Another Country
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Whilst some of you reading this will probably be nursing and cursing a bit of a hangover tomorrow, those amongst us who harbour a curiosity about political history tend to find the most anticipated aspect of a New Year to be the public release of 30-year-old governmental files from the Whitehall vault. This has become something of an annual tradition for yours truly, even if it’s a sobering reflection on the swift passage of time that when I first became interested we were unveiling the secrets of the early 1970s. Now we’re already onto the mid-1980s. To anyone over 40, it doesn’t seem that long ago; and some things, it seems, never change. Perennial squabbles over Europe may still be intrinsic to the Tory Party’s DNA; but listening to the portrait painted of the country on a Radio 4 programme about the newly-released files reminded me of how distant that England really is. As we re-enter 1985, the imminent end of the Miners’ Strike is perhaps the greatest pointer to what really has changed.
Unlike many workers in blue-collar industries, the miners were afforded a unique reverence by the British public, filtered down the ages via the likes of DH Lawrence, George Orwell and the ‘Bevin Boys’ of the Second World War; they were hard, honest men doing a dirty job that it took a special kind of working-class hero to put himself though. Even during the hardships that were a by-product of the strikes of 1972 and 1973/’74, there was a general consensus that blame lay not at the door of militant miners’ leaders, but Prime Minister Edward Heath. The February ’74 Election that brought down Heath’s Government was a defeat largely attributed to the policies Heath had pursued against the miners, and when Margaret Thatcher came to power with an avowed intention to reform the unions, she was determined to succeed where her predecessor had so spectacularly failed.
In 1983, the appointment of Ian MacGregor as head of the National Coal Board was seen as provocative; MacGregor had been transferred from his job as head of British Steel, in which he had overseen the workforce being cut by half. Fears that he would wield the same axe in the mining industry were bound to lead to conflict, and within a year, the NCB announced its intentions to close 20 pits, leading to the loss of 20,000 jobs. As with the manufacturing industry, the most affected areas of the country would be in the North of England, as well as in Scotland and South Wales. Whole towns and villages had grown around the mining industry and the mines continued to be their main source of employment; the devastation such closures would bring about were incalculable, and a confrontation was now unavoidable. The national strike that began in March 1984 and ended twelve months later proved to be the watershed industrial dispute in post-war British history as well as another turning point in the Premiership of Margaret Thatcher.
The images of the strike remain seared on the collective memory of those who lived through them via the TV news – the volatile clashes between pickets and police, the bitter divisions between the miners who remained on strike and the ‘scabs’ who returned to work, the intimidating orations of NUM leader Arthur Scargill, the resolution of Thatcher to stick to her guns, the sense of observing a particular kind of Britain in its agonising death-throes; for this was a conflict in which ambivalence had no place. Even the media found it impossible to retain a balance and reporting tended to be partisan; battle lines had been drawn and sides were taken; you were either for the miners and therefore against the Government, or vice-versa. Yet, it would be too simplistic to paint the strike in black & white terms, to define heroes and villains or saints and sinners depending on which vantage point one took; to do so would be to absolve those whose actions during the height of the strike remain questionable – on both sides.
However, the stakes were painfully high for all parties involved; the miners knew defeat would lead to the decimation of communities that the strike had already fractured, whereas Thatcher knew that victory for the Government was imperative if she was to carry out the wholesale programme of changes she had in mind for the country. Neither side was prepared to back down, but the Government was in the strongest position almost from the start. Dependency on coal as a primary source of fuel was not the same in 1984 as it had been in 1974, certainly not in the nation’s households; and the toxic divisions that the strike brought about within pit villages and towns was bound to weaken the miners’ resolve. By the time the dispute had dragged on into 1985, morale was especially low on the miners’ side; despite relatively strong support from the public, the hardships that the strikers and their families endured were seeing more and more returning to work, and there was too much disunity within the mining communities to sustain the strike or guarantee victory. Eventually, on 3rd March 1985, the strike formally ended.
The proposed pit closures that had sparked the strike action a year earlier went ahead, but the damage had already been done during the strike, forcing customers to look elsewhere for coal supplies when their regular suppliers were indefinitely out of action. The impact on those parts of the country where mining had been the traditional life-support system of the entire community was devastating, and it’s true to say that in many cases, these areas have never really recovered from the loss of the pits, becoming notorious black-spots of terminal urban decay and cradles of hopelessness. Social deprivation, high unemployment, high crime rates and high drug abuse have come to characterise neighbourhoods in which there was little or no investment following the collapse of the industry that had given birth to them. Many former mining areas were transformed into ghost towns or ghettos, with those who remained being abandoned and effectively left to their own devices. The economic recovery that was to propel Margaret Thatcher to an historic third term as Prime Minister in 1987 was not one that everyone had a stake in; the divisive nature of her premiership was never better exemplified than by those who fell through the cracks in 1984.
In retrospect, the Miners’ Strike was the last defiant roar of a working-class united by a sense of shared values and common grievances; but perhaps the fatal divide between the miners themselves was an indication that this roar emanated from a toothless old beast about to be put out of its misery. After 1985, what had long been a clearly defined social group would be too fragmented to come together as one again, at least for a cause with any genuine substance; in the future, what once passed for the working-class would unite only when engaged in voting-off contestants from a televised circus that had been cynically sold to them as having the gravitas of a life-and-death struggle. And if the likes of Arthur Scargill had been painted as a self-aggrandizing Marxist thug during the strike and after it, Margaret Thatcher emerged from the battle with her reputation as a modern-day Boudicca strengthened further.
Thatcher had done the country an undoubted service in neutering the powers of bully boys within many of the leading trade unions, but the rights of those with genuine grievances to make their grievances heard in a democratic forum were arguably damaged by the legislation she subsequently drafted, and the bullish spirit of the militant trade unionists merely resurfaced in areas of industry that Thatcher vigorously endorsed. But the Britain for which she reserved her most indefatigable fury is gone, whether by manslaughter or hara-kiri. 30 years later, the jury is still out.
Petunia Winegum
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December 31, 2014 at 9:39 am -
It is rumoured that Queen Victoria once supped tea from her saucer, not to expose to ridicule a guest who was doing likewise.
