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By Root 2726 0

’s position throughout the strike — that uneconomic pits could not be closed — was totally unreasonable. Never while I was Prime Minister did any other group make a similar demand, let alone strike for it. Only in a totalitarian state with a siege economy — with nationalization, the direction of labour and import barriers — could the coal industry have functioned, even for a time, irrespective of financial realities and the forces of competition. But for people like Mr Scargill these were desirable things. The impossibility of the NUM’s policy on pit closures is a further clue — as if public statements were not enough — to the real nature of the strike itself.

The strike certainly established the truth that the British coal industry could not remain immune to the economic forces which applied elsewhere in both the public and private sectors. In spite of heavy investment, British coal has proved unable to compete on world markets and as a result the British coal industry has now shrunk far more than any of us thought it would at the time of the strike.*

Yet the coal strike was always about far more than uneconomic pits. It was a political strike. And so its outcome had a significance far beyond the economic sphere. From 1972 to 1985 the conventional wisdom was that Britain could only be governed with the consent of the trade unions. No government could really resist, still less defeat, a major strike; in particular a strike by the miners’ union. Even as we were reforming trade union law and overcoming lesser disputes, such as the steel strike, many on the left and outside it continued to believe that the miners had the ultimate veto and would one day use it. That day had now come and gone. Our determination to resist a strike emboldened the ordinary trade unionist to defy the militants. What the strike’s defeat established was that Britain could not be made ungovernable by the Fascist Left. Marxists wanted to defy the law of the land in order to defy the laws of economics. They failed, and in doing so demonstrated just how mutually dependent the free economy and a free society really are. It is a lesson no one should forget.

* See pp. 139 — 43.

* See pp. 379 — 83.

* In fact, I have since seen documentary evidence suggesting that he knew full well and was among those who authorized payment.

* See pp. 685 — 6.

CHAPTER XIV

Shadows of Gunmen

The political and security response to IRA

terrorism…1979–1990

THE BRIGHTON BOMB

As usual, by the end of the week of our 1984 Party Conference in Brighton I was becoming frantic about my speech. A good conference speech cannot just be written in advance: you need to get the feel of the conference in order to achieve the right tone. I spent as much time as I could working on the text with my speech writers on Thursday afternoon and evening, rushed away to look in at the Conservative Agents’ Ball and returned to my suite at the Grand Hotel just after 11 o’clock.

By about 2.40 a.m. the speech…at least from my point of view…was finished. So while the speech writers themselves, who had been joined for a time by Norman Tebbit, went to bed, my long-suffering staff typed in what I was (fairly) confident would be the final changes to the text and prepared the Autocue tape. Meanwhile, I got on with some government business.

At 2.50 a.m. Robin Butler asked me to look at one last official paper…it was about the Liverpool Garden Festival. I gave Robin my view and he began to put away the papers. At 2.54 a.m. a loud thud shook the room. There was a few seconds’ silence and then there was a second slightly different noise, in fact created by falling masonry. I knew immediately that it was a bomb…perhaps two bombs, a large followed by a smaller device…but at this stage I did not know that the explosion had taken place inside the hotel. Glass from the windows of my sitting-room was strewn across the carpet. But I thought that it might be a car bomb outside. (I only realized that the bomb had exploded above us when Penny, John Gummer’s wife, appeared a little later from upstairs,