How 25 years after Scargill led the miners to defeat, he's still convinced he beat Thatcher
A quarter of a century ago, his was the second most recognisable face in the country: a sneering, self-righteous icon of Far Left class warfare whose air of menace was not diminished by his thick, ginger sideburns and a Brillo Pad thatch of hair combed across his balding pate.
On the eve of the 1984 miners' strike - or the Great Strike For Jobs, to use the romantic term he prefers - only Margaret Thatcher was better known than Arthur Scargill, then President of the mighty National Union of Mineworkers and self-anointed Chief Commissar of his own fantasy state, dubbed the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire.
The Prime Minister, of course, was Scargill's great nemesis. Mrs Thatcher stood diametrically opposed to everything he represented and was equally intransigent
After a year-long clash of ideologies so bloody and vitriolic that it often seemed more like civil war than an industrial dispute, she defeated him - with such crushing
finality that neither he nor the courageous miners he had led so misguidedly could ever recover.
That fact, if little else in a conflict so bitter that its wounds remain unhealed in great swathes of the country, is surely beyond dispute.
When the strike was called - 25 years ago last Thursday - in response to government plans to 'streamline' the then nationalised coal industry by closing 20 uneconomical pits, Britain had 170,000 miners working in 186 collieries.
Read entire article at Daily Mail (UK)
On the eve of the 1984 miners' strike - or the Great Strike For Jobs, to use the romantic term he prefers - only Margaret Thatcher was better known than Arthur Scargill, then President of the mighty National Union of Mineworkers and self-anointed Chief Commissar of his own fantasy state, dubbed the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire.
The Prime Minister, of course, was Scargill's great nemesis. Mrs Thatcher stood diametrically opposed to everything he represented and was equally intransigent
After a year-long clash of ideologies so bloody and vitriolic that it often seemed more like civil war than an industrial dispute, she defeated him - with such crushing
finality that neither he nor the courageous miners he had led so misguidedly could ever recover.
That fact, if little else in a conflict so bitter that its wounds remain unhealed in great swathes of the country, is surely beyond dispute.
When the strike was called - 25 years ago last Thursday - in response to government plans to 'streamline' the then nationalised coal industry by closing 20 uneconomical pits, Britain had 170,000 miners working in 186 collieries.