Shall I assume a similar motive behind your use of the spelling ‘Bevan’ as I did the other day – only to be pursued by the pedant police?
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December 31, 2014 at 9:57 am -
I and other left-wingers (at the time – we all grow up eventually) were appalled at how Scargill mis-handled the strike. His self-aggrandising stance played into the hands of the government. He ignored all the warnings from “his side” about his poor tactics and lost almost entirely through egotism.
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December 31, 2014 at 10:41 am -
Agreed. If the idiot had held a ballot to “legalise” the strike, and had won, Thatcher would have been on very shaky ground. Her use of police as a military force also would have been more closely questioned.
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December 31, 2014 at 10:21 am -
“We” (that would be Aged Mother’s ‘Royal We’-speaking for the entire Home Counties) “We have never forgiven them (miners) for holding the country to ransom during WW2!”
So in the household of my teenage years we were staunchly Pro-Maggie and pretty much all my friends and neighbours seemed to be. Finally someone was going to smash the unions and save the country from further winters of discount tents. The miners lost any vestiges of sympathy the southern English might have had for them when Mick Maghey was shown on the news foulmouthing and almost attacking an Officer of Court (i think)on the street. I remember thinking that he was insane-and I mean ‘insane’ in a clinical sense.
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December 31, 2014 at 10:27 am -
I think it is morally wrong to send people down coal mines to work, no matter how tough and manly they may be.
But the former mining villages in Durham are in a very bad state.
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December 31, 2014 at 9:28 pm -
I agree …..the only worse fate I can think of for a working man is sending him into a sauna with a birch to beat Peter Mandelson.
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December 31, 2014 at 10:48 am -
It seems to me that industry and manufacturing the ’70s and onwards had massive opportunities for improved productivity, new products & processes. I worked in just such an industry for an international company. Meanwhile we had a lot of labour intensive smokestack industry of declining competitiveness, putting hundreds of thousands of jobs at risk.
Mix together some militant unions, bosses inadequate for the rapidly changing world, and a succession of floundering politicians, and confrontation was inevitable.
MT is now routinely blamed for the collapse of British industry. I don’t buy that. A lot of people have had their lives blighted by those events, but I guess things had moved on too far for positive & collaborative progress, if it was ever possible.
The issue was ‘who governs?’.
Just a view, but I was there.-
December 31, 2014 at 1:46 pm -
I suppose we’re far enough away now to see possible parallels between what happened in the 1970s and 80s and the introduction of machinery in early 19th century industry, with many of the more militant trade unions taking a Canute-like stand reminiscent of the Luddites.
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December 31, 2014 at 2:32 pm -
Ah, Petunia that brings back memories of O-level(failed) British Social & Economic History 1760 to I forget when.
Interesting parallels.
Be interesting too to see what happens when the remaining protected species get reformed, assuming govt has the will. They are also the last real strongholds of union power.-
December 31, 2014 at 6:22 pm -
I passed that one ,with the highest ever recorded score in the county *insert own-trumpet sounding here* …and I don’t recall the study period end date either! I have a feeling it went up to 1914 ? Thanks to it I know all I will ever need to know about Bessemer, Corn Laws, Spinning Jenny, The Slave Trade, Preganancy in Workhouses,The Rocket and the smuggling of ‘Geneva’. None of which, besides the latter, has been any help in my life since.
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December 31, 2014 at 8:27 pm -
The Tolpuddle Martyrs, the GNCTU, Chadwick, the Reform Act, and Corn Laws too.
Not sure I can remember what I had for lunch today though.-
December 31, 2014 at 8:33 pm -
What about the Chartists ?
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December 31, 2014 at 9:02 pm -
Huskisson, Macadam, Arkwright, Shaftsbury & Robert Owen too.
..and really it wasn’t the unions or the Labour party that stopped children being put up chimneys?
Will someone tell Owen Jones and that startled panda chap.
…now what did I go upstairs for?
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December 31, 2014 at 3:56 pm -
Personally I don’t go with MT as the cause of the decline in British Industry, I see Wilson’s ‘White Heat of Technology’ speech as being the start, the casting off, of ‘sunset industries’. We studied it in Geography in the early 80s, it has always occurred to me, if ‘you’ as in the government and the businesses themselves understood it, why in the name of all that is holy did they not do anything about it? A friend thought that it was the placing of academic into industry and the lack of proper penalty for failure for the upper management that has contributed to the demise. That and the UK’s industries not having properly recovered from the War.
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January 2, 2015 at 7:52 am -
I was there too and I thoroughly agree with you binao. What so many of the left wing commentators about the miners’ strike leave out of their crits then and now was the economics behind the crisis. Wilson had been closing pits throughout his premiership because they were simply uneconomic and more and more of them were trending that way. The same applied to other trad industries like ship building. One can still hear today the preening of workers and trade unionists over how ‘the men were wonderful craftsmen with ship building in their blood’ – whilst on the other side of the world, smaller, more sallow complexioned men were doing everything they could do and 20% better! Nor will I take any shit from the left about the nasty, brutal consequencies of deploying the police en masse as an army to confront the strikers. Many activists, provocateurs and miners were themselves brutal thugs; again, referring to the ship builders, remember what that estimable union leader Jimmy Reid had to say when reminding the cohorts during the Clydeside ‘Work In’ of 1971 of how they should behave. The fact remains that Arthur Scargill inspired by Jo Gormley, who was able to bring down Heath in the 70s, sought to remove the democratically elected Thatcher Government and replace it with an East German style state – I, for one, wouldn’t have enjoyed that very much.
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January 2, 2015 at 10:42 am -
The irony with Gormley is that it eventually emerged he was feeding information to the security services whilst playing the ‘man of the people’ role within the mining industry. Even Scargill was unaware of that until it came out.
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January 2, 2015 at 11:14 am -
What information? About commies or production quotas?…
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January 2, 2015 at 11:48 am -
Oh I see… Informing on Arthur…
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/true_spies/2351547.stm
“Arthur Scargill himself was not surprised by Mr Gormley’s actions, saying: “The history of our movement is littered with people in leadership positions who were either connected with Special Branch or connected with the State.”Not to mention all being paedo’s…
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December 31, 2014 at 11:13 am -
I lived in a mining community although I had moved in before the strikes etc. the miners were good for the community. They funded brass bands, ran a welfare club really well and sold cheaper booze. They helped where they could.
