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.

You obviously wish to see protestors get their heads smashed in ?

Well given the facts surrounding what went on under Wilson compared to Thatcher as far as pit closures go the only prejudice on display is yours. Either that or you are a ill informed as Dally on the facts.

Around 290 mines closed under Wilson's government; around 160 under Thatcher's. Google is your friend.

The important question that you forgot to ask Google is over what period of time and what arrangements were put in place for the employees - coal mines close for all sorts of reason not least of which is the fact that they either lose the seam they are following, it peters out into low quality shale or technically it is too difficult/expensive to extract, the alternative is to then cut another shaft, or more often just close it and move to an adjacent mine where it may be more viable.

In fact the "science" of coal mining is done mainly on guesswork, educated guesswork, but still guesswork, the whole of the new Selby coalfield is a prime example, my company was involved in some of the surface building work when that coalfield was opened, it was going to be huge, one of the biggest coalfields in Europe, it wa sin open countryside and the infrastructure requirement was massive, the coal that they knew was underground by test drilling was of top quality and there was lots of it, two or three generations worth of miners would be employed in the area, the coal was used mainly in power generation.

Twenty years later it was closed due to the removal of the coal subsidy in favour of buying poorer quality coal from Eastern Europe and worrying about the shoite that the power stations pumped out later, only now are they addressing carbon capture, but the main reason for its closure was geological, what had been predicted to be a 3m seam turned out to be less predictable, thats coal mining for you, there is still a lot of high quality coal underground but if a country is not prepared to pay for it in order to control its own fule supplies then its judged to be "uneconomical" mainly because you can pay for some poor buggger in a low waged country overseas to dig it out and ruin his health and environment for you - thats the commercial face of fuel extraction.

What's the point of protesting, there's no more chance of her listening now tha she did then, it's a pointless protest, just let them bury her and be done with it.
People moan about the cost of this, there wouldn't be need for some of the cost if people weren't pointlessly protesting to a dead woman.

If Google is my friend, where do those numbers come from?
What do those numbers actually mean?

How many of the alleged 290 pits had simply run out of coal?
Were they big mines or small ones?
How many men were sacked?
How many simply found jobs in other nearby mines?

And, the biggie, of how many of those pits did Wilson actually order the closure?


You'll have to excuse me, I don't like empty numbers, I like to know how verifiable they are and, most importantly, what they really mean.

I know that. What I said was "Well given the facts surrounding what went on ....."

I was clearly giving you too much credit to have worked out the two scenarios were totally different as has been pointed out to you by other posters.

Under Wilson the coal industry was in decline as pits ran out of coal and demand lessened. What they did when pits were closed was manage the effects of the closure on the areas and most importantly after Wilson's closures we still had a coal industry so at least some miners could move on. Thatcher just killed the industry off and put nothing in its place and instead was prepared to have taxpayers pay ex-miners benefit rather than provide any meaningful alternatives. You can close anything down if you offer people an alternative and you won't be vilified. If you just shut it and say get lost, tough luck you get the reaction you do to Thatcher.

It was his terms in government that started the preliminary surveys on the Selby coalfield and then in the early seventies put all the legals in place to purchase the land and lay the infrastructure that would service what was going to be a huge modern coal extraction site involving four linked pits and a distribution centre, it would basically feed the three main power stations along the M62 for several decades and remove our reliance on foreign oil after the 1973 Middle East embargo.

What they were doing throughout the 60s and 70s is closing dozens of the smaller pits that the NCB had inherited, the former privately owned operations that might fund a nice little lifestyle for a local owner but were at the end of their life or just hopelessly under-invested, pits like the one in the village that I lived in, and the one a mile and a half away, and instead investing millions into a modern industry that would serve the country's fuel needs for generations, with our oil and coal reserves the 1970s were very optimistic times.

As I have pointed out though, a country has to invest in its fuel extraction industries, the decision to buy the stuff elsewhere and damn the consequences was the moment we put ourselves at the mercy of "the market" and all its vagaries.

The Queen is in attendance. How much smaller do you reckon the security operation would be if you removed the threat of a relatively small number of protesters? Not enough to make a serious dent in the rumoured £10m cost IMO.

Not to mention the current Prime Minister and three former Prime Ministers.

I'm listening to LBC and they think the real costs will be around the 3-4 million mark not the rumoured 10 million.