Mrs FD grew up in the thick of some of the shittiest areas during the miners strike.
Just lets say that the miners were not all sweetness and light.
Her Mum the post office which would get attacked a number of times, her Dad was a fireman and got attacked on the job. She would be beaten up at school.
Her Dad has said many a time that it wasnt just the Police that started the violence
if they were they wouldn’t have required heavy subsidisation, and would have continued working.
A doctorate student at Aberystwyth university was working on the economics of British coal at the time. British coal wasn't the only subsidised coal and imported coal came from countries selling a "cash crop" cheap to prop up their economies and currencies. It wasn't fair competition. You then have the fact that the main buyer was a national monopoly, the CEGB. The whole not competetive argument was a fudge from a government which was setting prices for both supplier and buyer. And the alternative, gas, and its powerful lobby of private oil majors dear to the conservatives.
When the economics of the mining regions and beyond was considered the pits were profitable in that the GDP they generated added far more to the the government tax take than the cost of the subsidies. Ski resorts in France are subsidised because of the wealth they bring to the whole region for example.
The doctorate student (ironically a Saudi ambassador's son) was adamant that the mines were a major positive contribution to the British economy.
Just lets say that the miners were not all sweetness and light.
I don't think anyones under any illusions about that. Anyone who's ever worked in a heavily unionised workplace will have met their fair share of pound-shop Scargills, who are permanently aggressively confrontational and seem to see themselves as some kind of revolutionaries
You had two sides led by a pair of bellicose belligerent nutters, completely unprepared to compromise and who saw themselves as being on some sort of life or death mission for the soul of the country. One had a politicised state militia on their side, the other a ready supply of people well and truly up for a ruck and probably harboured ambitions of bringing down the government.
Meanwhile the vast majority of the miners were just normal people who quite fancied having a job so they could carry on leading normal lives. They just became collateral damage
Union officials are just people, i've seen both sides, through my apprenticeship and industrial days the AEEU/Amicus/Unite had decent shop stewards where i worked, had a good relationship with the management and all was well, later in life when i was non-industrial i just witnessed too many wasters in union positions protecting each other, and the reason i left the union.
Our industry was decimated as well unfortunately, outsourced or sent abroad, then we wonder why we have no skilled workers and why outsource so much.
Norman Tebbit summed up the casually callous attitude of the government by telling people to ‘get on their bikes’.
However, as a former RAF brat, I find the continued reaction to Tebbits comment a bit naive. We moved regularly for my primary school years. My dad had a huge struggle to find work when he left the RAF in the winter of discontent. Lots of people move to find work, and have done for centuries. We relocated when I was made redundant in 2000.
Of course, the fallacy is that working class people DID move to be where the work is. They always have, always will because they have no choice. Even in the first two episodes of this documentary there were several references to people who'd only just moved into the area - miners moved from pit to pit, and pits didn't stay productive for ever. I had lost touch with many of my friends within a few years of leaving school in the 80s because so many of us moved to different parts of the UK.
But, to be told 'get on your bike' by a Tory minister, even one who claimed working class roots*, came across as thinking that the working classes were indolent slobs. If he'd had any working class roots he'd have known how utterly stupid that statement was.
* working for the FT at 16, being a pilot shortly after. I'm unable to find out what his parents did with a very quick google. I shall carry on looking! And a personal connection - he used to be seen in the pub up the road , when I lived on Dartmoor. I didn't drink in that pub, it was too posh.
I wonder how the payslip waving police feel now that they too have been completely done over by the Tories?
I wonder how the payslip waving police feel now that they too have been completely done over by the Tories?
All living in their multimillion pound apartments in Spain according to here.
Of course, the fallacy is that working class people DID move to be where the work is.
Yup loads did and you’re right miners at one time often moved about. A few families where I lived move to Aus post strike, within a year.
This is one of those bits of History if you weren't in it best to not proffer opinion.
It was also ship building, steel, they shut Consett steel works and it was profitable, they pulled the rug from under Sunderland Ship builders, the revenge extended in many directions.
The Strike was part of a long like of historical "adjustments" transportation, enclosures act, thw Plantations, Highland clearances, The luddites, the Industrial revolution, post WW1 the working class felt they were owed better but never got it, WW2 required a much more delicate approach to conscription, training and combat, then Churchill lost, the NHS was born, Council housing kicked off, and the working class got some power and control mainly via Unions and Labour governments, then came Thatcherism probably the best long con (outside the US) of the working class ever and as they say the rest is History. I was an AUEW member for 25 years of my working life, i went from the tools to management and remained a member. As a Union they contributed more to my pay and conditions than i ever paid in subs.
This was shown last night on BBC Scotland.
Tells the story of Polmaise Colliery, Fallin. First pit out and the last pit back.
Well worth a watch.
Strike! The Village That Fought Back
Forty years after the miners’ strike, this documentary tells the story of Polmaise Colliery, whose workers were the first to walk out and the last to go back to work. Hearing from miners who were on the frontline, and family members and journalists who covered the strike, this documentary reveals the inside story of the miners who went on strike for 56 weeks to save the last village pit in Scotland.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001xrwh/strike-the-village-that-fought-back