They helped 4 young guys, of which I was one, set up and play in a rock group. They provided a place to practice, transport and financial support for us to make some pretty good headway. We used to practice on a Sunday afternoon after the strippers and bingo session.
Their living conditions had improved immensely but there were still quite a few miners rows which wee very nasty and not fit for use.
The town suffered badly after the strike. It’s probably never recovered. I moved on as I mentioned. To a yuppy executive home with all the trimmings. If the miners I knew had seen my new house and lifestyle they would have been pleased and happy for me.
Things change. I still think at some point in the distant the mines will be back.
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December 31, 2014 at 3:58 pm -
Tend to agree when the open cast pits have been stripped bare then the deep mines become viable again, I used to work in civil engineering tunnelling a scary job, but nowhere near as bad as mining.
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December 31, 2014 at 11:14 am -
It is little realised that the UK mining was in terminal decline already; the peak year of production of UK coal was in 1913. It has been going down steadily since, in spite of technological improvements and industry re-organisations, and now we produce annually about the same as we did in 1810. There’s not a lot that can be done with an exhausted coal mine or a watered-out oil well except close them. Thatcher seems to have taken the opportunity to have a
showdown with the unions at the same time; break the NUM and the less powerful would be neutered.As oil and gas run out, and the price of fuel rises, these pits may be worth re-opening in spite of their poor yield, but whether the capital is available to do that in the future is a questionable point. The best hope seems to be in-situ gasification, but so far no reliable method has been found.
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December 31, 2014 at 11:26 am -
I recall during the recent unedifying-almost traitorous- ‘Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead’ thing hearing on the radio from someone my age who grew up as the son of a miner in a mining town and as such HATED Mrs T with a passion AT THE TIME. Their pit did close, and Dear Ol Dad did loose his job and did remain unemployable up to his pension. However the Son -not being able to go ‘doOOOn pittt’ at 16- went on to 6th Form (co it was the only thing to do besides go on the Old King Cole), then to Uni -the first member of his entire family to ever go- and now is a well earning professional who owns his own home, cars, and iPad -miles away in distance and terms from the poverty of his youth. So now he has mixed feelings about Thatcher -mixed towards actually agreeing with what she did.
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December 31, 2014 at 11:49 am -
Of course, Harold Wilson closed more pits than Mrs Thatcher. What Scargill was about was defeating the democratically elected government. The minors had already bought down Heath and Livingstone tried it in London.
It would be nice to see some investment in devising methods of extracting coal that didn’t involve lots of men slaving away underground.
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December 31, 2014 at 12:00 pm -
“The minors had already bought down Heath”…. I know you can’t libel a dead man but are you sure?
“Livingstone tried to defeat the democratically elected government”. Again, are you sure? He didn’t follow her line, but I struggle to recall him trying to overthrow her, although he was up for quite a lot of confrontation – not an unhealthy thing in a democracy, surely?
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December 31, 2014 at 12:01 pm -
“It would be nice to see some investment in devising methods of extracting coal that didn’t involve lots of men slaving away underground.”
We already have it – it’s called ‘open cast’ minining, and people tend to not like them in their locality:
http://i2.thejournal.co.uk/incoming/article5111928.ece/alternates/s615/opencast-mine.jpg
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December 31, 2014 at 12:17 pm -
Bit of a bugger doing it that way several miles out under the North Sea however…
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December 31, 2014 at 12:43 pm -
We’ll just have the oil and gas instead, then!
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December 31, 2014 at 2:13 pm -
An alternative that doesn’t destroy the countryside is CBM. Coal Bed Methane is where the small holes are drilled into the ground and the gas extracted.
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December 31, 2014 at 12:05 pm -
“It would be nice to see some investment in devising methods of extracting coal that didn’t involve lots of men slaving away underground.”
It’s called ‘opencast mining’ – digging a big open hole instead of very small closed-in ones. It’s a damn sight cheaper, too.
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December 31, 2014 at 12:44 pm -
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December 31, 2014 at 2:13 pm -
But you’re the one who, further up the comments, rather carelessly used the term ‘bit of a bugger’ when Edward Heath’s name had been mentioned.
(He who lives by the sword, dies by the sword……)
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December 31, 2014 at 11:54 am -
The miners had a true ‘community spirit’, perhaps unique amongst all other trades. However, this excellent piece fails to mention the reason for MacGregor’s action – namely £250million-a-year losses, which were unsustainable.
I don’t recognise the latter part of: “By the time the dispute had dragged on into 1985, morale was especially low on the miners’ side; despite relatively strong support from the public, ……”
Those in non-mining areas despised being held to ransom by the bullies, particularly the threat of secondary picketing. Remember for example, the scenes at Orgreave, near Sheffield, where 5,000 pickets tried to stop coal being moved to the Scunthorpe Steelworks?
IMHO, it was action like that which killed public sympathy for the coal mining industry.
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December 31, 2014 at 12:01 pm -
The police were not innocent bystanders at Orgreave.
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December 31, 2014 at 12:02 pm -
The police needn’t have been there if illegal secondary picketing hadn’t occurred.
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December 31, 2014 at 12:27 pm -
“wouldn’t” might be the more significant word than “needn’t”.
http://youtu.be/qgDKtLPp46s
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December 31, 2014 at 1:51 pm -
It really depends on where you were when it happened, I suppose. Growing up in Yorkshire, support for the miners’ cause remained strong throughout the strike.
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December 31, 2014 at 8:59 pm -
My in-laws lived in a Yorkshire mining town when the ’84 strike was on. Prior to that, I had enjoyed occasional healthy and robust debates with the locals but, once that strike began, it was taboo to hold, or even consider, any opinion other than unquestioning support for the strike. Any hint of an alternative view was greeted with clear aggression, not recommended with coal-miners who often have more muscle-power in their spit than between their ears.
I never thought I would again see such levels of absolute, visceral hatred as then applied to Thatcher and her government – but disturbingly, only this year as the Scottish referendum evolved, a very similar level of emotive vilification was evident, being applied north of the border to The Tories, Westminster and Cameron, in that order. Where Scargill led, Salmond followed.
