The 1984 Miners' Strike
40 years ago. I just got back from up North, and Thatcher's phrase "the enemy within" still smarts in some quarters.
The coal industry was apparently in decline, the tories had drawn up the Ridley Plan to avoid a repeat of the three-day week and the NUM bringing the government to its knees in 1973, and my memory FWIW (not much) is that a major media narrative was Scargill not holding a ballot on whether to strike. This, it seemed, allowed the government to take the moral high ground and get away with e.g.
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The government won and the NUM lost. With the benefit of hindsight, how should King Arthur have played his cards differently?
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If he'd held a ballot he'd probably have lost it, which is why he didn't. And the government was determined to close the pits anyway -- and it's just as well, in environmental terms -- and there wasn't a lot the NUM could do about that. It was a rather nostalgic attempt by a union to impose national policy and, in a dying industry (with natural gas available, and domestic coal far more expensive than imports), the union simply didn't have the power that it had 12 years earlier.
