Extracto las páginas de Modern Times Revised Edition: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties
Mrs. Thatcher, soon dubbed by the Brezhnev regime "the Iron Lady" (a title she relished), called herself a "conviction" politician, as opposed to a consensus one. She implicitly repudiated much of Conservative post-war policy, and especially its tacit agreement with the Labour Party that whole areas of British public life, including the welfare state and the nationalized sector, were sacrosanct. Her first task was to curb the legal power of the trade unions which, as we have seen, had been growing steadily sin 1945. A previous attempt at reform by the Conservative government in 1971, the comprehensive and ultra-complex Industrial Relations Act, had proved unworkable and had been promptly scrapped by the incoming Labour Cabinet in 1974. Mrs. Thatcher's government, having learned the lesson, set about the problem on a step-by-step basis, enacting in all five separate acts, over the space of three parliaments, which progressively ended a whole series of special union legal privileges, made many strikes and forms of picketing unlawful, and subjected unions that broke the law to severe financial penalties. Mrs. Thatcher also made it clear that the police, in dealing with "mass", "flying" and "secondary" pickets, which had made it virtually impossible in the 1970s for employers to resist strike demands and so inflicted grievous damage on both the private and public sector, would be fully backed by her government.
The new policy was soon put to the test. The trade unions had effectively destroyed the governments of Harold Wilson in 1968-70, Edward Heath in 1974 and James Callaghan in 1979. The National Union of Mineworkers, following aggressive tactics created by Arthur Scargill, leader of the Yorkshire miners, who became president of the NUM in 1981, had played a major role in these victories, which threatened to make syndicalism, rather than parliamentary democracy, the ruling for in Britain, at leas in a negative sense. The British coal industry had been taken into public ownership in 1946 precisely to create industrial peace in the mines. But the NUM had always treated the National Coal Board as if it were as grasping and antisocial as the worst private pit-owner, thus defeating the central object of nationalization. On 6 March 1984, announced the closure of twenty uneconomic pits. Scargill had twice failed to bring about a general miners' strike, which under NUM rules required a 55 per cent majority in a national pit-head ballot. On this occasion, Scargill evaded the rule-book procedures. As his Vice-President Mich McGahey pu it: "We shall not be constutionalized out of a strike. Area by area will decide, and there will be a domino effect." Hence the decision to strike was take not by the union's members but by the more militant delegates; and the strike having begun on 10 March, a special delegate conference on 20 April rejected demand for a national ballot by 69-54. The fact that the strike was called undemocratically and unconstitutionally was a strong point in the government's favour in resisting it. Harold Macmillan had frequently observed: "There are three institutions in Britain so powerful that no government is wise to take them on: the Brigade of Guards, the Roman Catholic Church, and the National Union of Mineworkers." Margaret Thatcher was encouraged in defying this dictum by the attitude of the Nottinghamshire miners, who resented Scargill's tactics, voted in a ballot four-to-one against a strike, kept their pits open, despite much intimidation, and eventually formed a separate union, thus splitting the NUM irretrievably; on 7 August 1985 they won a High Court action, which, four months later, enabled the new Union of Democratic Miners to achieve legal status as a trade union.
The Scargill strike of 1984-5 merits examination in some detail because it was, in effect, an attempt to destroy a democratically elected government, and its failure was an epochal event in British industrial history. It was beaten by a combination of the courts, enacting the new reforms governing union activities, and by effective coordination between the various locally-commanded police forces of Britain. By mid-April 1984 Scargill's men had shut 131 out of 174 pits and they planned to "picket out" the rest, using the fear-inspiring methods they had employed so successfully in the 1970s. This time, however, the police were prepared to stop them, with the backing of the law. On 22 October, the police won a High Court ruling that they had the right to stop buses carrying militant miners to areas of disturbance with the object of committing a breach of the peace. By road control, and by mass policing at functioning pit-heads, the police managed to make it possible for miners wishing to work to do so, though some were victimized at home. Thus Scargill's primary objective of shutting all pits failed. The strike was extremely costly: it added 2750 million pounds to government expenditure, 1850 million to the NCB's losses, cost British Steel 300 million, British Rail 250 million and the electricity supply industry 2200 million. It was also extremely violent, and cost five lives; on 16 May 1985 two South Wales miners were found guilty of murdering a taxi-driver taking non-striking miners to work, though the conviction was reduced to manslaughter on appeal. Between March and end-November 1984, for example, 7100 striking miners were charged with various offences, and a total of 3483 cases were eventually heard, with 2740 convictions; the cost of policing alone rose to 300 million pounds.
But with the government determined on no surrender, the futility of the strike became gradually apparent. Ignoring the lessons of the 1920s, Scargill had struck at the wrong time of year, the strping. The NCB and its consumers had long seen the crisis coming, and had built up huge stocks. As a result, there was no need for power-cuts throughout the winter of 1984-85, and on 8 January 1985 the highest peak demand for electricity ever recorded in Britain was met without difficulty. Scargill's strike funds were augmented by huge subsidies provided by Gadafy's Libyan government, a fact denied by the NUM at the time but subsequently established, beyond doubt, by the Daily Mirror in 1980. Despite this, miners bega to drift back, and by the end of February 1985, over half the 170.000 employees on the NCB's books were back at work. On 5 March a national miners' delegate conference assented to what was, in effect, unconditional surrender. Court fines had already cost the NUM 1.4 million pounds, and its funds were sequestrated. Some 700 strikers were sacked for "gross industrial misconduct", and 30.000 were made redundant, 10.000 more than the pre-strike planned figure. Indeed, with the creation of the breakaway UDM, the NUM itself, once the largest union in Europe, soon shrank to a mere 80.000 members, and, from being one of the richest Britain, became amont the poorest.
It was perhaps the most unsuccessful major strike in British history, though by one of the fundamental axioms of British trade unionism - security of tenure for officials - Scargill remained in charge, even if echoes of the dispute rumbled on. In 1990 he was accused of using Libyan-supplied funds to facilitate the purchase of a new home, grand by miners' standards, and it was said, "Scargill started out with a big union and a small house, and ended with a big house and a small union." Mrs Thatcher rightly regarded the defeat of the NUM as the most important reversal for militant trade unionism since the General Strike of 1926, rejoicing (6 April 1985), that she had "seen off" what she called "the enemy within". Two days later she added: "Despite cruel intimidation, the working miners insisted on their right to continue to work, and they found the had an employer and a government prepared to stand up for them. I hope and believe the lesson will not be lost on others."
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