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December 31, 2014 at 12:14 pm -
At the time, I was a sales rep & my routes around the patch included swathes of mining villages in Derbyshire, Staffordshire & Yorkshire. I remember being stopped occasionally at road blocks & picket lines. There was, generally, good natured relationship between the pickets & the police, but that all changed when the Met arrived. Those guys just wanted a punch up. Equally, various groups with soft skinned hands started to turn up on the picket lines. These oiks (they are now called ‘activists’, I believe) wouldn’t have recognised a pick or a shovel for what they were. Nor the notion of turning up every day to do a useful job. But there they were, pretending to be ‘miners’. The real ones were pretty scathing about them, but none of this came out in the MSM at the time. As usual, they missed the point completely & simply promoted the band wagons they were riding on.
My grandad had been a miner & he was very keen that his descendants did something else. I remember that he took me down the mine once when I was small to make the point. He had zero sentiment about the industry & saw the ‘community’ for what it was.
I also knew a couple of miners in the during “the Thatcher years” at the time of the strikes. They impressed me because they (and their wives) worked as much overtime & extra shifts as they could to send their children to a private school. They saw this as a route for their offspring to something a lot better and saw the pit as a gravy train that couldn’t last much longer. They weren’t stupid & could see from the inside that the numbers just didn’t add up, so they were making hay while the sun shone. Their opinion of Scargill was very low – and they saw Mrs T as doing no more than what had to be done. But they didn’t say that to their workmates or the ‘activists’. They were already taking substantial risks. You have to be brave to be a ‘scab’.
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December 31, 2014 at 12:15 pm -
My father didn’t like having to fight a war: killing people, and seeing your friends killed, wasn’t his idea of fun. But he told me there were two occasions when he would have killed without distaste: the first was after he saw Belsen. If ordered to advance ten miles a day and kill every German he came across, he would “paradoxically” have done it.
The second time was earlier in the war; if he’d been ordered to fire on striking miners he would have done so.
Of course the bastards struck during the Great War too.
And after the Second War, they were indeed “Labour Aristocracy” in a rather traditional sense: they were grotesquely subsidised. Bugger all this sentimentality about them.
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December 31, 2014 at 1:54 pm -
Some may also say “bugger all the sentimentality” about farmers too.
They survive against a global market only by dint of tax-payer subsidies in many forms and, just like the miners digging out over-priced coal, the UK’s farmers can’t even produce milk at a price comparable to others. Therefore the farms should all be shut down. Nowhere near as many employees affected, no bolshie unions to bother about, no volume of votes at risk, so why not do it ?
It could, of course, be connected to the beneficiaries of those bulk agri-subsidies being some very influential folk very high-up the chain, rather than just some muscle-bound, Labour-voting coal-hewers trying to fund their families.
Funny that.-
December 31, 2014 at 2:23 pm -
Which is more fundamental to the country’s (country as a whole, not just countryside) survival – food or coal?
As to agricultural subsidy, I’m not really a fan either, but would we be prepared to pay the real costs of production? I seem to recall some statistic that in the 1930s the average family spent 30% of it’s income on food, whilst now it’s less than 10% (though we now pay the difference through the tax system, it’s not quite so visible at the supermarket checkout).
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December 31, 2014 at 3:25 pm -
* UK’s farmers can’t even produce milk at a price comparable to others. Therefore the farms should all be shut down … beneficiaries of those bulk agri-subsidies being some very influential folk very high-up the chain *
Now you make me think about it, I can’t say as I’ve noticed much UKIP rhetoric about the removal of the European subsidy system, after we leave the EU. I don’t think ‘we’ should “shut the farms”, but rather just stop subsidising them and then let nature take it’s course. I wonder if the history of the British coal industry might have been quite different if all the mines had been returned to private ownership after the war.
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December 31, 2014 at 9:08 pm -
I agree, but it’s not just EU subsidies in the mix. Low-tax Red Diesel ‘for tractors’, business rates, planning rules, low-rent council farms, houses with protected agri-tenancies etc. all play a part in the accumulation of stealth subsidies which have been slipped in over the years. Let’s have a level playing-field for all and see if the fittest survive.
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December 31, 2014 at 9:59 pm -
Hope you include the bankers in that wish
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January 2, 2015 at 8:06 am -
Worked for New Zealand!
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December 31, 2014 at 12:16 pm -
As we read this article, coal is currently providing 35% of UK electricity.
http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk
In 2013, we consumed 60.7 million tonnes of coal, of which 50.1 million tonnes was burnt in power stations. Coal imports to the UK were 49.4 million tonnes.
These figures will only reduce in the future as the Greens strangle is combustion.
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December 31, 2014 at 1:42 pm -
I recall at the time that it was said that Polish coal could be shipped to Britain and was still cheaper than digging our own out of a hole and then putting it on a train. They soon realised the same applied to clothes and many other things. It’s odd how the closure of textile-manufacture up north was barely ever mentioned; it was always about coal; but then we never had a National Cotton Board.
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December 31, 2014 at 12:24 pm -
Speaking as a disinterested observer from the non-coal-bearing strata of society I loathed Scargill and genuinely feared him. This was purely based on his oratorical style, which he seemed to have modelled upon Adolf Hitler. Politically, without the Nottinghamshire miners it’s hard to see how Thatcher could ever have prevailed.
Insofar as the “heroic patriots” that were the miners are concerned, it’s my understanding that during the second world war some elements basically held the then Coalition government to ransom and gained huge concessions, in order to enable Britain to pursue it’s single-minded resistance against Germany’s military Hegemony. Perhaps the miners back then had a lot to gain after centuries of oppression (like the Irish), but it still bears mentioning that whatever their aims, they were only out for themselves and their own, which is also perhaps as it should be, but is not what the propagandists about “Society” would necessarily have us believe.
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December 31, 2014 at 12:30 pm -
My recollections growing up during the 1970s are of constant strikes, three-day weeks and power cuts, caused in part by ‘the miners’ (or at any rate their union leaders). By the 1980s there wasn’t much public sympathy for miners – people in general were heartily sick of being held to ransom by them, certainly where I grew up.
