There are many words which have a popular meaning and a definition in law which are substantially different. In most cases these differences have little practical significance for day-to-day life, but in the case of the word 'rights' these differences have important implications. Each of us has our own ideas about what 'rights' are and these are frequently ideas to which we are passionately attached. This may be due to an awareness of the history of rights as the product of hard and bitter struggles in the last century, or an almost instinctive belief in the existence of certain 'natural rights' automatically associated with life in a liberal society. Whatever the reason, they are held close to the heart and cherished. Individual understanding of them is not to be meddled with lightly and any attempt to do so is likely to provoke a sense of outrage. It is perhaps for this reason more than any other that concepts of 'rights' are open to abuse, particularly at the hands of a manipulative government and those who would seek to further its aims. Nowhere in recent history has this been more readily apparent than with the sloganising of rights by the Tories during the 1984-85 coal dispute and, in particular, the emergence of a newly defined 'right to work'. The Tories and the right-wing generally were quick to capitalise on the undoubted widespread popular appeal that a 'right to work' possesses. They presented it as a fundamental freedom under threat, not from the State, but from the National Union of Mineworkers and striking miners it was they who were meddling with our rights. Ironically it was, of course, in defence of this right that the miners themselves acted; a 'right' which in the past often has been claimed as "one of the new social and economic rights associated with the emergence of socialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries".1 The purpose of this paper is to show how the Tories have manipulated and abused traditional liberal ideas about rights, in particular the 'right to work', with scant regard to the state of the law, and how the police and judiciary incorporated those ideas in their own thinking.