The miners’ strike was big and had split the country. Decency had gone out the window and I was detecting a horrible bias in both the Press and the good old BBC. I was used to the right-wing press misrepresenting the facts but had always assumed that the BBC took a more objective line. I was horrified at the way they had clearly been duplicitous in their reporting of the Orgreave Coke plant picketing. They had reversed the order of events to make the miners appear the guilty parties when in actual fact they were merely responding to horrendous police violence. That had to be an editorial decision.
If you cannot receive unbiased news you do not have a free country.
If all the media is controlled by one group then the population can be misinformed and you have a tyranny.
Thatcher was duplicitous to a level I had never imagined. She had the gall to stand on the steps of Downing Street and give her election winning speech telling us that she would bring harmony and end strife while she was actively planning with Nicholas Ridley, to cause division and mayhem.
She intended to bring down the unions. The Ridley report, written in 1977 and leaked by the Guardian and Economist in 1978, disclosed their planning. He suggested they needed to break one of the big three unions – The Miners, the Transport Workers or the Power Workers. They selected the miners.
They then set up elaborate plans and put them into action. They gave the police pay increases and widespread powers to stop secondary picketing. They bought off the Transport Workers and brought in non-union drivers. They built up huge stocks at the power stations in order to keep the lights on. Only when they’d done this did they provoke a confrontation by instigating a plan of pit closures and bringing in the hatchet man MacGregor.
Now I’m not the biggest fan of Arthur Scargill but his hand was forced. They set him up. He had no choice.