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December 31, 2014 at 1:58 pm -
It’s hard to believe how bad things were in the ’70s in industry; equipment being ‘blacked’ if a supervisor picked up spanner, a pervading atmosphere of sheer bloody mindedness and uncertainty about everything. I recall a spell in a factory in Glasgow, putting in new kit, only to reinstall it elsewhere when the grants & patience were exhausted.
A spell later in the decade in LA was an eye opener; can do, will do, and when do you want it? And yes I know there are downsides to the US, but you could get things done, quickly & well, and there was the expectation of success, not failure.-
December 31, 2014 at 2:39 pm -
During the late 1970s, my father (a photographer) did some work for a long-established medium sized manufacturer in Sheffield. At that time, steel was in short supply because of inefficiency in the steel industry exacerbated by constant strikes. He turned up to find them in full swing. Asking the foreman how they managed to keep going when so many firms were reported to be on short time or forced shutdown because of steel shortages, he was taken into the yard. There stood a shipping container, with several tons of steel bar in it. “We get it from Germany, now”, explained the foreman, “We ring the order through on Monday, and it rolls into the yard on Friday. If we order from British Steel, it’s on six weeks delivery when there aren’t any strikes.”
The irony of a Sheffield firm buying steel from Germany was not lost on him. His opinion of unions wasn’t too high, either.
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December 31, 2014 at 12:25 pm -
Part of the problem was that the NCB couldn’t make a profit. We’d spent decades propping up decaying nationalised industries with public funds, keeping plant installed in the 1920s and ’30s going because we didn’t have the capital to invest in more efficient stuff. By the 1970s, it was clapped-out, inefficient, riddled with high wages and overstaffing, and decades behind the productivity of countries like Germany and Japan that had rebuilt their industries after WW2 with modern plant and labour practices. By 1979, about 45% of UK public expenditure went into propping up loss-making nationalised industries – and that money had to be extorted from the potentially competitive private sector, ham-stringing it with high tax bills. Governments of all stripe ducked the issues for about two decades; all MT did was give freedom to the viable bits of nationalised industry, and a decent burial to the rest. There was no other sensible option by then.
Were the miners sold down the river? Well, mines only exist for a while. Eventually, they become exhaused or unviable, and close. If the sole reason for a village growing up is the mine, then it follows that once the mine goes, there’s no reason for the village to still be there. We’ve propped them up by giving welfare payments, and lied to people by saying that we’d ‘bring investment’. No government of any stripe ever has ‘brought investment’ – beyond some token gestures. We should have been more honest – sorry chaps, but the mine’s gone. We’ll support you to find new work and a new life elsewhere, but there’s nothing for you here, and nor will there be. That would have been harsh, but honest. In the end, it might have avoided some rather nasty problems of social deprivation, too.
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December 31, 2014 at 3:35 pm -
There is a massive irony that Germany and Japan’s “peace dividend” came in 1945, not just through the Marshall Plan and other grants, but also because they were barred from having large militaries. Not being able to spend money on ships and aircraft and tanks, they spent it on their peacetime industries instead.
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December 31, 2014 at 4:02 pm -
“they spent it on their peacetime industries instead.”
Not only that but in Germany’s case (and probably Japan’s but I don’t know for sure) they, the Germans, had the advantage of starting pretty much an entire state from scratch- they still refer to the period directly after the war as ‘Zero Hour’. It’s a lot easier to build something better if all the previous socio-economic-industrial-political baggage is removed first. Mind you a lot of Post War German town center architecture is an abomination , a prefab concrete eye sore-due to the need to house the ethnically cleansed Germans from the East. Only a few cities were able to rebuild as before (in the case of Nuremberg thanks to some school kids’ exercise books!). British industry, after the war, tried to rebuild the 1930s not give birth to the 1950s.
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December 31, 2014 at 4:09 pm -
East Germany was out-pacing the west for some years by rebuilding the 1930’s, but eventually, like the Soviet model it ran into the buffers of Obsolescence. Centrally-run massive corporations (whether stae or ‘private’) can be good at exploiting contemporary systems but become hopeless and helpless when change makes them out of date. The NHS began to run out of steam by the 80’s, but puffs on somehow, and whatever happened to General Motors…
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December 31, 2014 at 10:37 pm -
Whilst Britain was basking in the glow of the swinging 60s , then navel gazing in the 70s and making loadsamoney (well drawing down loadsacredit) in the 80s some of our more astute cousins in Europe (with the help of their governments) were investing rather successfully in the longer term. One might wonder the outcome if say the North of England had been part of the Soviet block and a colony of Russia and then been thrown over to the South of England in the 90s to add to the woes of post war Britain. Funny how West Germany managed and continues to manage rather well and I don’t think does so for any other reason than a rather different and less divisive political and social culture. Mind you we can celebrate the blessed Margaret as the all conquering heroine (Good Old Maggie she gave the miners a kicking) but what was left afterwards to celebrate?
No doubt the mines were uneconomic but if one was a miner and it was a choice between mining or no job coz no body has thought to invest in any alternative then I would no doubt have manned a picket line and charged the police.
I suggest the shame was not in closing the mines but the way it was done and the direction investment was subsequently encouraged —well directed I would say—- by the government-
December 31, 2014 at 11:06 pm -
The investment problem started well before the 1980s. When the means of production were nationalised, investment decisions were not made on commercial grounds, but rather dubious social ones. In the ’70s, tax on investment income reached 98% at one point, so not surprisingly investment capital was rather hard to come by – it went elsewhere. By the 1980s, and the freeing up of enterprise, major firms were looking to lower-wage economies in the Far East, and were also decidedly leery about British union activity.
We could still catch up with the Germans – we run them close and even beat them hands down in some sectors – but it’ll take a while, even though political thinking does seem to be turning more to the idea of a mixed economy rather than a service-based one. That latter idea was rather tested to destruction in 2008….
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January 1, 2015 at 9:59 am -
By the 1980s, and the freeing up of enterprise, major firms were looking to lower-wage economies in the Far East,
Perhaps Engineer but you must remember Germany was prospering and interestingly doing well enough to require additional labour which it solved by a large influx of immigrants, the gastarbiter (sp?) —Guestworkers of which the Turks formed a large proportion. Its interesting that real German complaint and violence about immigration came to the fore after reunification. Somewhere in the history of Post War Britain are lessons that might usefully be learnt (though I doubt they will) and that lesson might be that the Hobbsian notion of what is the true social contract might be worth a rather a second look.-
January 1, 2015 at 12:32 pm -
I’m not sure I’d hold up Germany as any sort of ideal these days. They have some pretty serious problems of their own, and not all of them down to reunification. They still have a lead in some sectors of engineering, but they don’t have it all their own way. Much of their automotive development work happens in (would you believe it!) the UK – Ricardo being one firm heavily involved.
