Ding Dong the wicked witch is dead...

Interesting article in the ST entitled "Nailing the lies about Maggies's industrial revolution" It makes the point that as Joseph Goebles is said to have observed, if a lie is told often enough, it is believed.

On the eve of the 1984 strike, Peter Walker, the energy secretary, "offered the NUM a deal in which miners at pits scheduled for closure would be offered the choice of a job at another pit or a voluntary redundancy package - and a further £800 million would be invested in the Coal Board.. Yet it was rejected by the NUM leader Arthur Scargill, who for ideological reasons wanted to wage class war and in such a conflict was prepared to lead his own members as Cardigan had the Light Brigade. Having had three calls for strike action rejected in ballots, he took his men into the industrial valley of death, with what the Labour leader Neil Kinnock, belatedly described as "suicidal vanity". This may help to explain why, whatever you might have gathered from either newspaper in the last weeks, The Guardian and the Daily Mirror joined the right-wing press in backing the (Thatcher) government against the strike.

Far from being a campaign to to replace British manuafacturing with an economy entirely based on estate agents and share trading, the closures of the highest-cost deep-seam mines were necessary precisely because heavy industry more than any other requires low energy prices to compete.

Not only had the bulk of British coal become significantly more expensive than that which could be imported, but we now had a much cheaper form of fuel available, from the North Sea. In that sense what happened during the 1980s was a switch from one form of native extraction industry, which sucked billions from the taxpayer, to another, which not only provided cheaper electricity to heat our homes and collossal tax revenues for the government, but also was much less hazardous to the workforce involved....... The truth is that the switch from high-cost coal to North Sea gas did not just save British energy consumers vast sums - it also saved men from dreadful industrial disease.

It's not clear how many who had worked down the pits became employed as roustabouts in the North Sea - where the average wage is now £64k a year and rising sharply; moreover, offshore work, however well paid does not support a local community in quite the way the pitts did. But it is another myth, endlessly repeated, that the Thatcher government was content to let the coal mining areas become industrial wasteland.

The most rigorous examination of the actual record was made in 2005 by the Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research at Sheffield Hallam University. It reported: "As the pit closures of the 1980s got underway, assisted by area status was extended to additional mining areas, notable in Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire.....the coalfields have also been targeted by a number of regeneration schemes."

With some success, it seemed: the Hallam team reported that "between 1981 and 2004, 220,000 male jobs were lost from the coal industry in England and Wales; this was offset by an increase in 132,400 in male jobs in other industries and services in the same areas.....There is incontrovertable evidence that the labour market in the coalfields is bouncing back from the hammer blow of the coal job losses"

This is scant consolation to those who never got back into the labour market up in the fresh air, but is much better that almost every article (and posting) on the subject last week would have you believe.

No one rejoiced in the same way when Harold Wilson died, even though over 200 pits closed under his leadership of the country - more than under Thatcher.

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