HAVING been born 12 months after the end of the 1984-5 miners’ strike I am used to being told that I’m “too young to understand” by Thatcherite apologists whenever I speak out about the vital importance of the trade union movement in Britain. I’m expecting a summer of “You don’t understand,” especially in the wake of the vengeful anti-trade union Bill that has the Tory Party and its hangers-on salivating at the prospect of continuing Thatcher’s union-busting legacy.

The trade union movement still has the Tories running scared and gnashing their teeth with anxiety. Why else would Cameron and his cronies feel the need to legislate against organised workers? I may not have lived through the strikes of the ’70s and ’80s, but here’s what I understand.

The Tories have never forgotten the twin defeats inflicted upon their party by ordinary working people in ’72 and ’74, and much of their policy since then has been dreamt up with the sole intention of exacting revenge.

So embittered were the Conservatives over their double humiliation, they drew up a plan of attack — the notorious Ridley plan, leaked to The Economist in 1978. Despite not yet holding office, the Tories were on the offensive as the plan outlined how to counter the so-called “political threat” of “the enemies of the next Tory government” by smashing the trade unions and cutting off social security for strikers in the hope of breaking strikes by starvation, thus preventing a re-run of the miners’ victories in ’72 and ’74. Unions were “interfering with market forces” and should be immediately brought to heel.

As soon as she was safely ensconced in No 10, Thatcher set about enacting the recommendations of the Ridley plan, attacking first British Leyland and then British Steel, building up to the grand denouement of ’84, when the iron lady came up against the iron will of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM).

For Thatcher, the NUM represented “the enemy within,” a supposed “mob” run by “extremists” who threatened “the rule of the law.” Her antagonistic language of hyperbole and outright lies is testament to her terror that organised workers, operating within the democratic framework of a union, could halt her dream of a country where the monetarist values of Milton Friedman, including a “natural” level of unemployment, deregulation, privatisation and glittering mountains of profit, were finally seen as more important than people, communities, state ownership of industry and a more equal distribution of wealth.

To some extent she succeeded, and monetarism prevailed. Yet the NUM refused to roll over and accept the cold winds of neoliberalism. The failure to completely obliterate the NUM and wider trade union values in a monetarist economy must have haunted Thatcher for the rest of her days. Despite deploying the full weight of the judiciary, the security services, the media and a newly militarised police force, the Conservative Party failed to exact revenge upon the miners by bringing down their union in the manner that their union had brought down the last Tory government 10 years before. In the face of the entire gamut of state apparatus, unionised workers were shown to be the stronger force.

The Trade Union Bill represents the continuation of the Tory Party’s desperate endeavour to break trade unions, an endeavour which all trade unionists must resist.

“The Tories have never forgotten the defeat inflicted in 1972 and 1974,” Arthur Scargill told the Yorkshire NUM in ’81. “Equally neither have the miners forgotten the lessons of 1972 and 1974.” We must remember the lessons learned of both the ’70s and the ’84-85 strike, and refuse to believe that the trade unions in this country have since been in terminal decline, as we are so used to hearing from both ends of the political spectrum.

That the Tories continue to try to neuter our unions by attempting to outlaw strikes speaks volumes about the potential power that can be channelled through a union. This power once again lies directly in the path of the Tory government’s strategy to batter the working class — now alternately termed “hardworking people,” “shirkers,” “scroungers” or “strivers” in an attempt to bolster the lie that the old Etonian ideology is not, in any way, fuelled by class-based contempt.

In case the proposed Bill fails to make it into law, Cameron has a back-up plan — erode workers’ rights through a renegotiated membership of the EU. GMB general secretary Paul Kenny and TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady have expressed serious concerns over these renegotiations, which place the already tightly shackled rights of Britain’s workers at risk of a race to the bottom, as Cameron and his Bullingdon Boys seek to withdraw from the European directives on working hours and agency staff. Trade union power is such a threat to the Conservative government that they feel the need to legislate against our organisations, not once but twice.

In an address to Glasgow University made in ’72, celebrated trade unionist Jimmy Reid stated: “Profit is the sole criterion used by the Establishment to evaluate economic activity. The power structures that have inevitably emerged … threaten and undermine our hard-won democratic rights,” adding that “the vocabulary in vogue is a give-away.”

Over 40 years later, today’s vocabulary is still obsessed with profit above all else. The Trade Union Bill, we are told, has been drawn up to allow the government to “pursue our ambition to become the most prosperous major economy in the world by 2030.” We can assume that along the way the Tories expect to create a level of social unrest that will put this ambition in jeopardy, and are therefore attempting to silence the mouthpieces of discontent with yet another union-smashing jamboree. They will try to legislate our unions out of existence — we must not let them.

Earlier this year, Len McCluskey of Unite hinted at the path his union should take in the face of Tory anti-union policy, arguing that “people have intrinsic rights (and) the right of working people to combine, to organise, is one of these rights. If partisan legislation is driven through Parliament, designed to push … trade unions outside of the law, we will not go gently into the night. We will rage against the dying of the light.”

Unite’s executive is recommending that the words “so far as may be lawful” be removed from the union’s rules on industrial action, providing a strong message that a decisive response is required to face up to the forthcoming Tory attacks.

The time has arrived when trade unionists must stand together and show the Tory government that the spirit of ’84-85 is as strong as ever, an inspiration echoing down the last 30 years as an essential part of our collective history — even for those of us wrongly deemed “too young to understand.”