article_snippet.sent: There is no acknowledgment by the film-makers that the unions’ greed and bully-boy tactics all but destroyed the British economy, or that the unions’
article_snippet.sent: Strangely absent from the story, of course, is any reference to the role the NUM played in bringing down successive British governments — both Conservative and Labour alike — and the NUM contribution to the terrible industrial unrest that gripped Britain in the Seventies and culminated in the Winter of Discontent.
article_snippet.sent: Nor is there any mention of the attempt by Arthur Scargill, the loony-Left leader of the NUM, to persuade communist Russia — not to mention Colonel Gaddafi — to bankroll the strike, which Colonel Gaddafi members hadn’t even had the right to vote for in a fair ballot.
article_snippet.sent: At no point in the film is any sympathy shown towards the employers struggling to keep the firm competitive.
article_snippet.sent: The viewer is expected to assume that the demands of the strikers are completely justified.
article_snippet.sent: A more honest assessment of the British car industry would have featured the way union firebrands such as Derek Robinson
article_snippet.sent: In Dagenham would have pointed out that the Ford factory which once employed 40,000 people now has fewer than 4,000, thanks, in part, to rising labour costs — pushed up by militant unions.
article_snippet.sent: Then again, that would have meant acknowledging the inconvenient truth that the trade unions played a big role in the postwar decline of Britain’s industrial base.