Labour Leadership watch

Scargill was no match for Thatcher. He did what he thought best, though whether anyone could have stopped Thatcher is unlikely.

I'd forgotten about the steelworkers Nightowl

Shame on me. Though the closing of the Ravencraig steelworks in 1992 (?) directly affected my relatives in Motherwell.

The problem with Thatcher was she deliberately moved the UK from a manufacturing based economy to a service-based one.

Anyway this twist to the Corbyn thread came about because someone insisted Cameron was another Thatcher, which is not the case.

rosesarered, you have no idea , you put forward the right wing excuse which few no longer believe except from the die hard right. When the cotton mills closed the communities didn't own their homes. In the eighties many in the coal villages did, this may come as a surprise to you but there was no demand from the middle classes for holiday homes in the South Wales valleys, so the miners couldn't pay the mortgage , couldn't sell , couldn't put food on the table because your government stopped benefit payments to the children. Was working in the pit hard ? Yes bloody hard, was being homeless , unemployed , degraded, mocked, robbed of dignity , hungry, an improvement ? No. Don't try to erase the brutality of the treatment of my family, friends and community with your - it's all in the past ,it isn't in the past , in South Wales and North of England unemployment is still high but the children of those miners who tried to keep work in the valleys are now called benefit scroungers. This is moving on and adapting ?

Popping in to look at GN quickly before travelling to hospital but I would like to put my two penneth in.

You will never win an argument whichever side of the divide you are on regarding the Miners Strike.

One side remembers going through the travesty of the Miners Strike and will hold that dear to their heart . There are areas of the country that have and always will be more union minded and have remained activist for their cause. This is a fact and we see this when looking at the political map. Durham will feel differently to Exeter. Doncaster will feel differently to Devizes etc.

The other side remember the 3 day week and Miners Strike for similar reasons. Their families had to see their fathers , sons, daughters come home after loosing their employment because businesses were closing too. The anger for those outside of the mining community was the fact they had not withdrew their labour to cause their loss of employment but they /we equally have a problem with regard to those times.

We were known as the 'Basket Case of Europe' due the the virtual blackmail of the Unions. Strikes were called for the most petty, stupid reasons but it showed the employer the 'power' of the Unions , whether or not they were asking for 75%, 50, wage increases and the like. The UK was brought to it's knees.

This argument will rage on for ever because people will have their own memories of how hard those days were. The miners did not/do not have a monopoly of suffering through job losses. It is always the case there was a 'forgotten workforce' that suffered because of it and probably in far higher numbers but they did not withdraw their labour they lost their jobs alongside the miners though because of it. Bitterness and bad memories do not belong to just one group of workers.

The miners strike as we all know caused bitterness , even between fathers and sons , any combination of family members had a very bad time of it and even to this day some have never reconciled due to the 'hatred' the miners strike caused them.

I am trying to say that whilst you have a background of coming from a mining community you can only recall the miners strike as you and yours found it. Others recall the Miners strike in the same way, as they found living with it. The problem arises when there is a perpetual feeling of hardship by one side that was and remains active, vocal having a shared platform to keep the grievances alive to date. There is no 'collective' group of those who had equal hardship , other than the ballot box I suppose.

For information my direct neighbours lost their job recently. They worked at Daw Mill Colliery so I am not coming at this from the view that if you didn't/don't have a connection/background of mining you should not speak on the subject. There was another aspect to the miners strike. At the time Scargill roused some mining communities to back him other mining communities did not agree with him. They were called 'scums' and they remember the whole affair in a different light to some. It was a horrible, vicious time and feelings will be rife on both sides of the argument.

You only have to look at the many sites and read the words of ex miners and you will see there was disagreement and whilst one considers Scargill a hero another considers Scargill a <@>#&=%>@

I think the point AB is trying to make Rosesarered is that yes, it may have been 30 years ago since all this happened, but the legacy lives on. The Welsh mining communities were especially badly hit as there was no thought given to encouraging other employment opportunities and there was no option but to go on benefits if you didn't want your families to starve, as indeed had happened in the early part of the century.

It's not too emotive a term to say that whole communities were destroyed financially and deliberately.

POGS there were indeed unions who needed to be curbed and were run by leaders who were totally greedy and confrontational. I think the car industry was a good example of this, and as a result much of the British car industry has passed into the hands of 'foreign' companies.

I don't recall the miners making unreasonable demands, except that they keep their jobs and the mines open. Sadly Scargil was a loud-mouthed bully, just like Thatcher and didn't get much sympathy or support from the general public.

I am of the opinion that unless you were part of the mining community and experienced the devastating trauma resulting as we can see from some of the posts, trauma which exists to this day, it is very difficult to argue that the closure of the mines was done for anything other than political motives. I do remember looking at both the steel works and mines whilst at university, and it was impossible to come to any other conclusion other than this black period was anything other than politically motivation.

They were called scabs Pogs, an old term used by trade unionists for strike breakers, because that's what they were. Not pleasant, but emotions ran high because whole lives were at stake. I still find it hard to forgive Nottinghamshire, they thought they were safe because their pits were profitable, but they paid the price in the end because most were closed anyway.

Anya, the general public are easily swayed by the right wing press. Scargill was a democratically elected lead of the Miners, and he knew what the Tory right wing were about, destroying communities just for the hell of it. Thatcher was a jumped up middle class snob, who introduced opportunist policies to win over the largely easily lead English, like council house sell off's, and shares in her newly privatized Utilities.

Thatcher has fundamentally destroyed Britain economy, morally, and socially, and Cameron is continuing what she started.

The rich and poor divide that Thatcher created, is getting wider by the day, and as a consequence of over 30 years of Thatcherism via stringent cuts in welfare, and now in work benefits, we have over a million people using food banks.

