I am a Brit, and I lived through the Miner’s Strike and was politically aware during the time.
The miner’s strike is a difficult subject for many people. The Coal industry in the UK was rapidly approaching its last legs at the time of the Strike and the Miners’ Union at the time was led by a far-left neo-Communist firebrand named Arthur Scargill who saw what he thought was an opportunity to bring down a right wing government by calling an all-out strike of the coal industry and threatening to starve the country of vital fuel supplies for the power generating industry. It was his intention to re-enact the blackouts of the 1970s when the NUM (National Union of Miners) successfully forced concessions out of earlier governments. He miscalculated though, because coal was more readily available as imports and, indeed, was cheaper to obtain from abroad. Therefore the lights stayed on, and the miners’ strike lasted for a year or so, during which time the miners’ families practically starved. It happened that the areas in which the strike took place were, by and large, populated by working class people who would never have voted for Thatcher’s government anyway, therefore it played out as a class-war struggle for hearts and minds and the people who suffered, led by Scargill who utterly refused to budge or compromise, were left with an abiding hatred of the Thatcher government. To this day she is still spoken of in those areas with contempt.
After about a year or so of attrition, the strike eventually withered and the miners went back to work, but by this time some mines had degraded to the extent that their closures, which had already been on the cards, were brought forward. Within a few years, the British coal industry, which was always running uneconomically compared to cheaper imports from abroad, practically ceased to exist. The people of the coal mining areas blamed Thatcher’s government and the Conservative Party for this, although more dispassionate observers would probably suggest that with or without her, the industry would not have survived for much longer. Mines were being exhausted, open cast mining from elsewhere in the world produced far more coal at far cheaper prices, and the era of deep mined coal in the British Isles was coming to a close anyway. The strike and the hardship it caused were mainly down to political manoeuvrings by hard-left activists, but their supporters - or rather their victims - never really cottoned on to this.
The Strike became a political totem for the Left, and Thatcher became their Bogey(wo)man. History will recount a more balanced tale though. It wasn’t all Thatcher’s fault - although there were policy mis-steps, especially in the policing of pro-Strike demonstrations - but by and large, the fault mainly lies with a radical left-wing union seeking a fight with a government that was sufficiently sure of its position that it simply wouldn’t blink. That was one of Margaret Thatcher’s major strengths: that she was practically unblackmailable. In the end, that inability to compromise was eventually her downfall when, as with most long term politicians, hubris came knocking at her door. But overall, she was a titan of a politician, the like of which the world is unlikely to see again.
