Thatcher vs the miners: official papers confirm the strikers’ worst suspicions

http://blogs.channel4.com/paul-mason-blog/thatcher-miners-official-papers-confirm-strikers-worst-suspicions/265

Amid the cooled air of a vault at the National Archive I trace my finger across Maggie Thatcher’s handwriting, in the margin of a typewritten note marked Secret.

She’s scribbled: “13 RoRo, 1,000 tons a day, 50 lorries a day…”

If you think destroying some of Britain’s most cohesive communities was a great achievement, then these jottings are a token of genius. They reveal Mrs Thatcher engaged in battle micro-management worthy of a Monty or Wellington.

The documents show the Conservative government was, in the middle of the miners’ strike, facing defeat.

Coal stocks were plummeting and – alongside the miners – the dockers had gone out on strike. So in July 1984, cabinet documents released today show, the government seriously considered calling in troops to move coal.

They thought, as Conservative policy chief John Redwood put it, the National Coal Board (NCB) was “crumbling”. In a powerfully worded, single-copy letter, Redwood warned Thatcher that the far left was engaged in a revolutionary strategy to “destroy” the government.

The cabinet had, the minutes show, from the very beginning, pressured police to get tough on the pickets, and complained that local courts were dragging their feet in the processing of those arrested.

The rest at link