2. The Not-So-Slow Death of a Beer Culture

They had beer-and-sandwich lunches, so we might have hoped for a better outcome. The reality is that those meetings between the British government of the 1970s and the mighty unions, of most note being Arthur Scargill’s National Union of Mineworkers, were a futile attempt to find common ground. One likes to think that there was a genuine attempt on the part of Edward Heath’s Tory government^[1] and the rabid socialism of the likes of Scargill to find a deal that would not bankrupt the government while confirming the union workers in worthwhile, safe, and sufficiently rewarding employment. The reality was that we had abject weakness on the one hand and seeming disingenuous attitudes on the other.^[2]

Margaret Thatcher had no truck with such approaches. The Iron Lady brought down her mighty fist and the unions were splattered. And so she will go down in history as the Prime Minister who took the nation out of the horrors of strike after strike that paralyzed the country, introducing a market-driven system where rewards were to be had by genuine endeavor and not as a God-given right.