Quote:
Originally Posted by harmitage
..and at that time she did have fairly substantial support from the British Public. The unions had pretty much abused their power for sometime before Thatcher came to power so union bashing was popular, especially those nasty miners who deprived our power stations of coal meaning we had to have power cuts.
IMHO Thatcher got personal and took it too far, destroying communities and families in the process.
She forced Scargill's hand at a time when she knew she had 5 aces.
|
Well, it's no secret that she ordered power stations to stockpile coal for months beforehand. Actually I remember being on holiday during the strike and in a playground next to a railway, and a great big coal train going past. I was amazed that it was possible to fill a train with coal. In fact I ran to find my parents to tell them. I remember by dad saying we'd have to phone Arthur Scargill and warn him.
The thing is, it might sound extreme to us now but we are a generation that has, by and large, grown up without any concept of what it was like when the question of who actually ran the country was topical. The trade unions were very, very powerful and were making it difficult for the elected government to manage the country and the economy.
The NUM may have represented a large number of people but they were still a single-interest pressure group at the end of the day, and such organisations have no business hobbling the entire country and everyone else's interests just so they're alright Jack.
I would say that redressing the imbalance was a perfectly reasonable policy aim of Thatcher's government. It may well have been ruthless in its execution but I think those who claim she let it 'get personal' are simply buying into a convenient parody of the handbag-waving nasty woman. Nobody who gets into a personal grudge match is able to stay the course in the measured, determined way she did for the 12 months it took to break the strike.
The point about destroying communities and families is another myth I take issue with. The industry was dying. Thatcher was no more the destroyer than a doctor who turns of a life support machine is a murderer. She dealt the final blow, yes, but if she hadn't, it would have been a lingering death that would have brought the entire country down with it.
Quote:
From the experience of when the public stopped blaming Labour and the Unions for the ills of the 70s, I would say it should stop around about the date of the next General election. 
|
It's amazing, when you look around threads on this forum, how many people simply assume the next Government will be a Tory one. That's the kind of thinking Labour enjoyed going into the 1997 election. Sometimes prophesies become self-fulfilling. Let's hope so, anyway.