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January 1, 2015 at 12:50 pm -
* I’m not sure I’d hold up Germany as any sort of ideal these days. They have some pretty serious problems of their own *
Yes. They’re called France, Spain, Italy and Greece…
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January 1, 2015 at 5:29 pm -
@Engineer
I’m not sure I’d hold up Germany as any sort of ideal these days.
I don’t know enough about the future but I do know a bit about its past and that was the extent of my observation
But you are right about ‘out shelling’ as I think its termed though that I think is a sign of lack of capacity of supply of labour from within a country when global demand is high …..essentially resulting in the ability to export jobs abroad and then reimport the finished product and add further value to it. Should global demand contract then one might speculate as to the job security of that employment. ….perhaps all the more so when the German minimum wage is about half that of England and the price of property in Germany is probably a third of that here.
I have heard that Britain has excellent specialised engineering design skills (it dominates Formula 1 design and construction so I understand)….and interestingly Engineering Undergraduates/Post Graduates are hugely admired by their Non Engineering Peers in British Universities perhaps because its perceived they can master subjects considered beyond most and that their skills will be relevant and directly productive resulting in employment. Germany’s whip hand in Europe is that it produces things people want and products they trust with decent margins. ….the end product is seen as German coz its organised by the Germans and as a result Germans call the shots.
The model that is said to power the German economy as you know is termed the Mittelstand ….a very different model from that which was adopted in post war Britain.
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December 31, 2014 at 12:47 pm -
Yes, Thatcher did us all a favour my breaking the militants. Unions are a tad more palatable these days.
Having said that, the big powerful ones own Miliband and his cohorts and God help us if they get elected in May. These people have learnt nothing from their past mistakes and the big union leaders are still milking their gullible members for everything they can get their greedy little paws on.
You want them running the country? Then vote Labour and watch Ed Balls take all your money and piss it up the wall…
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December 31, 2014 at 1:13 pm -
Your use of the word “militant” is puzzling. Couldn’t Mrs T be said to have been militant, but from a different position?
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December 31, 2014 at 1:32 pm -
More a pragmatist, I think. She merely did what had to be done to address the country’s problems, some of which had been allowed to fester for a generation. She didn’t succeed in curing all the ills – we still have a significant and negative stranglehold by the more idealist and dogmatic unions on public services such as education and healthcare. Both sectors could improve their services immensely if the unions were more pragmatic and sensible.
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December 31, 2014 at 2:15 pm -
Bevan or Bevin? Aneurin Bevan was a fiery Welsh politician who was a thorn in Churchill’s flesh in Parliament during the war. While Minister of Health in the Attlee government he presided over the establishment of the NHS. Ernest Bevin made his way up from even more humble beginnings and hardly any education to the top rank of the Labour movement as head of the then huge Transport and General Workers Union. He served as Minister of Labour in the wartime government (hence “Bevin Boys”) and as a much-admired Foreign Secretary after the war. Both deserve much credit for their achievements but Aneurin Bevan’s reputation is marred by his allegedly having lied (according to Richard Crossman) during the libel action which he, Crossman and Morgan Phillips brought against The Spectator for an article taken to imply that they had been drunk during some overseas outing.
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December 31, 2014 at 3:21 pm -
It’s a bit like the Monet/Manet thing. Damn inconsiderate when two people with similar surnames operate in the same world at the same time!
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January 2, 2015 at 8:18 am -
Too right – and people still refer to Manet as an impressionist painter, when he wasn’t.
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December 31, 2014 at 2:18 pm -
Breaking the power of the unions wasn’t the good thing that came out of the miners’ strikes, rather it was the abandonment of this filthy profession. Investing in clean, cheap renewable energy is the way ahead. Who would want to work down a mine but for a heavy pay packet? And if you look back to the 19th Century when women and even kids were more or less forced to, you’ll get a better perspective.
Thatcher’s approach kind of reminds me of that Danny De Vito speech. Check out the benevolent capitalist of Gregory Peck:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uundu-aPiBQ
and compare with the hard-hearted asset stripper (ie Ian McGregor) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62kxPyNZF3Q
then tell me 40 years on that Thatcher was wrong.
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December 31, 2014 at 2:39 pm -
The writing was on the wall for domestic coal production from the beginning of the 20th century, as one commentator put it the maximum output was in 1913. I can remember houses being heated by open coal fires and my parents bemoaning that the quality was poor because all the best stuff was being sold off to cope with the National Debt. How true that was must be a matter of some research. Then coal became expensive, and I can remember my father making briquettes out of coal dust with a little cement admixture – not through poverty, but because the coal supplied was too fine, and damped down the fire – an open fire requires lumps. (As an aside, many old coal waste tips contain a lot of coal, as only big lumps were saleable. Dust put into a steam engine’s firebox drops through the firebars onto the track. Now, fine coal is in demand for power stations, and it is economic to reprocess those waste dumps!)
There used to be a coal yard at every railway station of note, but these are now the car parks.
My father was a career soldier, and he was sent off to Suez at a day’s notice. We then lived in the NE of England, and the village where I went to school had many children from mining families. I was under strict injunction never to repeat the family criticism of coal and mining for fear of reprisals (Dad reckoned that coal miners were organised by Britain’s enemies, having been on strike in both World Wars). In one classroom I sat next to a lad who was routinely at the bottom of the class – I’d slipped down there due to having been in hospital twice (tonsils then appendix) – the class was organised in terms of where you were in the periodic tests and I hadn’t taken them. I remember the event still, because this lad (whose name escapes me nearly 60 years later) showed me a wooden model his miner father had made for him of a coal cutting machine. He also showed me his black eye and bruises received from his father who had no money for beer and took it out on the lad (he said). Tough love! We were 8 years old. My father (from a working class background himself) never raised his hand to me – not ever – and I formed a negative impression that has lasted until today. I have a recollection of being told that miners were on strike because mining is dangerous and they needed better pay. Anyway, childhood recollections aside, in the 1972 strike, my poor grandmother met her end in the cold and dark, and I find it hard to forgive that, too. I was trying to get some computing done on a mainframe computer that needed most of 3 hours to get running from cold, and one had less than 3 hours warning of power outages. I was pissed off, but never managed outright hatred.
