The 1972 miners' strike: popular agency and industrial politics in Britain

The national miners' strike of 1972 is central to contemporary British history: it undermined Edward Heath's Conservative government and sharpened social conflict; the common interpretation of the strike as a 'victory for violence', shown here to be disingenuous, legitimised the Thatcherite attack on organised labour in the 1980s. This article examines the high politics of the strike, but situates popular agency - the actions and attitudes of the miners - as the predominant historical contingency. This was especially so in the uproarious events documented at Longannet in Fife, which shaped the outcome of the strike. This analysis is related to the character of industrial politics more generally in the 1960s and 1970s

Percolative Model for Nanoscale Phase Separation in High Temperature Superconductors

The nature of the phase diagrams of HTSC is clarified by discussing two kinds of phase diagrams, that of the host crystalline lattice, and that of the dopant glass. The latter is associated with changes in the electronic properties, while the former is much more accessible to direct experimental identification, by diffraction, of nanoscale phase separation. Careful examination of electronic properties in both the normal and superconductive states reveals that there are several electronic miscibility gaps in YBa2Cu3Ox and La2-xSrxCuO4 that have been previously overlooked. Recent experiments on the pseudogap in Bi2Sr1.6La0.4CuOy also reveal an electronic miscibility gap.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figure