miners strike 1984-lessons to be learnt.

[borders]

Surely no one is seriously comparing the miners strike to postal workers. Oranges and apples. If theres anything to be learnt from it, it failed miserably and probably damaged unions politically ever since.

have you read all the posts ?, obviously not judging by this post . in my 2nd post i said it was not RM related , but that i was interested in this piece of history and did anyone have any stories. have you any stories about the miners lifes around that time, if not then clear off.

[johnsouthwales]

can't seem to find any other links to stories, besides the bbc link. there's not much in my town search. been doing my project so haven't had much time.

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/3431371.stm

[Night Tonic]

Surely no one is seriously comparing the miners strike to postal workers. Oranges and apples. If theres anything to be learnt from it, it failed miserably and probably damaged unions politically ever since.

have you read all the posts ?, obviously not judging by this post . in my 2nd post i said it was not RM related , but that i was interested in this piece of history and did anyone have any stories. have you any stories about the miners lifes around that time, if not then clear off.

And there was my answer, if you read.

"It failed miserably and probably damaged unions politically ever since"

[johnsouthwales]

http://www.museumwales.ac.uk/media/7/5/ ... Strike.pdf" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

http://www.hartlepoolmail.co.uk/news/Mi ... 5052198.jp" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Those under 40 will find it hard to understand how society was polarised and how many things changed as a result of the year long miners strike.

[johnsouthwales]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009 ... ers-strike" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

http://www.thisisnottingham.co.uk/strike" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

http://www.workersliberty.org/story/200 ... ory-strike" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

http://www.eastwoodadvertiser.co.uk/154 ... 5113742.jp" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/p ... 847315.ece" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/miner ... -23213505/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

article.wn.com/view/2009/03/16/How_the_miners_strike_taught_me_to_believe_in_impossible_thi/

http://www.cumnockchronicle.com/articles/4/13930" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

http://www.dinningtontoday.co.uk/miners-strike" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[BELIAL]

No Stories then!

Makes you wonder if folks are capable of any independent thought anymore. Simplistic at best moving on to superficial sound bite but naive in the extreme

[borders]

Surely no one is seriously comparing the miners strike to postal workers. Oranges and apples. If theres anything to be learnt from it, it failed miserably and probably damaged unions politically ever since.

have you read all the posts ?, obviously not judging by this post . in my 2nd post i said it was not RM related , but that i was interested in this piece of history and did anyone have any stories. have you any stories about the miners lifes around that time, if not then clear off.

And there was my answer, if you read.

"It failed miserably and probably damaged unions politically ever since"

apart from stating the bleedin obvious-- "It failed miserably " , do you have any stories ????

[borders]

cheers John , i am working my way through them , very interesting.

[borders]

Miners' Strike: "We have had a credit crunch for a quarter of a century"


STILL ANGRY: David Guy


12 March 2009
By Paul Watson


THERE were 170 pits in the country employing more than 200,000 men at the start of the Miners' Strike.

The North-East region accounted for 23,000 of them – a total only surpassed by the mining heartlands of Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire.

Today only five deep pits remain open – but nothing north of Yorkshire.

Almost 4,000 miners lost their jobs when the pits at Easington and Horden and the mothballed Blackhall Colliery closed almost a decade after the 1984 dispute.

The coal industry was privatised in December 1994 to create RJB Mining, now known as UK Coal.

The closure of Northumberland's Ellington Colliery in early 2005, was the final nail in the North-East mining industry's coffin.

David Guy, president of both the North East NUM and the Durham Miners Association, said Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's determination to "flatten the miners" has left a terrible legacy and called for her successors to be shown first hand the damage done.

He says bluntly: "I was in Easington earlier this week and drove along Seaside Lane.

"I think every Conservative MP should be paraded down that street to see exactly what state it is in and see the effects that the pit's closure had.

"Easington was laid to waste and has never recovered."

Mr Guy, who was a NUM branch official at Dawdon Colliery when the strike started, said he shudders when he hears talk of the current credit crunch and its effects on financial institutions.

He said: "Our mining communities have been in the grip of a credit crunch since they lost their collieriesand are still trying to recover. The current financial situation can only hinder that recovery.

"Government resources are being used to prop up the banking sector and it is communities like Easington that will be deprived of essential funding."

He maintains that what the NUM warned about a quarter of a century ago has proved to be true with the North Sea gas supplies almost gone and the country having to rely on imported coal.

He said: "The strike was about protecting jobs in mining communities.
"There was very little alternative employment at the time available to miners and their families.

[borders]

i have been reading about the Ridley Report , seems the Tories were intent on taking on a big union at the time and they drew up plans to do this.

