Interesting piece by Kavanagh of The Sun. I can remember the pain the unions caused to everyone, the old, the sick and the young alike. We must never forget.
“WHO divided Britain? Was it Margaret Thatcher, who inherited a country split asunder by sullen strikers who refused to bury the dead or clear the garbage?
Or was it Marxist rabble-rouser Arthur Scargill, the donkey who led NUM lions to their doom in a demented bid to destroy an elected government?
Was Margaret Thatcher divisive as, with Ronald Reagan, she fought and won freedom for Soviet citizens and refugees — many of them living here in exile?
Or was it the Kremlin tyrants who grudgingly dubbed her the Iron Lady for standing up to them?
Was Margaret Thatcher divisive as she saw close friends murdered and risked her own life to make the IRA understand terror would never prevail?
Or was it the hard-eyed killers who tried to blow her up in Brighton before accepting negotiation was the only path to a still-uncertain peace?
I grew up in a Mirror-reading, Labour-voting household.
But any sympathy evaporated in 1978 as I trudged to work through snow while bloody-minded train drivers walked out, postmen went on strike, power workers pulled the plug and water workers threatened sewage in the streets. In the sulphurous Winter Of Discontent, the most powerful man in Britain was not the Labour PM.
It was Jack Jones, leader of the mighty Transport & General Workers Union.
Today we know he was bought and paid for by the Russian KGB.
Strikes were so common every newspaper needed a team of reporters to cover them.
My patch included British Leyland, where Derek “Red Robbo” Robinson’s wildcats demanded ever higher pay for rubbish cars that cost twice as much to build as they fetched in the showroom.
Inflation was rampant, with shop keepers stumbling over customers to stick new prices on a can of beans before it reached the till.
Thanks to union thugs, state-owned mining, shipping, steel making, car building and coal mining corporations were technically bankrupt. The economy was on its knees and rogue unions led by Marxists such as “King Coal” Scargill were hellbent on finishing it off.
Privately, Labour leader Neil Kinnock condemned the coal strike as “suicidal vanity”. Publicly, weakly, he supported Scargill.
Then and now, Labour spoke with forked tongue. Its stock in trade is lies, half-truths and vicious smears.
Labour, not the Tories, is the real Nasty Party.
Today it is stoking the same synthetic rage as hysterical Lefties rewrite history.
Party leader Ed Miliband carefully avoided this “elephant trap” and delivered a statesmanlike appreciation of Thatcher’s virtues as well as her failings.
But Miliband has already walked into a trap of his own making by taking the side of the shirkers not the workers over welfare.
Now, with Maggie’s death reminding us all of his folly, he is locked into a battle that will rage right up to election day.
“Red Ed” doesn’t need me to warn him. Tony Blair, Labour’s most successful leader, has just launched a withering hail of criticism over his lurch to the Left.
But Miliband isn’t listening. He, too, is bought and paid for. Labour is now the wholly owned subsidiary of giant public sector unions, the last of the dinosaurs.
Unite gave him his crown and Len McCluskey, like any Mafia chief, will extract his price.
His members’ subs keep Labour afloat. Marxist-born Miliband will not cut the bloated state sector where those members are employed — and nor does he want to.
This is election gold for David Cameron if he knows how to mine it.
Maggie’s death was a “back to the future” moment. It vividly reminded everyone what happened the last time the unions were in charge.
Ed Miliband and his union paymasters are reigniting a destructive class war that divided the nation in the 1970s.
The choice in 2015 will be between a country in which union bosses selfishly dictate terms.
And one in which politicians are free to decide on behalf of the voters who elected them.
Nick Clarke 
Strong piece. I was just a kid in the late Seventies, but I remember clearly what that gloomy time was like.
Luckily – I was a teenager in the Eighties. Back then, a teenager could leave school and get a job quite easily – even changing it for another if it didn’t suit.
I worked at the crack of dawn on a market setting up stalls, stacking shelves in a supermarket, “martialling” at a roller-skating disco and even cleaning loos for a large company to earn a few bucks to take my girlfriend out at the weekend and buy books and records.
You could walk to the door of a company and say: “Got any jobs?” and they’d say: “Start tomorrow?” Sure, the pay wasn’t going to make me rich, but I wasn’t exactly loaded with employable skills myself back then. Good luck being a young person trying to get those sort of starting jobs now. Mostly gone.
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