The class quiz
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The miners’ strike of 1984-5 was the most bitter ‘class war’ in Britain since the 1926 General Strike. The Conservative government mobilised the entire strength of the state against the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), headed by Arthur Scargill, and ultimately defeated it. In July 1984, the then prime minister Margaret Thatcher (b. 1925) branded Scargill and other union leaders as ‘the enemy within’ – in her view, they comprised a political clique bent on undermining democracy and liberty. However, many working-class people took this to be a blanket slur against themselves. Ironically, it later became clear that the true ‘enemy within’ was actually at work inside the National Union of Mineworkers: MI5, the British Secret Service.