[borders]

Britain: The Ridley Report. How the Tories planned to take on the miners and the working class
By Anthony Healy
Wednesday, 25 February 2009
Today, almost 25 years since the miners’ strike began, the industry has been decimated, with only a few thousand jobs left. The proud traditions remain as the Durham Miner’s Gala demonstrates each year, and many miners have taken their fighting traditions into the wider labour movement. But many of the pit villages are crumbling and the social effects may never be completely overcome, on the basis of capitalism.


The attacks on the mining communities in Britain was a deliberately worked out plan to smash the most militant section of the labour movement. Photo by nicksarebi on Flickr. In parts of South East Northumberland, Durham and other former mining areas there are a series of landscaped country parks, with lakes populated by ducks, the odd swan and occasionally a pit wheel or a winding house that houses a heritage museum or a craft shop. This, and the big billboards with the European Social Fund logo and reference to ‘Coalfield Communities’, represent all that’s left of the mining industry in many areas.

But this destruction wasn’t an ‘act of god’ or some huge work of nature like the tsunami. This was a deliberately worked out plan. It was an attempt to take on and smash the most militant determined and class conscious section of the organised labour movement. And this was seen as a critically important task by the ruling class ad their chosen instrument, the Tory Party. It even had a name, the Ridley Report. Ironically Nicholas Ridley MP was the brother of Lord Ridley whose ancestral pile sits right on top of the Northumberland coalfield. Chain smoking Nicholas however never played in the pit row or had to go hungry when his dad was out of work. He was living it up down at Eton College with the other rich boys.

The Tories had been thrown out of office in 1974, during the big upturn in strike action which is best remembered for its miners’ strikes, with power cuts and the three day week. Ted Heath went to the polls asking the question: “who runs the country” and lost! The ‘70s were a period where wave after wave of industrial struggle forced the bourgeoisie to look to more extreme measures than ‘usual’, while at the same time the working class, the unions and the Labour Party began to move towards the left. Many workers began to draw revolutionary conclusions on the basis of their experience, while Brigadier Kitson began to plot a military coup to overthrow that well known revolutionary, Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson.

In 1974 the Tories drew up a plan as to how they might take on and defeat a major trade union in the public sector or nationalised industries as they were known at the time! Essentially it was a plan to launch a one-sided civil war against the working class. The plan was quite thorough, as became obvious when it was leaked to the Economist in 1978:

The government should, if possible, choose who and when to fight;
The plan grouped industries together based on an assessment of how easy they might be to beat;
Coal stocks were to be built up at the power stations;
Coal supplies should be arranged via non union foreign ports
Non union lorry drivers should be recruited;
Coal/oil dual fuel generators should be built at whatever cost;
The state must "cut off the money supply to the strikers and make the union finance them";
It was necessary to organise and equip a squad of mobile police, ready to use riot tactics to defeat pickets.
But Ridley was no maverick, and it’s quite clear he wasn’t acting alone. The plan was agreed by the Selsdon Group of right wing Tory MPs, a group that included among its number both Norman Tebbitt and Margaret Thatcher who was elected Tory leader in 1975.

Margaret Thatcher was eventually elected Prime Minister in 1979, by which time the right wing Labour government was utterly discredited and the leadership isolated within the active layers of the labour movement. Society was polarised, the Tories began to implement an economic strategy designed to make the economy ‘leaner and fitter’. In other words they sought to make the working class pay for the economic crisis that erupted between 1979 and1981. The Tories responded by slashing benefits to the old and the sick, cutting services and attempting to role back the welfare state, under the banner of “self reliance”, “choice” and “the free market”.

The Ridley Plan was central to this programme, the straightforward reason being that the organised Labour and trade union movement represented the biggest single obstacle to their plans. 10 million workers were organised in the TUC, potentially the most powerful force in British society, and the working class was moving to the left. The Tories had to risk a confrontation with the unions. The ruling class had no option, under conditions of capitalist crisis. Like the conditions we face today either the bosses or the workers had to pay. In the minds of Thatcher and her cronies there was ‘no alternative’.


The ferocity of the struggle that the miners were forced to wage to defend their jobs and communities however, revealed the limits of the Ridley plan and the trade union laws. Photo by nicksarebi on Flickr. It would be wrong however to look at the Ridley Plan in isolation. It was just one aspect of the Tories anti trade union onslaught. Even today, after almost 12 years of New Labour, the laws governing trade union activity in Britain remain the most repressive in any of the advanced capitalist countries. Restrictions on picketing, the huge bureaucratic process required to carry through strike ballots and the right of the government to “sequester” trade union assets were all imposed to try and cut across the potential for militant trade union struggle, which had been so much a feature of the 1970s.

