Westminster where he served for 22 years as a Labour MP.
His first clash with Scargill came in 1976 when he was secretary of the Glasshoughton branch of the National Union of Mineworkers and Scargill was president of the Yorkshire NUM. There was little love lost between the two men, one an old-school Labour pragmatist and the other a militant left-winger, and when Scargill sued the Sheffield Star for libel, O'Brien and a colleague co-operated with the newspaper. Scargill won his case, and at his behest the NUM suspended O'Brien and his colleague from holding office for two years. O'Brien, supported by his branch, challenged the ban in court and won.
Seven years later O'Brien clashed with Scargill a second time when Albert Roberts, the veteran Labour MP for the Yorkshire constituency of Normanton, announced his retirement. O'Brien challenged Scargill's man, Henry Daley, for the party's nomination and once again prevailed. O'Brien went on to win the seat in the 1983 general election. Hard-working, single-minded and a dedicated constituency MP, he was re-elected four times and served seven years as an opposition frontbench spokesman.
William O'Brien was born in Glasshoughton, a neighbourhood on the edge of Castleford, in 1929, the son of a miner of Irish descent. He was educated at St Joseph's Catholic School in Castleford, but left school at 15 or 16 to become a coalface miner at the local colliery along with three of his four brothers. Almost immediately he joined both the Labour Party and the NUM, and discovered a flair for organising. He became a shop steward at Glasshoughton and was elected to Knottingley urban district council. In 1974 Knottingley became part of Wakefield Metropolitan district council. O'Brien rose to become chair of the new council's finance committee and its deputy leader. He also served as a Wakefield magistrate.
He suffered setbacks. In 1973 he challenged Owen Briscoe, a left-winger, for the post of secretary of the NUM's Yorkshire region and lost. But he did manage to earn a degree in education from the University of Leeds in 1978, and in the same year married his second wife, Jean Scofield, a fellow Labour Party member who had grown up in an adjoining street. His first marriage had been short-lived but produced a daughter, Darrel. He treated as his own Jean's two daughters, Kaye and Diane.
O'Brien was elected to parliament for Normanton in 1983 with a slender majority of 4,183. The following year Scargill launched the miners' strike that became a protracted trial of strength against Margaret Thatcher's government. O'Brien supported the strike and condemned the government's planned pit closures, but opposed Scargill's methods.
The Glasshoughton colliery closed in 1986, not long after the miners' strike ended in defeat, but O'Brien was re-elected with an increased majority of 7,287 the next year. Neil Kinnock, then Labour's leader, swiftly appointed him opposition spokesman on the environment despite the fact that O'Brien had backed Roy Hattersley for the leader's job. After the 1992 election Kinnock's successor, John Smith, made him the opposition spokesman on Northern Ireland.
Proudly working class and partial to nights out in the working men's clubs of his constituency, O'Brien was one of 16 members of the so-called Rambo tendency created half in jest by a fellow Labour MP, Joe Ashton, to resist Labour's takeover by far-left and middle-class 'infiltrators and poseurs'.
He returned to the back benches when Tony Blair succeeded Smith in 1994, but continued to sit on select committees and to fight hard for his constituents until he stood down at the general election of 2005. He was replaced as Normanton's MP by Ed Balls, who went on to become a cabinet minister under Gordon Brown.
By then O'Brien was in his mid-seventies, but he did not retire from public life. He continued to hold authority to account. He served as a school governor and became a champion of local causes including the Pontefract Town Centre Partnership — an alliance of interested parties determined to reverse the town centre's decline — and the Dr Jackson Cancer Fund, created in memory of a local doctor to improve cancer care in mid-Yorkshire. He was knighted in 2010.
Alongside 'reading', O'Brien listed 'organising' as one of his two hobbies in his Who's Who entry. He continued to 'organise' well into his nineties. In 2003 he suffered a stroke and spent ten weeks in hospital. Visitors recalled how he campaigned from his bed to have a water fountain installed for their benefit.
Sir Bill O'Brien, union activist and politician, was born on January 25, 1929. He died on May 16, 2025, aged 96
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