Arthur Scargill
Arthur Scargill (born 11 January 1938) is a British politician and trade unionist who was president of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) from 1982 to 2002. Joining the NUM at the age of 19 in 1957, he became one of its leading cadres in the late 1960s. In 1973, he was instrumental in organising the miners' strike that toppled Edward Heath's Conservative Government in March 1974. A decade later, he led the union through the 1984–85 miners' strike, a key event in British labour and political history. It was a confrontation with the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher, and the miners union was decisively defeated. Coal mining almost disappeared as a major industry in Britain. A former Labour Party member, he is now the leader of the Socialist Labour Party (SLP), which he founded in 1996.