“The
1984 Brighton bomb forced Margaret Thatcher to tear up what would
have been the most divisive speech of her premiership, in which she
planned to accuse not only militant miners but the entire Labour
party of being 'the enemy within' and part of an 'insurrection'
against democracy.”
“Reports
of Thatcher’s infamous 'enemy within' speech, delivered in private
to the Conservative backbench 1922 committee the previous July,
provoked widespread outrage, because she had appeared to say
Britain’s mining communities were as dangerous an enemy as the
Argentinian dictator General Galtieri had been over the Falklands.”
“Now
the draft transcripts of the discarded conference speech reveal that,
far from regretting using the phrase 'enemy within', which she had
only used previously used in private, the Tory prime minister was
quite prepared, in the middle of the bitter 1984-85 miners’ strike,
to repeat it publicly – and widen it to include nearly the whole of
the Labour movement.”
“The
opening of the planned speech - part of the Thatcher Papers archive
at Churchill College, Cambridge - dispenses with usual conference
niceties: 'From the dark cloud falls an acid rain that eats into
liberty,' it begins. Thatcher was to go on to put Labour’s refusal
to condemn the picket-line violence of the militant miners at the
very heart of the problem, with influential men prepared to repudiate
the ideas of parliamentary democracy and the rule of law. She was to
claim that the Labour party was now the 'natural home' of these
forces – which was why it was so muted in its condemnation of the
violence and its praise of the police or working miners, and yet
willing to trumpet the 'extreme cause' of Arthur Scargill’s
leadership of the National Union of Mineworkers.”
“The
explosion of the IRA Brighton bomb, aimed at the heart of the
cabinet, ensured that the attack was never delivered. The speech was
hastily rewritten in the Brighton conference centre in the early
morning, meaning that Thatcher’s most famous remark on the miners’
strike – 'the enemy within' – would be one that she never
actually uttered in public.”
The
only "dark cloud" that threatens Europe today, is her
ghost:
Comments
Post a Comment