God and Mrs Thatcher by Eliza Filby

Author:Eliza Filby [Eliza Filby]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781849548885
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
Published: 2015-10-10T16:00:00+00:00

The religious delegation, though, pressed ahead and over the next three months senior church representatives from all denominations in Wales, Scotland and England, met with the NUM and eventually Walker himself, in a concerted effort to succeed where the NUM, TUC and the Labour Party had all failed. In the end, it was to no avail. The miners trickled back to work as all lost hope for a settlement being reached.

It has been estimated that the Miners’ Strike cost the state £6 billion, with the police bill amounting to £200 million alone. For a government supposedly committed to reducing public expenditure, the fact that such sums were spent without question indicates the level of determination of the Thatcher government in defeating the most powerful union in Britain. Many interpretations have been imprinted onto the Miners’ Strike. For the left, it was a triumphant tragedy, a time when old solidarities were destroyed and new ones forged; for the right, Thatcher’s unrelenting and resounding victory against the over-powerful and undemocratic union movement remains her greatest triumph. For the Church though, the Miners’ Strike was a moral fight about the nation’s values: between community and capital; dogmatism and compromise; harmony and conflict. ‘Their solidarity and endurance, have helped the rest of the nation to see that materialism is not the only motivating force in people’s lives’ wrote the Bishop of Lincoln in pointed words at the end of the strike.81 Reflecting years later, David Jenkins concluded that the social consequences of economic policies was not a ‘wet’ question, but a necessary one in order to formulate a proper assessment of the ‘structural deficiency or inefficiency’ of the government’s agenda.82 Anyone who had witnessed not only the social but also the economic costs of those communities that had been built on mines, could not fail to agree.

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