Scargill’s Great Gamble

SCARGILL’S GREAT GAMBLE

Day after day, week after week, massed pickets and massed police have faced each other and tried to outmaneuver each other: and miners have fought miners, strikers against non-strikers, fists, bricks, bottles, and insults flying. The siege of the Libyan “People’s Bureau” was more dramatic, Mrs. Thatcher’s constant wrangling with the Common Market more portentous, but they seemed mere distractions from this conflict, which may indeed prove more significant for Britain’s future. Arthur Scargill, the president of the National Union of Mineworkers, bellowing through a loudhailer at fanatical crowds of his militant supporters —his “red guards”—hopes to turn a dispute over pay and pit closures into something like a general strike, which, he dreams, could bring the government down: and Mrs. Thatcher, while keeping her government ostentatiously aloof from the industrial argument, is determined that violent picketing should not prevail. Her supporters hope that Mr. Scargill may be the General Galtieri of the second Thatcher administration.

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Anthony Lejeune

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British Conservative Party

Communism

Marxism

SCARGILL’S GREAT GAMBLE

Day after day, week after week, massed pickets and massed police have faced each other and tried to outmaneuver each other: and miners have fought miners, strikers against non-strikers, fists, bricks, bottles, and insults flying. The siege of the Libyan “People’s Bureau” was more dramatic, Mrs. Thatcher’s constant wrangling with the Common Market more portentous, but they seemed mere distractions from this conflict, which may indeed prove more significant for Britain’s future. Arthur Scargill, the president of the National Union of Mineworkers, bellowing through a loudhailer at fanatical crowds of his militant supporters —his “red guards”—hopes to turn a dispute over pay and pit closures into something like a general strike, which, he dreams, could bring the government down: and Mrs. Thatcher, while keeping her government ostentatiously aloof from the industrial argument, is determined that violent picketing should not prevail. Her supporters hope that Mr. Scargill may be the General Galtieri of the second Thatcher administration.