The largest donor to the Conservative Party in George Osborne's Tatton constituency is profiting by selling "luxury" properties with support from the Chancellor's "Help to Buy" scheme.

Help to Buy has been heavily criticised because it may increase housing prices rather than addressing the housing crisis.

But it also helps property developers like Peter Emerson Jones.

His company, Emerson Development Holdings, has given £28,600 to the Conservatives since 2010, most of it to Osborne's own constituency party in Tatton. He and his company have given the Tories over £50,000 since 2005.

His company's housing arm, Jones Homes, sells what it calls "luxury" flats and houses, using Osborne's Help to Buy scheme to fund the sales.

For example, Jones Homes offers "classic townhouses and luxury apartments" at its "Cleveland" development in Bolton.

According to the firm's website, one of its two-bedroom flats costs "£249,950 or £199,950 with Help to Buy." Average flats in Bolton cost around £85,000. An average detached house in the town sells at £234,000, so these are at the upper end of the market.

Buyers of these luxury flats need smaller mortgages thanks to Osborne's Help to Buy.

Almost every flat or house the firm is currently selling is advertised with a Help to Buy price - a four-bedroom house in Rotherham is advertised at "£227,995, or £182,396 with Help to Buy."

A similar house in Middlewich, Cheshire, sells at £269,950 but Jones's firm says: "This plot is also available on the new government backed Help to Buy scheme from just £215,960. Help to Buy price is based on 80 per cent of the full purchase price. Terms and conditions apply."

Under Osborne's scheme, the government will put up a 20 per cent interest-free loan to top up a 75 per cent mortgage when buying a house. The buyer will need to start paying interest on this loan six years later.

When Jones Homes talks about a Help to Buy price, this is not actually a lower price for the purchaser - it is advertising a price excluding the government loan.

Osborne said that he launched the scheme because "the deposits demanded for a mortgage these days have put home ownership beyond the great majority who cannot turn to their parents for a contribution," which has "set back social mobility."

He said that Help to Buy will "put that right - and put it right in a dramatic way."

However, Osborne's scheme has been attacked because it is available on houses costing up to £600,000. It may push up house prices and create a new housing bubble and is not likely to help those in most need at the bottom of the housing ladder.

However, the scheme will obviously help Jones and his company sell their "luxury apartments."

Jones has obviously made an impact on the government. After putting money into Osborne's constituency, he was also awarded an OBE in the recent new year's honours.

Instead of responding to the property crisis with low-cost and social housing, Osborne has launched a scheme which helps builders of luxury housing, including donors to his own constituency party.

Previously secret 1984 Cabinet Office files tell us much we already knew about the miners' strike - Scargill was right, Thatcher's government did have a secret list of pits to shut.

The law wasn't "neutral." Thatcher's ministers pressed the police to crack down on pickets.

They thought local courts weren't hard enough, so pressed their magistrates to use new laws against strikers and arranged for new "stipendiary" magistrates from outside the coalfield to be even tougher.

The government was deeply involved in planning the dispute, which it saw as part of a battle against the left.

So all the things the miners and their supporters said back then, but were denied by the government, are now confirmed.

Is that any help, now the damage is done?

We've had a lot of these "I-told-you-so" moments recently, when official reports now confirm what we said then - the paratroopers really did murder people on Bloody Sunday, the police really did lie and cheat to cover up their responsibility for the deaths at Hillsborough and construction, rail and engineering employers, with police help, really did blacklist union militants.

Now it is confirmed that Thatcher and her government saw the strike as their key battle and the courts and police as their weapons and soldiers. But isn't the war over?

I think not. First, the battle for miners who were wrongly convicted of picketing "crimes" in the strike goes on.

Any more detail about government pressure on the law helps them.

Second, the biggest secret revealed by the Cabinet Office files is that the miners came close to winning.

In July 1984 when the dockers went on strike and in October 1984 when the pit deputies - key mine management and safety officials - in the Nacods union threatened to join the strike, the government genuinely feared losing.

It considered using troops to break the strike, but knew this would be a desperate gamble.

In the end this solidarity didn't come. The strike was lost.

"New realism" in the trade unions and new Labour in Parliament followed.

Both were based on the idea that miners could never win and unions could not fight.

Weak, compromising unions and a Labour Party that won votes by embracing Tory ideas were the way forward. Both were, the historic record shows, wrong.

Of course we didn't have to wait 30 years to find that out. Thatcher was defeated before then.

The forward momentum of Thatcherism ran out after 1988. She faced three key disputes and lost them all - the nurses' strikes of 1988, the ambulance strike of 1989 and the poll tax campaign all defeated the Tories and persuaded Thatcher's Cabinet to ditch its leader.

The important thing about the miners' dispute that nearly beat Thatcher and the later struggles that did stop her is they all involved grass-roots, bottom-up campaigns. They mixed social movements and unions. They could not reverse Thatcherism, but they could slow it and, crucially, remove its leader.

They brought together strikers and protesters in new unconventional ways.

They were led by the left, which was in the end more "realistic" than the "realists" of new Labour and the "new unions" which delivered decades of ineffective compromise.