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.

Dally wrote:Thought this article from Sunday's Mail was good and best I've seen in the Press: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/artic ... ilure.html That's one of the worst articles I've seen about anything. No surprise you like it.

Dally wrote:Thought this article from Sunday's Mail was good and best I've seen in the Press: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/artic ... ilure.html That's one of the worst articles I've seen about anything. No surprise you like it.

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 bastardhood.
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.