Quote:
Originally Posted by TheDaddy
Hard to say, perhaps they wouldn't have toppled the government, their tactics were working though, we were going through those reserves hoarded before the strike even began, had they had support from the dockers, steel workers and more importantly the Labour party itself it could have been different, Maggie herself said “We were in danger of losing everything,†the strike “could indeed have brought down the government.â€
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After a year of the strike there was coal stockpiled for another 18 months at least, even before you take imports into account.
Also, the government made sure that they weren't reliant on coal for power generation; they spent £hundreds of millions on getting the 60s nuclear power stations modernised and recommissioned pretty much anything that had ever generated power, even power stations that ran on airplane jet engines.
Thatcher saw what happened in the 70s with the miners strike then and learned from what happened. Whatever you think of her as a person, I can't think of many examples where she didn't learn from others' mistakes.
The miners had no hope of winning.