As the Nottinghamshire collieries had attracted displaced miners from Scotland and the north-east in the 1960s, it has been argued that they were reluctant to strike to stop pit closures when there had been no action to save their home pits from closure. A large Polish community in Nottinghamshire (especially Ollerton) had been alienated by Scargill's policy of supporting the Communist government in Poland against the Solidarity union, which the NUM previously had supported. David John Douglass, a branch delegate at Hatfield Colliery dismissed the suggestions as the Doncaster pits also had large numbers of displaced and Polish miners, yet the it was amongst the most militant areas of the NUM. Nottinghamshire NUM executive Henry Richardson argued that the Nottinghamshire miners would have probably voted for strike had they not been subjected to so much intimidation within days of the walk-out in Yorkshire, which prompted many to defy the Yorkshire pickets as a matter of principle. At some pits, most miners initially refused to cross picket lines formed by Welsh miners but returned to work when more aggressive pickets arrived from Yorkshire. After the strike, Mick McGahey, one of the most prominent voices against a national ballot, said that he accepted "some responsibility" for alienating the Nottinghamshire miners through aggressive picketing. Jonathan and Ruth Winterton have suggested that the greater success of picketing in Lancashire, a region with little tradition of militancy, might be ascribed to the more cautious tactics of the North Yorkshire area of the NUM, which worked with local officials in Lancashire to coordinate respectful picketing, in contrast to the aggressive tactics adopted by the Doncaster NUM in Nottinghamshire. The Marxist academic Alex Callinicos has suggested that the NUM officials had failed to make the case to their members adequately and believes that the Nottinghamshire miners were simply ignorant of the issues. The opposition Labour Party was divided in its attitude, its leader Neil Kinnock, whose late father had been a miner, was critical of the government's handling of the strike, but distanced himself from the leadership of the NUM over the issues of the ballot and violence against strikebreakers. Kinnock later said that it was "the greatest regret of [his] whole life" that he did not call for a national ballot at an earlier stage. He condemned the actions of pickets and police as "violence", which prompted a statement from the Police Federation that some officers would struggle to work under a Labour government. He appeared on a picket line on 3 January 1985, after having said in November that he was "too busy".