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Originally Posted by cookie_365
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.
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That's what the press have always said, that they had no chance of winning, probably to put anyone else of trying, the fact is there were several times when they came close.
Don't believe to BS about the stockpiles either, there was a reason that the government forced their hand to striking when they did, don't you think they'd have prefered to strike at the end of summer rather than the begining of spring?
October 1984, six months into the strike, the future of Thatcher's government hung in the balance - when there were less than six weeks' coal stocks.
We weren't as reliant on coal you mean, our power stations were still in general coal based and our steel industry was entirely coal based.
The government weren't expecting the strike to last as long as it did, nor for them to be as organised, or do you think she was telling fibs when she said “
We were in danger of losing everything,†the strike “could indeed have brought down the government.â€
They expected a few months at most
Ten years after the strike Frank Ledger, the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB) director of operations, recounted how they had only planned for a six-month strike and that the situation at this time was verging on the "catastrophic".
Former CEGB chairman Sir Walter Marshall spelt out what this meant: "Our predictions showed on paper that Scargill would win certainly before Christmas. Margaret Thatcher got very worried about that... I felt she was wobbly".