The Enemy Within: The Secret War Against the Miners

by SeumasMilne (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  1994

  $14.09

  Margaret Thatcher branded the leaders of the 1984-5 miners' strike as the enemy within - a furtive political clique out to undermine democracy and liberty. This book reveals the irony of Thatcher's accusation. For an enemy within was at work inside the National Union of Mineworkers. But it was not a force hell-bent on subversion of the British state. Quite the opposite - it was the secret service of the British state itself. This book follows the war waged by successive Tory governments against Britain's miners. It draws together the threads of a story which travels from Sheffield and London, to Moscow, Tripoli and Dublin, recounting the astonishing lengths to which the intelligence services were prepared to go in their most ambitious counter-subversion operation ever mounted. Drawing on access to sources and informants from all sides, the author exposes spying and dirty tricks against the NUM on an epic scale. Naming names and providing a wealth of never-before-published detail, Suemas Milne shows how MI5 was involved in a series of elaborate smears against Arthur Scargill and his closest associates, which drew in Labour politicians, Conservative minister and the media empire of Robert Maxwell. Running operations against the NUM was the woman who now presents the new face of MI5 - Stella Rimington.

• Used

  Paperback
  2004

  $7.69

  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.