The mines had to close, and miners had to lose their jobs for practical harsh economic reasons. Firstly, UK coal costs rose steadily in line with safety innovations and improvement in working conditions. For example, pithead baths were still not available at all pits, a decade after Nationalisation. Secondly, mechanisation increased the waste disposal problem, and that brought increasing costs. This culminated in the 1966 Aberfan disaster, which was followed by the Mines and Quarries Tips Act that brought still yet more cost overheads dealing with unsafe waste dumps. Eventually, one could buy coal on the international market for half the cost of home produced stuff. Then there was the damage that mining did to buildings and the infrastructure over them, for which the NCB had to pay compensation. In one house in Bolsover this was paid four times as different seams were worked underneath. Finally, the Clean Air Act(s) led to the demise of many open fire heated homes. Coal wasn’t so much pushed out of contention by gas and electricity as it priced itself out of the market. In many homes it was superceded by those awful paraffin stoves, and gas only became the fuel of choice for central heating when the North Sea gas fields opened.
I’ve never been able to reconcile the view that coal mining is a horrible and dangerous profession, which therefore demands high pay rates, with the view that it needs to be preserved at the cost of ever increasing subsidies so that generation can follow generation ‘doon t’pit’ to be injured or inflicted with ‘black lung’ (pneumoconiosis) in the interests of black spittle; allotment gardening; brass band playing; keeping one’s bath filled with the free issue of coal; the ability to brutalise one’s children whenever one wants, and the Labour Party.-
December 31, 2014 at 3:27 pm -
The Compo lawyers cut their modern teeth on the H&S claims against the old Coal Board (ie Us) didn’t they?
Before they moved on to Asbestos and then the Banks (Us and Us)-
December 31, 2014 at 7:52 pm -
Whoa, ‘Steady the Buff’s’ Moor, it’s the blue Asbestos that’s done for me and I haven’t even thought of speaking to a ‘Compo lawyer’ thus far. Do you think I should?
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January 1, 2015 at 9:55 am -
If you haven’t by now, I suspect you never will.
But then I hardly know you.
Happy New Year…
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January 1, 2015 at 12:44 pm -
The government should have banned asbestos long before they did, the various compensation schemes available for asbestos injuries seem to me to no more than “blood money”. Don’t feel guilty about it, get yourself a lawyer. I did.
The government also introduced a new scheme for mesothelioma sufferers this year, for the cases where employer insurance couldn’t be found for the years of exposure. It started paying out in the summer. I believe I was one of the first in the new scheme.
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December 31, 2014 at 4:15 pm -
Well I have been down more than a dozen coal mines – only one of which was still open last time I looked – and I have never met a better organised or motivated workforce than a set of blokes at a coalface. The point being that if one is not organised and not motivated in such a place you will not produce much coal, and there is every likelihood that people will get hurt. But it is just labouring work. Hard, hot, dusty and vile. I am sure that I breathed in more shit in my few cumulative weeks underground than in the rest of all my decades above it. Underground and waiting one day maybe to die alone in the dark, not a one of the men I met wanted their sons to follow them down and that should be enough to inform anyone.
All of the obervations above are true: Wilson closed more pits than Thatcher; the cost of UK coal was a multiple of that deliverable from overseas; Thatcher set out to break the NUM, got her ducks lined up and stomped them; the viability cut-off point when I was about was 1,000,000 tonnes per year because the overhead cost was like a paving slab around the neck of every man; communities did rely on the pit for every last copper of wealth that flowed in and were therefore dead when the pit closed… And so it goes on. The blame for it all should not appear against Thatcher’s name though. The miners were betrayed by the stupidity of their leadership and the bottomless cruelty of the Hampstead Heroes, the post-war anti-capitalist rich-enough-to-have-principles Benn, Crosland, Jenkins, Kinnock, Castle even, who pushed them on as the figurehead of the working man, and then left them to twist in the wind because it suited them to have such visible victims of the Tories. Dig that bastard Orwell up and let us see what they really thought of the workers. Wikipedia tells me by the way that 1049 miners were killed last year in Chinese mines. And don’t we all know that it was likely ten times that. Workers of the World, Unite! Indeed.
The highjacking of what we used to call the ecology movement was started on my watch too. The response of every sensible person to the appalling pollution and despoilation of the land that occurred up until at least the mid-eighties was twisted and bastardised. Until we find it now a new stick with which to beat the poor and keep them in their workhouses of debt the better to vote for their real slavemasters on the Left.
Happy New year to youse all, Comrades.
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December 31, 2014 at 6:17 pm -
A well informed and passionate rant, I thank you for your contribution, ‘the moon is a balloon’.
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December 31, 2014 at 7:32 pm -
Haven’t you noticed that the people who are so in favour of coal miners are also so against coal?
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December 31, 2014 at 6:18 pm -
I always thought the old Miners toast was ‘To the last mine and the last miner’ as no one wanted their sons to follow them down the mine. I remember the 70s with a shudder, they were bad days of strikes, power cuts etc. and why anyone remembers them fondly is a mystery to me. I dread to think what would have happened without Mrs. Thatcher as no one else had the courage to even try to sort things out. I only wish another leader of her stature would emerge now.
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December 31, 2014 at 8:02 pm -
I begin to doubt the accuracy of my own memory.
I remember it as Heath being trounced because he’d been elected on a mandate to assert authority over the more militant unions when he was elected and when he bottled it, was correctly analysed as not being fit for purpose.
I am however reminded of the incredible courage of the merchant seamen on the Murmansk convoys whilst the home grown super heroes in the mines were striking during WW11.
I suppose perspective is all.
