The thirtieth anniversary of Margaret Thatcher’s landslide election victory in May 1979 is marked in 2009. It also marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the outbreak of the 1984–85 miners’ strike — the conflict which epitomised Thatcher’s robust approach to Britain’s internal problems and the bitter divisions it provoked.
Margaret Thatcher rose to power on a wave of public frustration with over-mighty trade unions in the 1960s and 1970s and with the weak response to them of both Labour and Conservative governments. In 1975, she successfully challenged Edward Heath for the party leadership after his government was toppled by a bruising standoff with the miners. She brought down James Callaghan’s Labour government after the ‘winter of discontent’ of 1978–79, when the country was brought to a halt by a wave of striking public sector workers, including nurses, ambulance drivers, refuse collectors, firemen — even cemetery workers.
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