Thatcher plan to use troops to haul coal

DOCUMENTS show the Thatcher government planned to use soldiers to move coal as it prepared for a decisive showdown with miners.

MARGARET Thatcher secretly considered the use of troops to break a strike by coalminers, according to newly released government papers.

Documents released by the National Archives at Kew, west London, show the extent of the planning by Thatcher's Conservative government for the decisive showdown with the miners which helped define her political legacy.

The papers show that ministers and officials repeatedly warned that a confrontation with the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and its leftwing leader, Arthur Scargill, was inevitable.

Thatcher, who had been a minister in Edward Heath's government in the 1970s when it was brought to its knees by a miners' strike, was only too well aware of the stakes involved.

In February 1981 - less than two years into her premiership - she had been forced to cave-in to the NUM's pay demands, aware that the government was unprepared to withstand a prolonged conflict.

Behind the scenes, however, a secret Whitehall working group - codenamed MISC 57 - was established to lay the ground for the battle to come.

Plans were set in train quietly to purchase land next to electricity power stations - which were nearly all coal-fired - so that coal could be stockpiled to keep them running through a strike.

They also began the expensive process of converting stations to dual-firing so that they could run on oil if coal supplies were exhausted.

MISC 57 also discussed using troops to move coal stocks, although officials were unenthusiastic warning that it would be a "formidable undertaking".

In a memorandum dated October 27, 1983, PL Gregson at the Cabinet Office noted: "To move 1/2 million tonnes of coal per week - twice as much as was transported by road during the rail strikes earlier this year, when power stations were not picketed - would involve 4-5,000 lorry movements per day between pitheads and power stations continuously for 20 weeks.

"The law and order problems of coping with pickets not just at the power stations but also at the pitheads would be enormous and would arise from the very outset of the strike.

"A major risk might be that power station workers would refuse to handle coal brought in by servicemen in this way."

The following day, however, a meeting of senior ministers chaired by Mrs Thatcher ruled - while they might be able to rely on existing coal stocks in the early stages of a strike - planning for the use of troops should continue.

"It was agreed that ... it might be necessary at some stage to examine more radical options for extending endurance, including the use of servicemen to move pithead stocks to power stations by rail and road," the minutes noted.