dual post

You really are extraordinarily dim aren't you?

Much as I think Gallloway is nothing more than a self serving prat, he has a point here. Thatcher wasn't a touch on Churchill.

Even she didn't turn the troops out against miners.



Finally stopped drinking, starting again Wednesday.

Wilson won four elections.

Atlee oversaw the introduction of the greatest social changes in Britain for over a century.

Neither of them were treated like royalty when they died, despite both dying in periods when their party were in power. So what's different here?

one can only hope.

Maybe Wilson closed too many pits?

Nail on the head. More mining jobs went during Wilson's premiership than Thatcher's. Yet no one moans about him.

Pits have always closed, or scaled down, when the coal became too expensive to mine. My father and grandfather worked at a number of pits and moved about a fair bit. But they could usually find work somewhere. The problem with the 80's closure problem was that it was obvious that there wouldnt be jobs to be found elsewhere.

All of this is true ^^^

The area that I lived in during the 80s strike had been a mining area for 100 years or more, and before the nationalisation of the industry all of them were privately owned pits, often under-invested in order to scratch a living for the owners (anyone been to Lotherton Hall in Leeds to see how the owners scratched a living?).

The village I lived in had its pit closed in the early 60s and all around the area were former pit workings - by the 80s all of the mines had been amalgamated into one large one in Blyth and employees either left the industry (some gratefully, I never heard a retired pitman speak fondly of the job) or moved five miles up the road to the bigger pit.

Thats simply how it was, the closure program of the Thatcher era was unprecedented in its plan and swiftness and it was obvious that there would be nothing to replace the employment that it offered to those communities afterwards, which proved to be true, it would be eight years or more before EU money started to be invested into infrastructure and low or free rates offered to tempt businesses back into south yorkshire and northumberland.

Note the reference to EU money too...

He was a Labour PM. Beyond reproach. The left has never allowed facts to get in the way of their prejudice.

Theres only one person here waving a scarf in football supporter style whilst trying to avoid any facts and, erm...

its you

as per usual.

One other issue was the fact that many in the coal mining industry believed (laughably now, but in the 70's the mindset was different) that it was their birthright to mine coal.

The "new" jobs that the economy demanded were often spurned by the ex-miners as not being "mans work" (whatever that means).

True I believe the governement could have helped the mining area's more (though maybe my views are clouded by the fact that I lived in one), but many in the workforce didn't help themselves.

Wilson and Atlee weren't worshipped by the triumvirate of old-money establishment, spivvery and fruitcakedom that constitute the tory hood.
There's your difference.

Lots of things were different in the 1970s, the macho "mans job" image being just one of them.

The actual truth is that while the pits were valued in their communities and were seen as a "job for life", so too were many other jobs, professions and industries, its just the way it was and that generation had experience of near-full employment since the 1950s and the fact that if you had a trade you did have a good chance of working in that industry for the rest of your life - and many did.

The industries that moved into those Enterprise Zone mining areas varied and often did so at subsidised leases, and business rate free periods on the proviso that they employed locally unemployed - ex-miners in other words, many of whom had trades that could easily be transfered into manufacturing busineses - I numbered a lot of these businesses as clients of mine and as I mentioned before, I have yet to meet an old pitman who, with hindsight would prefer to be 500 feet underground again rather than working in a new factory - there just weren't enough of them and they weren't quick enough to prevent years of misery and unemployment.