A wave of strikes and mass protests is sweeping across Europe. Apparently no one is happy. If nothing else for demographic reasons, it is inevitable to lengthen the retirement age. There is no other. But tell it to the millions of irate Frenchmen ready to do battle to safeguard their rights or to the Brits shaken by the shot in the foot of Brexit, not to mention the battered Spanish health workers and teachers.
The winds of social confrontation that marked the first years of Margaret Thatcher's first government, from 1979, but especially after her landslide victory in the 1983 general elections, are blowing again. Immediately a trench war broke out between Maggie and the unions, with that of the seasoned miners in the front line. A prolonged and absurd battle of attrition like that of the Somme but by other means, in which the unions, as would be seen, had everything to lose.
These were very turbulent times, marked by galloping inflation and an abrupt change in the political and social paradigm that would divide the British into two opposing blocs, just as they are now. Whoever was right, nobody missed the need to impose drastic changes that would save the ship from the capsizing that was coming. But none of the opponents was willing to give in the slightest to at least some of the more acceptable demands of the enemy. In fact, in the first two years of her first term, the Iron Lady passed two laws against the hitherto all-powerful unions.
Declared in February 1981 after an attempt by the Thatcher government to close 23 of the mines that did nothing but generate huge losses, the miners' strike lasted eleven agonizing months. Opposite them was Arthur Scargill, a communist and son of a communist, no matter how much he went to Labor in 1962; and a miner-he went down to the mine for the first time at the age of fifteen-and the son of a miner. He had been under surveillance by MI5 for years, under both Labor and Conservative governments. His phone was tapped and he knew it. His activism was legendary.
In that dreary winter of 1981, the country still depended on coal extracted from state-owned mines to generate four-fifths of its electricity consumption. What's more, the government didn't have enough coal reserves to meet a prolonged miners' strike, as Scargill knew.
Maggie, aware that sooner or later she would have to deal with Scargill and his hosts, ordered coal stockpiling to prevent a blackout that would hopelessly paralyze the entire country, knowing that opting for nuclear energy, which at that time only covered 14%, it would take years to replace coal. In any case, mining had been in the doldrums for decades, sustained only by large subsidies.
In 1984, two years after the Falklands war and with a large majority in Parliament, Maggie ordered the closure of some of the most ruinous mines for the economy. It was a declaration of war to which Scargill responded with a call for an indefinite strike.
Given the power of the State, how were the miners going to finance themselves during what promised to be a prolonged period of Numantine resistance and confrontations? Well, thanks to millions in aid from sister communist unions in Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria or the Soviet Union, but above all from the Libyan dictator Colonel Gaddafi.
They were devastating for all those eleven months delivered to unreason. In addition to ten thousand people arrested for activities against the authorities, another twenty thousand suffered some type of injury in the violent skirmishes. And it goes without saying that Maggie, unperturbed, not only got away with it, but she managed to crush the hitherto ironclad miners' union. All a warning for navigators. The signing of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 would do the rest.
Will Macron be the new Margaret Thatcher? Will the unions lose again? Are we facing a new wave of strikes and protests spurred on by unreason and foreign funding? Has the Brexit UK, in clear decline, returned to the turbulent times of the 1980s? Apparently, this is what Rishi Sunak, the British prime minister, thinks, who is inspired by the exploits of the Iron Lady.
Who was going to say it. Coal is once again a coveted source of energy endorsed by none other than the greens, as is nuclear power. And the UK of Brexit ousts its prime ministers more quickly than the Republic of Italy. The world has changed. Keeping Margaret Thatcher as a reference is not going to solve anything. Neither in the United Kingdom, nor in France, nor in Spain. And the unions would do well not to repeat Scargill's mistakes. A new trench warfare would be nonsense. Manca fineness.
