About Arthur Scargill
Arthur Scargill (born 11 January 1938) is a British trade unionist who was President of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) from 1982 to 2002. He is best known for leading the 1984–1985 United Kingdom miners' strike, a major event in the history of the British labour movement. Joining the NUM at the age of 19 in 1957, Scargill was one of its leading activists by the late 1960s. He led an unofficial strike in 1969, and played a key organising role during the strikes of 1972 and 1974, the latter of which played a part in the downfall of Edward Heath's Conservative government. Thereafter Scargill led the NUM through the 1984–1985 miners' strike. It turned into a confrontation with the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher in which the miners' union was defeated. Initially a Young Communist League member, then a Labour Party member, Scargill is now deputy leader of the Socialist Labour Party (SLP), having founded the party in 1996 and served as its leader from the party's foundation until 2024. Scargill recalled how after becoming a miner, the poor working conditions and "people who should never have been working, having to work to live... on that first day I promised myself I would try one day to get things changed". In a 1975 interview with New Left Review Scargill said: I was in the Young Communist League for about six or seven years and I became a member of its National Executive Committee responsible for industrial work.
Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.