The virulence of the denunciations of Scargill and the miners during and long after the 1984–5 strike went far beyond the established boundaries of modern-day mainstream British politics. It reached a peak in the summer of 1984, when the Prime Minister compared the struggle with the miners to the war against the Argentine junta over the Falklands/Malvinas islands two years earlier. ‘We had to fight an enemy without in the Falklands,’ she declared at a gathering of Conservative back- bench MPs. Now the war had to be taken to ‘the enemy within, which is much more difficult to fight and more dangerous to liberty’. A few months later, Margaret Thatcher would return to her theme in the Carlton Club, the clubland temple of High Toryism:
At one end of the spectrum are, the terrorist gangs within our borders and the terrorist states which finance and arm them. At the other are the hard left, operating inside our system, conspiring to use union power . . . to break, defy and subvert the laws.
Her senior ministers were no less extreme. Thus Leon Brittan, the Home Secretary responsible during the strike for overseeing Britain’s largest and longest-running police mobilization ever, fulminated:
Mr Scargill does not just hate our free and democratic system and seek to do everything he can to discredit and damage it; he also feels equal hatred and contempt for those miners whose servant he is meant to be but whose tyrant he has become.
The message conveyed by these remarks by Thatcher and Brittan was unmistakable, down to the use of the words ‘conspiring’ and ‘subvert’: this false prophet and his bands of untamed red guards and coalfield sans-culottes should be treated as outlaws. They were enemies of the state. By branding the miners ‘the enemy within’, the Prime Minister was giving a calculated signal of unambiguous clarity to all government agencies that the gloves should come off in the war with the NUM.
An extract from 'It's Palestinians who have the right to defend themselves' by Seumas Milne for the Guardian on Tuesday 20 November.
The way western politicians and media have pontificated about Israel's onslaught on Gaza, you'd think it was facing an unprovoked attack from a well-armed foreign power. Israel had every "right to defend itself",Barack Obama declared. "No country on earth would tolerate missiles raining down on its citizens from outside its borders."
He was echoed by Britain's foreign secretary, William Hague, who declared that the Palestinian Islamists of Hamas bore "principal responsibility" for Israel's bombardment of the open-air prison that is the Gaza Strip. Meanwhile, most western media have echoed Israel's claim that its assault is in retaliation for Hamas rocket attacks; the BBC speaks wearisomely of a conflict of "ancient hatreds".