Reading How to Blow Up a Pipeline for the book club, there'll be a discussion post up tomorrow.

Finally finished The Enemy Within. The gist of it is that MI5 managed to get one of their assets to a high up position in the union, he then went about doing things to deliberately undermine the union and sabotage the 1984-85 miners strike. The combination of security service meddling and infiltration, the hostile media, the full force of the state, and tying the union up in legal battles massively hampered the strike effort, despite the workers best efforts and the international aid they received. Following this, during another round of pit closures in the early 90s, the MI5 manufactured a narrative in the media with the help of newspaper baron Robert Maxwell that the union leader Arthur Scargill had taken money from the Libyan government and used it to pay off his own mortgage. This was, of course, nonsense but it succeeded in its task of turning the country against Scargill and the union and again tying them up in legal troubles to reduce their ability to resist the new round of pit closures. The author of the book quote a journalist at the time who summed the whole affair up very well:

"At the height of the 1990 campaign, Paul Foot, then the Daily Mirror’s top columnist, suggested an analogy. Imagine, he said, that he had run a story on the front page of the Mirror about two Tory MPs who had paid off their mortgages out of funds they had raised for charity. ‘I’m sure you’d agree that’s a very good story,’ he said. Suppose, he went on, that an official inquiry had then found that one of the MPs had never had a mortgage at all and the other MP had paid his mortgage off long before the charity money had even been raised. And say it was also revealed that the paper’s main source – and this was, he said, the ‘most extraordinary thing about a source that I have ever come across in a lifetime of investigative journalism’ – had been shown to be the ‘only person on earth’ who was guilty of the allegation he had made against the two MPs in the Mirror and was still paid handsomely for his testimony. And imagine that his other main source was a man convicted of plotting to blow up mosques in Pakistan. ‘First of all,’ he said, ‘I would never have been able to get such a story published. But if I had had such a story published and all these facts had then come out, my feet wouldn’t have touched the ground. I’d have been fired and nobody would ever have believed a word I’d have written ever again about Tory MPs or anything else.’ But in the case of the Scargill story, instead of the journalists being called to account or the Press Council protesting at such an abuse, the allegations were repeated again and again even though they had been proved to be false. And each time one allegation was discredited, another took its place, like the multiheaded Hydra of ancient Greek legend. ‘Since these allegations have nothing to do with facts or investigative journalism,’ Foot queried, ‘how and why is it that the story continues to run?’ It ran, he concluded, because the most powerful vested interests in society wanted it to run."