I bought this book thinking it was about the miners strike itself, the event, and though mistaken I wasn’t disappointed. It actually focuses on the aftermath of the strike, and the government and press collaboration (particularly Robert Maxwell’s Daily Mirror) in their attempts to discredit and criminalise the National Union of Mineworkers leadership, especially Arthur Scargill, with the aid of ever complicit security services. The lengths that the government went to in their witch hunt were truly extraordinary and made me feel quite ill. At times it was reminiscent of Enemy of the State, a terrifying film that you would think belongs firmly in the realm of fiction.

This is a great book showcasing the strength of a state machinery when it is used for political purposes. By the end I was thoroughly angry, which I think is the intention. To feel anything else would be quite inhuman. The title comes from a speech made by Margaret Thatcher in relation to the miners when she had referred to them as the enemy within, as opposed to the Argentineans; the enemy without. Flogging a dead horse was never beyond the Iron Lady. They tried to allege communist conspiracies, Soviet gold, Libyan links and attempted to portray the NUM leaders as having pocketed donated cash from workers for themselves. All of this was of course lies, but it didn’t stop the government saying it, the police investigating it, and the press declaring the accused guilty before proven so, or as it turned out, innocent. Certain stories at the time suggested that brown envelopes were changing hands packed with money from foreign unions, and indeed they were, but only after the government closed the bank accounts of the NUM and refused them access to their members contributions. Is it any wonder that cloak and dagger operations were introduced? They were used to circumvent the illegal sequestration of union funds.

The most shady figure in all of this is possibly the former NUM employee Roger Windsor, whom the book reveals to be a double agent working for MI5 (under Stella Rimington at the time) who refused to speak to the author regarding the events in question. Windsor’s position was to distort the legality of the behaviour of senior NUM officials and destabilise the industrial dispute from within, indeed perhaps he was the real enemy within. After the fact, Windsor became chief witness in the case against Scargill which has never been proved, a case which, if there had been any criminality on his part, the authorities would surely have discovered since they were not above making it up anyway.

Milne weaves this incredibly complex series of events together well and leaves the reader with no doubt as to what really happened in the aftermath of the strike, and indeed as most of us who live in the north of England now understand, just how vindictive the government can be when it wants revenge; that is to say, to the point of destroying manufacturing in this country for the sake of a political grudge.