Cavey wrote:
Well, my take on it is this; I don't doubt that generations of people in these areas will forever and a day blame the Tories for the loss of their mines - a perpetual motion generator of grievance, much like the whole of Scotland IMO.
Well, I don't mean to suggest I think this is a good thing. I was merely struck by the correlation.
Quote:
Another thing I might say is this: why does everyone get so fucking misty-eyed and romantic about coal mines anyway? They were terrible back breaking places to work, people were dying of awful respiratory diseases or were at least stone deaf. All of us to a man and woman would fucking shudder at the thought of our kids working there, or indeed in any of the factories such as the one I started out in when I was 16. I lost my job in that factory in '85 too and I was devastated; I loved it, the camaraderie and the work. But, am I glad now, 30 years later, that actually this was the impetus for me to retrain, and now I'm running an engineering consultancy, not operating a 5 tonne manual fly-press in a freezing cold, damp, tobacco smoke and cellulose air drying paint solvent filled hell hole? Millions of people have retrained, our economy has become dominated by service sector jobs with none of the awful occupational risks and diseases that my father had to endure, and more people are working now than ever before.
Several things about coal mining, from someone who grew up a few miles from colliery towns:
It's true that British coal was hopelessly uneconomical and most likely had to go. A minor diversion: I don't believe "cost" is the only metric to apply when choosing an energy source. If you do, you end up over reliant on the cheapest, and then you do silly things like expose yourself to the oil crisis of the 70s or forget how to build nuclear plants in the 90s. But still, a balance must be struck, and it seems to me British coal might have been on the wrong side of it.
However, what I think you've overlooked in your post is just how devastating this was to these communities. Coal was all they had -- coal, and steel, and service industry to support coal workers, and so on. Coal all the way down, for hundreds of thousands of people. Wilson's pit closures happened over many years, and were (I believe) generally smaller mines so the shockwave effects were much more gentle. But Thatcher wound the whole lot up in a matter of years, and -- crucially -- she did it without doing anything at all to support the people it destroyed. All those people, out of work, with no prospects, and no money. There was no retraining. There was no work to be had. So mismanaged was this that these towns today, fifty years later, still have some of the highest unemployment in Europe. I occasionally have to drive through them. They are bleak, awful places.
Perhaps people should have moved, moved away from places their families have lived for generations. But these were different times when people were less mobile and felt their family ties to the land much more keenly; and in any event, with British heavy industry on the decline everywhere, did the entire UK even have that many open jobs for unskilled manual labourers?
Could Thatcher have done more? I don't know. Did she do anything meaningful to soften this terrible blow? No. Am I surprised people are still angry? Not really. People aren't misty eyed and romantic about coal mining per se. They're misty eyed and romantic for a time when the area for miles around them didn't have 25-50% unemployment rates,.