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Notes -
Scargill and the like had toppled a labour government: humiliating the PM at the time and dragging the country into a standstill. I would focus on Thatcher's predecessors (Callaghan, Wilson) as she was largely a reaction to their failed policy. If unions will sabotage the pro-Labor party, there's no point in government negotiating with them. By the time Thatcher came to be the public wanted the government to destroy the power of the unions and once that was accomplished they dispensed of her for more amiable neoliberal money-men: she was just the hatchet-man.
Granted. I just wonder if it would have been possible to destroy the unions without flogging the industries. Callaghan and Wilson certainly failed to come to an agreement with the unions but I don’t think they wanted to destroy them? They were Labour politicians.
Who is ‘they’? The public? Poll tax aside, she was still reasonably popular I think - she was unseated by internal party politics.
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