Your Memories of the Miner's Strike

[xenia]

Thatcher was right. Scargill was using the miners for his own political reasons. He was funded by Gaddafi and the Russians.

 

Th pits were churning out coal that no one wanted. Pits were uneconomical, why should they be subsidised?

[cuttsie]

Thatcher was right. Scargill was using the miners for his own political reasons. He was funded by Gaddafi and the Russians.

 

Th pits were churning out coal that no one wanted. Pits were uneconomical, why should they be subsidised?

Thatcher was useing Scargill more like .He was [is] that thick he never new.

P.S. They both ended up filthy rich so no differance in the end.

The pits were not uneconomical they had indeed produced record results.

Edited October 25, 2011 by cuttsie

[911wasalie]

Thatcher and her cohorts did there job they broke the working class and we are now seeing the outcome.

Millions out of work due to closing our heavy industries especially in places like Sheffield.

The Industries in Question have been relocated abroad so as to take advantage of the cheap labour some times this work is even done by kids.

The situation that we are now left with is that working people are turning against each other and forgetting who the real culprits are for the situation that we are now in.

 

Agree with every word, Thatcher should have been arrested.

 

I lived in a small town called Wivenhoe on the river Colne in N.E. Essex, a town of solid Tories. The Thatcher gang started importing coal from Poland to a tiny harbour across the river and miners from Kent would come up and try to hinder the process. The local police would drive down towards Kent and arrest the miners on the road. That of course even in Thatchers Britain was against the law.

 

That small town became covered in coal dust and almost to a man the town turned Lib Dem.

[willo]

Thatcher was right. Scargill was using the miners for his own political reasons. He was funded by Gaddafi and the Russians.

 

Th pits were churning out coal that no one wanted. Pits were uneconomical, why should they be subsidised?

 

the only thing thatcher was right about was not having a european superstate [with us included in it], she apparantly had a fear of the NUM causing her grief as they were credited doing to her predecessor [whom she stabbed in the back] 1 ted heath.as for scargil, if he had called a ballot & made the whole thing legal ,maybe we'd still have a mining industry now! as regards subsidising the coal industry, the coal industry was owned by the people of this country & not mrs thatcher,home produced coal was used in power stations [which at the time were also nationalised industries] the idea being that this country was self sufficient.during my time in the mines [early to mid 70s] we were told at college that there was enough coal of the highest grade in yorkshire alone to power the country for 700 years still unmined, the coal we were getting at Treton was so good it had to be mixed with slack [rubbish] or it would burn the grates out in the power stations, the price per tonne [1974] to the power stations £ 6 , at the same time the government were importing coal from poland £14 per ton that had to come to our pit to be mixed with our [yorkshire coal] before it would burn properly in the power stations.The miners at the time were 14th in the national pay scale & imho miners have never been treated fairly by any government of this country.as for the stockpiles of coal that you say no body wanted/needed this was a move by the government to switch to oil & gas fired power stations, thus alleviating the dependency on coal. fast forward to the present day & look at the state we're in now, extortionate fuel bills,our armed forces fighting in the middle east [or where ever there might be oil] perhaps if the main protagonists of the miners strike [thatcher/scargill]had been more sensible we would still be self sufficient in the energy game.P.S. the british empire was built on King Coal.

[DerbyTup]

My Dad and brother were both NCB workers, my Dad hated Arthur Scargill but my brother was a follower of him. It caused a lot of upset in our house, and when the strike was over, as Arthur said, most pits were closed and my brother lost his job. My Dad was an engineer and near retirement so he wasn't affected as much. I lived in Eckington, and it ripped the heart out of that community.

 

Also lived in Eckington, also the son of a coal miner. Although our old fella had retired, crippled from years of working in the mine, by the time of this strike.

 

He had no time for Scargill anyhow and was not a bloke to miss a day's work for any reason - so he wouldn't have wanted to go on strike.

 

Eckington of course used to have its own mine at one time - but many of the miners were bussed to other mines around the area. When those mines closed it did have a very negative effect on those communities and even today you can still notice the impact of it.

 

My memories of the miner's strike was seeing miners bussed to work in specially hired coaches which had the windows covered in mesh and in some cases the coach companies even had their company name painted over in order to prevent repurcussions. The buses were not full of miners like the normal pit buses used to be - but usually just a handful of miners, not keen to show their faces at the bus window for fear of reprisals.

 

I remember also hearing about striking miners dropping concrete posts off a bridge onto vehicles that were taking miners to work. I think there was an incident not far from Eckington where someone got badly injured or killed as a result.

 

I remember one of the newspapers describing the miners as "lions led by donkeys" - and that stuck with me eversince.

 

The miners were generally salt of the earth folk who were mislead by more than one party, including Scargill. They had an expectation that work would always be there, on their doorstep, and when that changed it ruined many, many lives.

[xenia]

Straightforward opinions have been voiced about the rights and wrongs of this issue. I support what Thatcher did. However I cannot understand why clean coal technology has not been introduced. The NUM under Scargill were a political force determined to undermine the democratic process.They were the shock troops of the union movement, they had to be beaten.

[alex3659]

Thatcher was right. Scargill was using the miners for his own political reasons. He was funded by Gaddafi and the Russians.

 

Th pits were churning out coal that no one wanted. Pits were uneconomical, why should they be subsidised?

 

If no one wanted the coal why did we import coal from other countries?.

The stockpiles of coal built up By the Thatcher government were to prevent power cuts in the strike Thatcher was planning in revenge against the miners.

[willo]

Straightforward opinions have been voiced about the rights and wrongs of this issue. I support what Thatcher did. However I cannot understand why clean coal technology has not been introduced. The NUM under Scargill were a political force determined to undermine the democratic process.They were the shock troops of the union movement, they had to be beaten.

 

please read this--http://www.socialismtoday.org/81/miners.html

[rightlass]

I can remember police stopping cars at Atco traffic lights in Eckington, to check if any picketers were on board.

Edited October 27, 2011 by rightlass

[chrishall]

Scargill made the mistake of announcing he would bring down the Establishment, a declaration of war that the powers that be took seriously and made preparations, but he underestimated the power and guile of the Establishment who proceeded to take away his power base which was the coal industry. They were able to do this because of North Sea oil and gas plus an organised police force and a compliant press at their disposal. Predictable outcome really, whether you agree with Scargill or not he wasn't a good enough commander of his troops to ensure victory.

 

As to why coal isn't widely used now is probably down to the fact that Scargill is President of the NUM for life and can't be voted out (as I understand it) so when he has departed this mortal coil the way will be open to build a new more efficient coal industry without too much interference.

 

That's my view on it anyway.

Edited October 27, 2011 by chrishall