Thank Scargill for helping Thatcher break the miners

When in the early 1970s I tried to get a job in London journalism, I found it impossible because the journalists' union operated a closed shop to keep people out, no matter how well qualified. After a few years' working abroad, I went into TV, which had looser rules, only to find that part of my salary went automatically to the Labour party, which I did not support.

Union meetings and union representatives were so intimidating that I did not dare take up my right to opt out. Meantime, the greedy and corrupt "Spanish practices" of fellow Fleet Street unionists were notorious, just as they were in television: I regularly had to sign chits for work that technicians had not done.

Even so I was still shocked when the National Union of Miners' leader, Arthur Scargill, notoriously approached Colonel Gaddafi for money during the miners' strike of 1984 - that same Gaddafi whose fellow countrymen had just shot a young policewoman in London.

It is rare to live through an immensely important change, and recognise it

It was miserable to be in the power of such overmighty and overbearing unions, and strangely enough it was Arthur Scargill himself who, to an important degree, helped free us all from them. But until I read an intriguing just-published book (Marching to the Fault Line, by Francis Beckett and David Hencke, Constable £18.99) I had not quite appreciated what a debt of gratitude I owe to this alarming man.

It is rare, at least in this country, to live through an immensely important political change, and to recognise it at the time. That is what happened during the miners' strike of 1984. It was a great turning point, and many people were acutely aware of it.

More a civil war than an industrial dispute, this bitter conflict radically changed the balance of political power in this country, as it had from the first been intended to, both by Margaret Thatcher's government and by the coalminers' leaders.

The outcome was that trades unionism and the mighty power of the trades unions were all but destroyed. They are history. That was a tragedy for some, or a hugely welcome relief to others, but it is precisely what was at issue. "Who governs this country?", people used to ask. As it turned out, it was not, fortunately to be Arthur Scargill and the hard left of the union movement.

To see the dreaded King Arthur so shrivelled in this book by the harsh light of hindsight is sobering and fascinating. Back in 1984 he was a figure of enormous power. It is probably hard for those too young to remember that time to believe that revolutionary socialism and communism were ideas that some people still took seriously. The Communist party was still influential in the union movement - in fact during the 1984 strike the Soviet Union sent "Russian gold" to relieve the hardship among British miners' families.

Scargill and many other important union leaders believed passionately that the unions were a force for revolutionary change and that trades unionists had a duty to struggle for it permanently; the union movement could and should fight to bring about a socialist society, battle against the forces of privilege and reaction and bring down governments where necessary. Even the young John Prescott used to talk like that, on occasion.

This revolutionary socialist view was not shared by all Scargill's fellow citizens, or indeed by all his fellow unionists, and it was loathed and feared by many such as me, not to mention Margaret Thatcher. Many miners did not want to strike and tried to go on working: they became the victims of Scargill's highly organised flying pickets, bussed around the country in thousands to harass the so-called 'scabs' and the police brought in to protect them as they went to work.

It is hard to forget the scenes on television of armed and mounted police menacing unarmed protesters on foot, or the terrible suffering of the strikers' families. There was a lot of public sympathy, and contrary to what this book suggests, I remember a huge amount of sympathy in the media too - it is not right to say that the government had in the traditional manner managed to square both the middle classes and the press. In the BBC, where I was working at the time, it was socially embarrassing to say a word against the miners or their cause.

But it was important to notice, and it is important to remember, that the men on the picket lines were violent themselves, deliberately provoking trouble and attacking policemen at times. It's also important to remember that many miners were against the strike. I wonder how many people now remember that Arthur Scargill, shamefully, never called a national ballot. That is because he would almost certainly have lost it.

I wonder how many people are aware that the NCB offered very generous settlements at various stages, as this book points out. At the beginning of the strike the energy secretary Peter Walker offered a redundancy package that was hugely generous by contemporary standards. In July the NCB offered Scargill what the engineers' leader John Lyons called the nearest thing to victory that any trade leader can ever expect – "95 per cent of what they are after". But Arthur was after something else, and pressed on, to the very bitter end.

Early unionists were heroes. By the late 20th century the bullied were the bullies

This fascinating book doesn't quite explain, though it does discuss, why important political figures of the left were so unable to restrain or control Scargill, even when they appreciated the damage he was doing. Nor does it really deal with something I suspect does not really interest the authors - the attitudes of members of the public like me, who truly feared and loathed the unions and their power at the time and longed for their defeat - not from a position of privilege or power, but for strong personal reasons.

Anyone with the slightest knowledge of history will understand how very necessary the union movement once was, to protect working people from harsh and sometimes vicious employers and from their unthinking greed. The early unions were full of working class heroes and heroines. But by the late twentieth century the bullied had become the bullies, and, worse still, ignorant and doctrinaire bullies with a totalitarian agenda and some disgraceful allies.

The strike first presented itself as a union dispute about the National Coal Board's plans to close several uneconomic pits, with an inevitable loss of many coalminers' jobs. It's an oddity of history, as this book points out, that the immediate trigger for the strike - the NCB's announcement in April 1984 that Cortonwood mine would be closed in five weeks - was incorrect. There was no such plan.

But this detail was not important. Many other closures were planned and both sides had been making preparations for a major strike against them for months - indeed, the government had been stockpiling coal since 1981, 50 million tons of it.

Underneath it all lay a long-standing power struggle, both in senior Conservatives' minds and in the view of many of the top trades unionists who supported the miners' leader Arthur Scargill. Had victory gone the other way, this country would now be a very different place. And as this very clear and meticulous book shows, Thatcher's triumph was far from inevitable.

The authors reveal in detail how Thatcher owed her most uncertain victory in large part to the folly and the strangely blinkered obstinacy of Arthur Scargill. Proof of his almost pathological aversion to inconvenient fact is his remarkable failure, to this very day, to acknowledge that he lost the strike; he lives in isolation, estranged from almost all his friends and family, in a limbo of denial.

The miners' total defeat, and particularly their unnecessary humiliation, was due in large part to Scargill's intransigence at the time, and to the failure of any of his close colleagues, of the TUC and of the Labour leader Neil Kinnock, to stand up to him and make him accept any of the reasonable compromises offered by a nervous government. Other trades unionists recognised this, or came to recognise it, at the time. The electricians' union leader Eric Hammond, for instance, borrowing the phrase used of the troops in World War I, described the miners as "lions led by donkeys".

The result was the destruction not just of the miners' unions, but of trades unionism in general in this country. Almost overnight the mighty union leaders turned from household names into nonentities, unions themselves became an irrelevance with a collapsing membership and they have remained so to this day. For many years I have appreciated that I owed a debt of gratitude to Margaret Thatcher for this. Now, I realise I am indebted to Arthur Scargill as well. ·