Re the miners strike, many commentators believe that the underlying agenda was not predominantly an economic one but a political one - to emasculate the unions by making an example of the NUM. Archive material reveals that, far from Mrs Thatcher's statements that the government could not involve itself in the dispute but must leave it to the NUM and NCB to fight it out between themselves, she was pulling the strings behind the scene.

Mrs Thatcher hated the unions.

As the Guardian reported in 2014:

"Reports of Thatcher’s infamous “enemy within” speech, delivered in private to the Conservative backbench 1922 committee the previous July, provoked widespread outrage, because she had appeared to say Britain’s mining communities were as dangerous an enemy as the Argentinian dictator General Galtieri had been over the Falklands.

Her own handwritten notes for that speech , released for the first time by the Margaret Thatcher Foundation on Friday, confirm her intentions
Now the draft transcripts of the discarded conference speech reveal that, far from regretting using the phrase “enemy within”, which she had only used previously used in private, the Tory prime minister was quite prepared, in the middle of the bitter 1984-85 miners’ strike, to repeat it publicly – and widen it to include nearly the whole of the Labour movement."

History shows that Scargill was right - her aim was to close the mines, and not solely for economic reasons. I never understood why Scargill did not hold a ballot because it would undoubtedly have shown support for a strike and in not doing so it allowed the right wing to claim that the strike was not legitimate.

The right wing always talks of unions "holding the country to ransom" but are noticeably silent when companies which, if asked to pay proper wages to, and provide proper working conditions for, their employees, threaten that they will leave the country and re-locate their businesses in parts of the world where employees have no choice but to be compliant.

I'm not arguing as 'part of the mining community' WW. By the time all this happened in the 80s our family had morphed into professionals - doctors, nurses, midwives mainly with a scattering of teachers and scientists, and moved away from mining areas.

I'm arguing this as someone with an understanding of mining communities and a politically aware professional. It was quite obviously a deliberate action on the part of Thatcher, partly to back up her 'Iron Lady' and 'this woman's not for turning' personna and partly from the same calculated streak which caused her to wage the Falklands War as a means to rescuing her flagging popularity, with no regard for the lives lost.

having alienated both left and right I'm off for a very strong caffeine fix

In Northumberland and Durham many miners bought their houses from the NCB, courtesy of Thatcher's right to buy. When the pits were closed there were no jobs in the villages, and nobody wanted to buy miners houses in those villages. Whole communities on the dole, and in many villages three generations on benefits.
Consett steelworks closed along with the pits in Durham. There are now lots of superstores where the steelworks was. Minimum wage jobs if you can get them.
There is coal there, otherwise UK Coal would not be wanting to open them up again; three applications within ten miles of where I live.
Thatcher destroyed much of the North East and Cameron and IDS now want to punish the unemployed even more.

I agree that we can't live and dwell in/on the past, but it's vitally important that we learn from it.

One mine closes in an area and this leaves unemployment , what some don't understand is the geography of the South Wales Valleys, one runs into another and they all lead to Cardiff and Newport , you passed one pit and within a few miles you passed another , the Rhondda had 53 working collieries in a 16 mile area at one time.

I fought throughout the strike, I saw police officers batter miners, I saw them burn ten pound notes in front of picket lines , wave building society brochures of houses for sale and mocked with - you are buying this for me, and holiday brochures . They were instructed to do this in places where the tv and press cameras would be positioned . MI5 bugged the phones of our leaders . Don't ever tell me it's in the past so move on.

I also want to add, how lovely some people in London were when I was there collecting money , it was in labour strong parts of London but those people were Londoners and I met such kindness from people who had never been to South Wales

Jen, private companies want to open up mining fields in Merthyr , they can sod off

Annie go girl!!!!

I do think there is some mixed thinking out mining. For example, the same people who think mining is so awful it should never be brought back castigate the unions who made sure it was up the highest safety levels they could.

I also think you might be surprised at modern day gold mining www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCDCQtcPeGU might give you some idea.

The issue with mining is that they need to be properly capitalised so that modern, safe methods can be used. It would be better that the unions did not have to force the owners - either the state or private - to do this - but that is what it needs.

As others have said, none of this is addresses the issue of what Thatcher did to the miners. She not only destroyed their industry for purely political reasons but left them to rot with no help in rebuilding their communities. It was pure spite.

about not out

Excellent post POGS.
AB, if private companies want to open up mining fields, that will create jobs for some.Wales did have it worse than anywhere else it's true, but remaining hate filled will not make anything better, far better to move on.
As POGS has said, we all have differing views of those times.
Tegan, you are so right,we can't dwell on the past, but learn from it.

Yes, but what I've learned from it is not to trust any Tory government or believe what I read in the press/see on the television.

Actually, I haven't read the newspapers for years, and have learned not to trust any government of whatever persuasion, they will not deliver on everything.Equally I have learned that all in life is not black or white.

.rosesarered,I am not hate filled, injustice always makes me angry and what happened to the miners was one of the greatest injustices in British history . Our own government lied and schemed , they destroyed the lives of decent , hard working people. Thatcher stocked up on coal from other countries, she didn't do one thing to replace the lost jobs , she left us destitute and now we are criticised again for so many being on unemployment and sickness benefit

What else could be expected from a PM who supported apartheid as did the present PM

My village suffered an horrific disaster in 1966, I watched my father cry, I watched fathers digging for their childrens bodies. Less than twenty years later I watched these men again cry

I am so proud of these men and so proud I am a related to them, I have their blood

whitewave, I have already been demonstrating against the opening of a coal field, looking back I seem to have spent my life demonstrating !

AB, was that Aberfan? Terrible tragedy,I remember it well. I was not directing the ' not remaining hate filled' at you but people in general, as it is better for the health not to nurse a grievance and let the past go.