Apologise for taking on the miners? As Mrs T would have said: ‘No! No! No!’

There is only one answer to the Labour demand that David Cameron apologise for Margaret Thatcher’s handling of the 1984-85 miners’ strike, and it is the one the lady herself would have given: ‘No, no, no!’

To judge from his robust response yesterday at Prime Minister’s Questions, Mr Cameron seems in no mood to say sorry. Indeed, there are three very good reasons why such an apology would be entirely misguided and wrong.

The first is that such apologies for past injustices, real or imagined, are morally dubious. Mr Cameron was still at school at the time of the miners’ strike and thus bears no personal responsibility. ed Miliband, too, was a schoolboy.

Apologies issued or demanded by politicians on behalf of others, especially if they are dead, are simply exercises in cynicism and hypocrisy.

When British Prime Ministers apologise for the slave trade, the Irish potato famine, Bloody Sunday, the Amritsar massacre or other tragic episodes in our history, they are going through the motions for diplomatic purposes.

Violence

No one is fooled that grovelling about our past in this way is a brave or honourable thing to do. We may regret the deeds of our ancestors, but a formal apology for them is a charade.

The second reason why no apologies are due for the actions of the Thatcher government is that it did not act out of malice or selfinterest, as the Left has always maintained.

It may suit Labour to perpetuate the myth that Mrs Thatcher pursued a vendetta against the miners. The truth is quite different.

In reality the mines had long been uneconomic and had been sustained by huge state subsidies for decades before the strike.

The previous Labour governments of harold Wilson and James Callaghan closed many more pits than Mrs Thatcher. Curiously, Mr Miliband is not offering to apologise on their behalf.

The more militant miners used violence to intimidate those who wanted to work, culminating in the so- called Battle of Orgreave, where thousands of picketing miners fought police at the Orgreave coking plant in Yorkshire.

Yesterday, with shameful cynicism, Labour moved to put pressure on the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) to conduct a hillsborough- style inquiry into police tactics.

Orgreave was not a tragedy like hillsborough. It was a pitched battle between 10,000 miners and 5,000 police resulting in dozens of injuries and hundreds of arrests.

Police were bombarded with bricks and stones. A few officers may have used excessive force, but they were under extreme provocation.

Some miners later sued the police, with 39 of them receiving nearly £500,000 in compensation for assault, unlawful arrest and malicious prosecution. But this cannot be compared to hillsborough, where 96 died and there was a systematic police cover-up.

There is no justification for the IPCC to mount an investigation of Orgreave, let alone a ruinously expensive inquiry, because the main facts are known and always have been.

I have no doubt Labour has mounted this campaign because they would like to change the subject from the present state of the economy — which is at last booming again — to old grievances.

It is in their interest to claim the Tories deliberately engineered and escalated the strike in order to crush the unions.

Their argument has been given a spurious plausibility by secret papers recently released under the 30-year rule, which makes public Cabinet papers three decades after they were created. Yet the new documents do not substantially alter what was already known.

No one should be surprised that contingency plans were made to declare a state of emergency and use troops to move coal stocks or food supplies if the strikes continued. It would have been irre- sponsible for any government not to prepare for the worst.

Nor is there anything shocking about the ‘secret’ proposal by the chairman of the National Coal Board, Ian MacGregor, six months before the strike, to close 75 pits over three years.

The pit closure programme was no secret. It was dictated by dire economic necessity.

There is nothing in these new documents to justify Labour’s conspiracy theory that the Conservatives deliberately sought to escalate the dispute ‘guided by a complete hostility to the coalfield communities’, as Labour MP Michael Dugher put it earlier this week.

The state of crisis was caused by the impossible demand by the miners’ leader, Arthur Scargill, to keep all pits open, even if they were losing huge amounts of money.

This brings us to the third and most important reason why Mr Cameron should hold out against demands for apologies or inquiries. Mrs Thatcher was right and Arthur Scargill was wrong.

Those who do not remember the miners’ strike may find it hard to understand how desperate Mrs Thatcher’s predicament then was. her predecessor, Ted heath, had tried to take on the miners, imposing a three- day working week to conserve electricity.

Fear

he called a general election in 1974, asking voters: ‘ Who governs Britain?’ he lost and a broken-backed Labour government, which lived in fear of the trades unions, took office.

In 1977, as a young reporter, I met the leader of the Scottish miners, Mick McGahey. he was an unashamed Communist and boasted openly of his comrades’ determination to turn Britain into a socialist paradise. Many others saw the miners as the vanguard of socialism, including ed Miliband’s father, ralph.

Mrs Thatcher came to power in 1979 with the explicit aim of curbing union power. even in her first term, however, she was forced to yield to the threats of the National Union of Mineworkers. She reluctantly granted new subsidies to uneconomic pits, because she was warned that they could bring the country to its knees.

No sooner had Mrs Thatcher, newly confident after the Falklands War victory, been reelected, than the militant new leader of the NUM, Arthur Scargill, sought to call a national strike intended to bring down her government.

Scargill was a Stalinist who did not believe in democracy. he sought to intimidate his members, at first by mass picketing and later by mob violence, aimed not only at ‘scabs’ who crossed the picket lines but at their families and anyone who helped them.

One taxi driver, for example, was murdered for driving miners to work by having a concrete slab dropped onto his car from a road bridge.

In June came Orgreave, which marked a new escalation of violence by Scargill and his men. This is the pivotal moment in the highly charged battle which has been seized upon by today’s opportunist Labour Party.

Scargill continued to hold the country to ransom, though he was losing ground. Then, in March 1985 the leadership of the NUM defied Scargill and voted to call off the strike.

It must be admitted that Margaret Thatcher was not entirely magnanimous in victory. She could not forgive ‘ the enemy within’, those militants who had sought to derail the stability and prosperity of their own country, and her enemies have not forgiven her.

This has left a bitter legacy in our culture — think of films such as Billy elliot.

But such criticism of our greatest peacetime Prime Minister should not be allowed to obscure her achievement. Thirty years later, we can see clearly that the defeat of the miners’ strike was a blessing for the whole nation.

It made possible the Thatcher revolution — both economic and social — of which we are still the beneficiaries.

Labour’s call for an inquiry is nothing but a cynical ploy. Orgreave was no hillsborough. And David Cameron has nothing to apologise for.

Daniel Johnson is editor of Standpoint.

n

Defied