MARGARET THATCHER was a “time traveller” incubated by Britain’s sick ruling class to undo the advances of the 20th century and usher in a harsher and crueller world, workers’ and gay rights campaigner Mike Jackson told the Big Meeting on Saturday.

Mike Jackson of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners — a figure made familiar to a younger generation through the hit film Pride — told the Durham Miners’ Gala that the miners’ strike was a key turning point in that process.

Thatcher, whose name drew a deafening chorus of boos from the thousands-strong crowd, had used “taxpayers’ money, a militarised police force and a disregard for the law” to destroy the mining industry and take out the most powerful trade union in the land, the National Union of Mineworkers.

“The miners were ready, but they knew they couldn’t win on their own,” he said, saying the gay and lesbian community had rallied to the miners among the “millions who did stand shoulder to shoulder with them, to show the miners and their families were not alone in that civil war without guns of 1984-85.”

But not enough of the movement united behind the miners, and the consequence of their historic defeat was imposition of a “venal neoliberal economics in Britain which was then replicated around the world — planet Earth has now been corporatised by titanic, profiteering businesses.

“We have work to do — governments have allowed themselves to be controlled by global corporations. Citizens need to fight back and reclaim that power — and trade unions are key to this in every country and every continent,” he urged.