[British miners' strike: FORTE workers forced the gates…]
1984 1984-08Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 4 →
Read from the scan by machine and not corrected: expect misread words, and now and then a caption or a line from a neighbouring story. For anything you quote, read the scan.
Scan page 4
British miners' strike: FORTE workers forced the gates to close.
Although the government denounced the miners for defying the law, the incident was to prove the turning point in the strike. Heath's eventual fall at the hands of a second miners' strike in 1974 was widely attributed to his failure to beat the "flying pickets" led by Arthur Scargill, now the national president of the miners' union.
Thatcher's plans and miners' response Margaret Thatcher has learned the lessons of Heath's downfall. From the beginning of her administration in 1979 she planned the destruction of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), which is rightly seen as the vanby the police.
Police were bused or flown into Nottingham from all over the country in the biggest police operation ever seen in an industrial dispute in Britain and at a cost of 2,000,000 pounds per day. Miners traveling to the picket were stopped at police road blocks and arrested. When they appeared in court, their main condition of bail was that they should not participate in pickets outside their area. In Parliament these measures were denounced as "police state' tacties not only by left-wing Labour MPs, but also by MPs of the bourgeois Social Democratic and Liberal parties.
Police tacties, miners' tacties Indeed the tactics of the police were