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"A real-life thriller." - Evening Standard "One of the most remarkable demolition jobs ever." - Spectator "A tribute to detailed journalistic investigation ... strips away the myths and lies." - New Statesman "An astonishing book." - The Nation "Riveting. It knocks spots off the usual 'whodunnit'" - Guardian
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Margaret Thatcher branded Arthur Scargill and the other leaders of the 1984-5 miners' strike ;'the enemy within'. With the publication of this bestselling book a decade later, the full irony of that accusation became clear. There was an enemy within. But it was not the National Union of Mineworkers that was out to subvert liberty. It was the secret services of the British state - operating inside the NUM itself. Seumas Milne revealed for the first time the astonishing lengths to which the government and its intelligence machine were prepared to go to destry the power of Britain's miners' union. Using phoney bank deposits, staged cash drops, forged documents, agents provocateurs and unrelenting surveillance, MI5 and police Special Branch set out to discredit Scargill and other miners' leaders. Planted tales of corruption were seized on by the media and both Tory and Labour politicians in what became an unprecedentedly savage smear campaign. In this new edition, published for the twentieth anniversary of Britain's most important postwar social confrontation, new material brings the story up to date - and, in the wake of the Iraq war intelligence scandals, highlights the continuing threat posed by the security services to democracy today.
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63 of 71 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The "real" enemy within.,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Enemy within: Thatcher's Secret War Against the Miners (Paperback)
When newspapers pronounce the guilt of a high profile figure, they splash the story across the front-page. When it later transpires that the story is false, they may occasionally print a retraction or correction - but they usually "stick it inside somewhere" at the bottom of a page. This excellent book provides a thorough account of the real truth behind the smear campaign of the early 1990's directed against the National Union of Miners and Arthur Scargill in particular. A campaign with one goal, but many players - the media, the Tory government and the security services - the objective of which was to follow through Margaret Thatcher's aim of ensuring the coal miners (and unions in general) would never again be in a position where they might hold the country to ransom, or bring down a government. Seumas Milne's updated and exhaustive work exposes the truth, once and for all, about a campaign that ultimately failed because it was based on a foundation of lies and misinformation. Milne only touches on the strike itself, and twenty years on there is a real need for a similarly exhaustive study of the 84-85 miners strike to accompany this book (hopefully written by an correspondingly impartial observer), so that students and historians can in the future, fully understand the lasting significance of these events. The book itself in extremely well written and makes easy reading. If I have one criticism, it would be regarding Milne's explanation of the truth about the "Libyan money". The point is clearly made quite early on, but reiterated and re-explained too often afterwards. Forget Michael Moore's rants about the corruption and lies in the US: read this book and discover some home truths about those that we entrust with our money, our lives and our security in this country.
24 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Blistering reading,
This review is from: The Enemy within: Thatcher's Secret War Against the Miners (Paperback)
I bought this revealing book primarily to improve my facts of an event which happened when I was about 10 years old. My only real memories of the stike were images on the TV of police and miners clashing at picket lines.
What this book reveals is that even the reports I watched on the TV were 'spliced' to show the miners attacking the police first. This must read covers dodgy legal professionals, machiavellian MPs, even shadier journalists, moles, and the unaccountability of MI5 which makes worrying reading. Whilst explaining the important events of the 'conflict' Milne's remarkable work leads us through a modern history lesson of the current pathetic state of British politics, the fact there is no real difference between New Labour and the Tories. Unfortunatley the miners strike helped many different organisations to exorcise the Right's nemesis, powerful trade unions and has taken away the mouthpiece of the working man and woman. The style of writing is top class and facts are presented in an easily digestible fashion.
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Coal War,
By
This review is from: The Enemy within: Thatcher's Secret War Against the Miners (Paperback)
Seamus Milnes book takes as it's starting point the 1990 Daily Mirror/Cook Report "scoop" regarding Arthur Scargill and his National Union of Mineworkers associate Peter Heathfield. They were accused of embezzling monies to pay off their mortgages from donations made by Libyan Trade Unionists during the 1984-85 Miners Strike. The story led to Scargill and Heathfield being subjected to a number of lawsuits from their own Trade Unions executive, as well as a variety of Government bodies, investigations by the Inland Revenue and the Serious Fraud Office and left Scargills reputation in tatters. After months of official investigations, it turned out that the accusations were entirely false: one didn't have a mortgage, the other had paid his off out of his savings. Not only that, but the one person who had been involved in fraud (not counting the then Daily Mirror proprietor Robert Maxwell who enthusiastically supported the false claims) was the Daily Mirrors and the Cook Reports single source: Roger Windsor, the leading non-elected officer of the NUM through-out the Miners Strike of 1984-85. The information that Milne collated for this book strongly suggests that Roger Windsor was an informer, or agent, for the security services whose head of Trade Union espionage during the Miners Strike was Stella Rimmington, later to be the first female head of MI5.
Milne goes beyond debunking the smear campaign against Scargill and Heathfield to looking at a variety of other issues surrounding the Miners Strike. The activities of the Media, the Conservative Party, the right-wing of the Labour Party, MI5, a disparate bunch of right wing loons (not to be confused with MI5!), Special Branch and GCHQ during the strike, and in the subsequent destruction of the NUM and the British Coal industry are forensically scrutinized. The story that emerges is an ugly one that reveals the reality of power in Britain's "Democracy", the systematic emasculating of the Trade Union movement during the 1980's, the beginnings of what became New Labour, and the subversive and undemocratic nature of the Security Services role in British political life (as was again made clear with regard to the role of MI6 in the campaign for the Iraq War in 2002-03). Milne's book is dense with detail, clearly written and essential to a full understanding of the Thatcher period in particular, and the British political scene in general. As an example of investigative journalism "The Enemy Within" is exceptional, and one that I can't recommend highly enough to anyone who is serious about the real story of what was possibly the most important event in post-war British history.
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