Yahoo Finance Miners Strike: Margaret Thatcher's Triumph
She called them "the enemy within" and the 1984-85 miners' strike was the most divisive confrontation of Margaret Thatcher's 11 years in power.
It was a vicious, violent industrial dispute that changed the face of Britain and its industrial landscape forever.
It pitched striking miners against the police, family members and communities against each other and even saw Britain's security services and foreign governments, including Libya and the Soviet Union, dragged into the controversy.
It also confirmed Mrs Thatcher's status as an unrivalled hate figure for British trade unionists and left-wingers.
During the year-long dispute, 11 people lost their lives: six pickets, four teenagers looking for coal and a taxi driver taking a non-striking miner to work.
More than 11,000 arrests were made and more than 8,000 people were charged, mostly for breach of the peace.
But it ended with humiliating defeat for the miners and a political triumph for Mrs Thatcher and the Conservatives.
It was a humiliation, too, for Labour's leader Neil Kinnock and was a turning point in industrial relations in Britain.
In a speech to Conservative MPs during the strike, Mrs Thatcher declared: "We had to fight the enemy without in the Falklands. We always have to be aware of the enemy within, which is much more difficult to fight and more dangerous to liberty."
Later, she said she had seen the strike coming since 1974, when the miners had brought down Edward Heath's Conservative government.
She had avoided a miners' strike in 1981 by backing down because coal stocks were low. But after her crushing defeat of Michael Foot's Labour Party in the 1983 general election, she knew a strike was inevitable, she said.
"I had never had any doubt about the true aim of the Hard Left," she wrote in her memoirs, The Downing Street Years. "They were revolutionaries who sought to impose a Marxist system on Britain, whatever the means and whatever the cost."
The miners' leader Arthur Scargill was a Marxist who provided "the shock troops for the Left's attack", she claimed.
The strike was over plans by the National Coal Board to close dozens of uneconomic pits and stem financial losses running into billions.
Mrs Thatcher had recently appointed the American Ian MacGregor as the board's chairman, after he earned a reputation as an industrial hard man by transforming the fortunes of British Steel and halving the workforce in two years.
Anticipating a strike, Mr MacGregor - under orders from Mrs Thatcher's Energy Secretaries Nigel Lawson and then Peter Walker - built up massive coal stocks at power stations.
The strike began in Mr Scargill's Yorkshire power base and soon spread. But it was weakened by two flaws: first the snubbing of the strike by thousands of miners in areas like Nottinghamshire, who formed the Union of Democratic Mineworkers, and secondly Mr Scargill's refusal to hold a ballot, which meant he never got political backing from Neil Kinnock and the Labour Party or the TUC leadership under general secretary Norman Willis.
Many moderate Labour MPs who instinctively wanted to support a union steeped in the party's history were dismayed by Mr Scargill's tactics.
But besides the failure to hold a ballot, public support for the miners was undermined by horrific picket line violence, although the police came in for criticism too.
The most notorious clash between pickets and police came at the Orgreave Coking Plant near Rotherham in June 1984. There were about 5,000 on each side and brutal violence erupted.
Mounted police charged the miners with truncheons and inflicted serious injuries on several pickets.
A defiant Mr Scargill was at the heart of the clashes, in which 93 arrests were made and 51 pickets and 72 police injured.
Earlier in the dispute, responding to criticism of police tactics on picket lines, Mrs Thatcher said in a TV interview: "The police are upholding the law. They are not upholding the Government.
"This is not a dispute between miners and government. This is a dispute between miners and miners. It is the police who are in charge of upholding the law. They have been wonderful."
After more clashes some weeks later, she said: "You saw the scenes on television last night. I must tell you that what we have got is an attempt to substitute the rule of the mob for the rule of the law and it must not succeed.
"There are those who are using violence and intimidation to impose their will on others who do not want it. The rule of law must prevail over the rule of the mob."
But trade union and left-wing critics of the Prime Minister claimed the real "enemy within" was the security services, after it was revealed that MI5 agents had been infiltrating striking miners.
There was also an intense propaganda war between Mrs Thatcher and Mr Scargill throughout the dispute. And in some of the more bizarre twists of the year-long strike, Mr Scargill turned to Colonel Gaddafi and Mikhail Gorbachev for funds.
Libya is thought to have provided £150,000, but in a behind-the-scenes move, Mrs Thatcher successfully persuaded Mr Gorbachev not to help the miners.
In the autumn of 1984, the strike began to crumble as more and more miners, running out of money and suffering huge financial hardship, returned to work.
Over the winter, more and more miners, their families suffering terrible poverty, went back and by the end of February, what Lady Thatcher called "the magic figure" - more than half - were back at work.
Looking back on the strike, Mrs Thatcher said it had been about more than uneconomic pits and had been a political strike.
"What the strike's defeat established was that Britain could not be made ungovernable by the Fascist Left," she wrote in her memoirs.
"Marxists wanted to defy the law of the land in order to defy the laws of economics. They failed."
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