Arthur Scargill — bane of Margaret Thatcher, architect of the early 1980s miners’ strike, hard-left trade union leader — has come out for Brexit.
He has revealed his sympathies — and the fact that he is still alive, which quite a few of us didn’t realise — in an unexpectedly witty and on-point letter to the Daily Telegraph.
SIR – I find it interesting that the leaders of the Labour Party, the Liberal Democrats and the Scottish National Party are all calling for the resignation of the Prime Minister and the Attorney General on the grounds that they acted unlawfully in advising the Queen to prorogue Parliament. Are these party leaders also going to call for the resignation of Lord Burnett, the Lord Chief Justice; Sir Terence Etherton, the Master of the Rolls; and Dame Victoria Sharp, the President of the Queen’s Bench Division, who ruled that the Prime Minister acted legally?
Arthur Scargill
President, National Union of Mineworkers 1982-2002
Barnsley, South Yorkshire
Brexit has certainly created some unlikely alliances.
Who would ever have imagined that among the most dedicated saboteurs of Brexit would be Winston Churchill’s grandson Sir Nicholas Soames?
Who would ever have imagined that among its most passionate and articulate supporters would be such rabid leftists as George Galloway and Arthur Scargill?
In light of my previous column on the prospects of a Brexit-induced civil war, I am particularly happy — though not wholly surprised — to find the mineworkers (well, former mineworkers) on the side of the goodies.
If and when it all kicks off, I think we can also count on: sturdy rural folk; fox hunting people (handy cavalry); the Army (squaddies and NCOs, anyway: and frankly who needs the officers?); the police rank and file (but not the senior officers, but again, who cares: they’re all either over promoted women who’d be useless in a ruck; or pen pushers and cowards like the Met Police commissioner who stayed in his car when Islamic terrorist Khalid Masood was busy stabbing one of his officers to death)…
Civil wars are horrible things — I’ve seen Goya’s Atrocities of War etchings and I’m not sure I fancy experiencing this kind of thing for real.
Then again, if push comes to shove, I’m quietly confident of the Brexiteers’ chances. Boris Johnson, I remember, is particularly good in a scrum…