253. The Enemy Within

What had converted Maggie Thatcher from something of a lame duck into a front runner for the next British general election?

While the economy had begun to pick up, that had been patchy at best, with some parts of Britain suffering badly while the general picture was improving. That’s what made me feel then, and leaves me feeling now, that it was the victory in the Falklands that made her more or less unassailable, far more than any economic achievements.

The election, when it came, gave her a landslide majority in the Commons, making her the only British Prime Minister in the twentieth century to have improved her majority at her second election. But that disguises the fact that her popular vote actually fell slightly, mostly down to the impact of the SDP-Liberal Alliance, taking far more votes than the Liberals alone at the previous election. That won them a disappointing number of MPs, because of the perversity of the first past the post system, while giving her a huge victory, down to the exactly the same thing.

Next, having defeated an enemy without, the Argentinians, she took on what she regarded as a more serious threat, the enemy within. That was the trade union movement and more particularly the miners. When they struck against mine closures, her smart work preparing the ground for resisting even a long strike, combined with the incompetence of a radical but inept leader of the miners’ union, Arthur Scargill, she was able to crush the strikers.

A second victory in three years. But not against an external enemy. This was against the enemy within, a once proud and powerful working-class movement, now reduced to impotence.

Illustration: A scene from the Battle of Orgreave between mineworker pickets and police. Photo from the Doncaster Free Press.

Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License