Kings Bay Affair

The Kings Bay Affair (Kings Bay-saken) was a political issue in Norway that reached its apex in 1963 and brought down the government of Einar Gerhardsen and formed the basis for non-socialist coalition politics in Norway that persisted to the end of the 20th century. The affair was a dramatic episode in Norwegian history that portended the end of the Gerhardsen dynasty and the emergence of a more articulate and coherent political alternative in the non-socialist camp. It is also credited with galvanizing the radical socialist wing of Norwegian politics in time for the EU debate nine years later.

The Kings Bay Coal Mining Company was a coal mining operation based in Ny Ålesund on the Norwegian territory of Svalbard in the Arctic Ocean. Since 1933 it had been a wholly owned crown company, held by the Norwegian government.

Between 1945 and 1963, 71 lives were lost in three major accidents in the mines. Resulting from a mining accident at Kings Bay mines on November 5, 1962, in which 21 miners were killed in an explosion. In the summer of 1963 a commission established by the Storting delivered its report finding several deficiencies in the management of the mine. Among other things, the commission found culpability on the part of the minister of industry at the time, Kjell Holler.

The non-socialist opposition to the Labour Party government demanded that Holler be dismissed, but the prime minister Einar Gerhardsen claimed that Kings Bay operations were not accountable to the parliament, since the company was run under a corporate charter rather than a government agency. This was the pretext, but the underlying issue was constitutional: the non-socialist coalition was protesting against what they perceived as a shift of power away from the legislative in favour of the executive branch in Norway. Having previously enjoyed the confidence of a Labour-dominated parliament since World War II, Gerhardsen was, for the first time in his entire tenure as prime minister, forced to appear before the parliament and answer for his cabinet's actions.

...
Wikipedia