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December 31, 2014 at 10:49 pm -
The UK is spending £30k for every £20k it earns. The only region to have a balance of payments surplus is the North East. So let’s all remember that when the bill needs to be paid your houses and assets and communities will suffer in the same way our people did in the 80’s etc. If you want to see the truth of it, look at the UK motor industry -100% foreign owned and doing very well with a unionised and productive workforce. Their 70’s management couldn’t cope, didn’t innovate, engage or develop. They sought conflict and tried to break the unions – just like Thatcher etc did – with her MI5 allies, traducing media and militarised police.
I could indulge in some speculation about why it is that the governing party hardly has an urban representative at MP or even council level north of Nottingham, but I’d rather appeal for a return to consensus politics where we could value each other’s classes, regions, culture and politics. Maybe then the economy might improve for everyone. Remember, if the depression hits, we in the North can deal with it very well – we’ll be fine; it’s the south that’ll really suffer. Let’s be friends – say sorry for Thatcher and become one-nation Tories ; then we in the left can cooperate with you. Happy New Year.-
January 1, 2015 at 1:11 am -
What twaddle: Britain north of Nottingham is state junkiedom through and through, and the reason it doesn’t vote Tory is pure and simple self-interest to keep the subsidies flowing. Most of the population is south of that line anyway. You get a vote if you contribute nothing to the national economy: that’s democracy. But like most twaddle, there is a grain of truth here: the UK as a whole is living on borrowed money and it is simply unsustainable to continue to do so. When the state spends only what it makes, it will be the benefits that get cut first. If the value of my house dropped to 10% of its present value it would simply return it to what it was when it was first built: an affordable starter home for a small family with one earner.
Whether or not Germany benefitted by a smaller defence spend than we did is a moot point, but they certainly benefitted from the spend in their country by our (UK, US and France, if not USSR) bases in their country.
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January 1, 2015 at 9:59 am -
Not entirely true. About 100 miles north of Nottingham, in a post-industrial seat, is a Tory MP who took the seat in 2005 from a Labour ‘rising star’ and has now accumulated a 10,000 majority, a seat which he will certainly retain in May 2015 – not all Tories are unelectable in the Grim North, they just have to be the right sort of Tories for the area.
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January 1, 2015 at 9:39 am -
@Bill Ingleby ….say sorry for Thatcher and become one-nation Tories ; then we in the left can cooperate with you. Happy New Year..
First thing I read this New Year and likely to be the most sensible I will read for the rest
And A Happy New Year to You-
January 1, 2015 at 9:54 am -
A sorry from the lefties for Blair and a decade of war and economic mismanagement and ultimate financial meltdown, and we can all be buddies until May 2015…
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January 1, 2015 at 10:04 am -
A collective sorry from all post 1960s Politicians or some frontier justice dispensed to those still living might be the better solution
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January 1, 2015 at 11:06 am -
Don’t worry Moor, the shame we feel about Blair burdens us still. But that’s only as far as war is concerned.
As for the ultimate financial meltdown, it really would have been worse under the Tories, who thought existing bank regulation (at that time) too onerous. I think tax credits are a silly idea – a decent working wage is what is needed. But Labour is always accused of being the “enemy of business” even if it timidly tries to address this.
I think most of us have a decent mix of of both left and right in us, and the polarisation of those by the media and demagogues and Parliamentarians makes politics in this country the province of fools and leads to ridiculous situations.
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January 1, 2015 at 11:09 am -
The reaction of the country to a coalition seems to suggest they (we?) really prefer the poles apart theory.
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January 1, 2015 at 10:06 am -
Group Hug?…
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January 1, 2015 at 10:50 am -
@ I remember the seventies with a shudder>>>>So do I. As a community midwife, still attending home births, it was all very worrying. Trips to the hospital incinerator to help get rid of after delivery detrituus were a pain. Electricity rationing by planned switch off at least allowed some planning. It made the waiting mums very jumpy. We also had rampant inflation, as well as strike after strike. I was in Iceland once when when a surprise electricity cut put us in the dark. They were able to produce their trusty winders and tot up the bills by till winding after each entry. Phew! There was one price tag on top of another . My more mature working colleague ended up scrabbling under the bed of a dotty mum to try and deliver her baby by coal firelight and a torch. At the coal face?.
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January 1, 2015 at 11:14 am -
I loved the 3-day 70’s. Candles when the leccy went off was cool. We played cards with mum and dad to pass the time and even got a game of Monopoly underway! I went to a footie game on a Sunday once because the evening kick-offs were prohibited and that was the only available date at the weekend. We had to voluntarily give the programme seller the normal admission price because the Club couldn’t legally charge an admission due to Sunday Trading Laws and how was THAT for Community Spirit!
Of course I was just a teenager having fun and adventures. Ten years older and like my dad I’d have been wondering how I was meant to get by on two days pay a week less…
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January 1, 2015 at 10:25 pm -
As I remember the “cheap” coal that was coming into the country was from subsidised Australian mines, or slave labour in China. I do remember living in a pit town at the time – rumours of police tapping the phones of miners, protests, riots, free school meals for the underfed miners’ kids, and the local woodland being stripped of its trees for firewood.
Anyone who broke the strike was an outcast. One particular house had the word “SLAG” painted on it in eight foot high white paint. Another neighbour of ours was starved back to work – a full three days before the strike officially ended. Guys he had worked alongside for 15 years refused to acknowledge his existence again.
Not a happy time – and afterwards we had to start buying our own soap as my Uncle could no longer bring home carrier bags full of bars of “P.H.B” – or “Pit Head Bath”.-
January 2, 2015 at 7:18 am -
Correction… SCAB , not SLAG.
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January 2, 2015 at 9:48 am -
@candles when the leccy went off was cool>>> I wonder of the kids these days can be as ‘cool’ about desperate times as we were pre global news reporting, ipads and smart phones. The winter of 1947 was a case in point. I was 11 and struggling with the mind blowing mental arithmetic of 11+ rehearsals, with a fantastic teacher in the council school. The nation was in deep financial crisis. Austerity had us in its most vicious grip and what a GLORIOUS WINTER we kids had. Ice skating on the village pond, rolling huge snowballs, snowmen. Sledging in the grounds of a posh hotel….no one moved us away. Whacking great slides with hordes of kids sailing along joyfully in the school playground!!!!!!. It went on for weeks on end. We were used to rationing and sharing out what little was to be had. Best winter of my life.
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