Margaret Thatcher's great achievement, legacy or tragedy was that she "broke" the trade unions. Scargill had led hundreds of thousands of miners who worked in hundreds of pits; now there are few pits and hardly any miners. The collective power of the miners - and, indeed, other great segments of working people, such as car workers, dockers, or steelworkers - has vanished.
So where does that leave trade unions? There is no explicit mention of them in the citizenship curriculum in schools, according to Forefront, the newsletter of discussion forum Unions 21. And this is despite a central theme of that curriculum being political literacy - alongside moral responsibility and community involvement.
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