The ferocity of the struggle that the miners were forced to wage to defend their jobs and communities however, revealed the limits of the Ridley plan and the trade union laws. Despite the plans that the Tory government had prepared and despite all of the legal mechanisms and ploys that they used to undermine the strike, the battle of pit closures lasted for almost a year. The level of support within the working class for the miners meant that millions of pounds were raised on the streets and from the labour movement to support the miners and their families. The Tories were forced to move the legal goal posts on several occasions to try and shackle the National Union of Mineworkers. Ultimately the failure of the trade union leadership and the Labour leadership around Neil Kinnock to offer full political and industrial support to the NUM was the decisive factor in the defeat of the strike.

The class struggle is a battle of living forces, involving real men and women. The strategy and tactics of the ruling class are an extremely important factor in the situation, but of even more importance is the role of the leadership of the working class. The Ridley Plan was just part of a drift under Thatcher towards authoritarian rule in Britain, authoritarian rule now considered necessary by the ruling class. This reflected the crisis of capitalism and the fact that the ruling class weren’t confident that they could rule through the ‘usual’ methods. Yet the strategy of the Labour Leaders was to adapt to the new conditions by appearing to be “reasonable and moderate”. Meanwhile the trade union leaders adopted a policy of ‘new realism’, essentially weakness and collaboration. Under these conditions the outcome was inevitable - more attacks on the working class and the poor, the weak and the old. At the same time however the ideas of Marxism began to gain ground and began to become a significant factor in British politics.

At the time of writing, the most likely outcome of the next general election is still that of a Tory victory, albeit with a smaller majority than that which seemed on the order of the day 12 months ago. The main lesson of the Ridley Plan for the labour movement and the politically active layers of the youth is that a Tory government would be forced to move against the working class, to deal with the crisis that the capitalist system clearly faces. In the dark corridors, and the city boardrooms similar plans will be being drawn up today. Our task has to be explain the threat that this poses and help arm the movement to fight and defeat the Tories.

[borders]

heres an interesting article from the daily mail, raises questions about Thatchers real motives ? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Lloyd is reluctant to present 'King Coal' as the Comeback Kid - Britain's current annual output of 16.7 million tons falls some way short of the 207.7 million tons we were producing in the mid-Fifties - but he has every confidence in its future as a vital part of our energy mix: 'Like it or not we can't afford not to use it.'

Given the vociferousness of the Green lobby, you might have expected Lloyd to be more circumspect.

'If it's a choice between keeping to carbon emissions targets or keeping the lights on, it's blindingly obvious which route any government will take.'

The problem is the looming crisis caused by the failure of successive governments to plan for our energy future. Within a few years, nine of the ten nuclear plants that supply 20 per cent of Britain's power will come to the end of their lives.

Since no serious provisions have been made to fill this 'energy gap', Lloyd expects there will be a messy compromise.

'I don't believe renewables will do it in time, and we can't afford to rely too much on Russian gas, so the pragmatic approach will be to keep the nuclear power stations open a bit longer - and to make up the rest with coal.'

Coal currently generates about 35 per cent of Britain's electricity, but the majority of it (60 per cent) has to be imported from Russia, South Africa and Colombia.

Britain has sufficient coal reserves for 200 years - 'we're an island of coal,' one miner tells me proudly - but the industry has contracted massively over the past 25 years. At the time of the miners' strike, there were 190,000 mine workers in Britain; currently there are just 5,500. Now that prices have risen, most of the viable pits that were closed could be making money. They could have been keeping men in employment and contributing immeasurably to our energy security.

Workers shore up the roof of the tunnel
Of the 1,000 coal mines that existed when the industry was nationalised in 1947, only a handful remain open. There are just six large-scale deep pits in Britain (all in Nottinghamshire, South Yorkshire or Warwickshire; none in the traditional mining heartland of the Welsh Valleys), a dozen small-scale privately run operations and 24 open-cast mines - or 'surface mines' as they're now known because it carries less of an eco-unfriendly stigma.

Just over half of Britain's coal production comes from these surface mines. The rest lies deep underground and can only be reached by existing mine shafts - building new ones would cost between £300 million and £500 million per shaft, and you need two per mine for safety, transport and ventilation.

This is why mothballed pits such as Harworth in north Nottinghamshire, a couple of hours' drive north of Daw Mill, could, if reopened, revive the fortunes of the British coal industry.

There is an estimated 40 million tons of coal yet to recover at Harworth, but the mine ceased production in 2006 because it was unprofitable.

A year later, coal prices quadrupled, turning the mine once again into an attractive proposition. However, to re-open it UK Coal will need to find £200 million - in the teeth of a recession - from City investors prepared to wait three years before they see any return.

Bringing an existing mine back into operation is an extremely complicated and labour-intensive process. The main expense at Harworth would be boring twin tunnels from the existing shaft bottom three horizontal miles to the coal seam.

The work would employ 150 people and take more than two years to complete. The two tunnelling machines required would cost about £2 million each. After that comes the preparing and equipping of the coal faces - about £25 million for the hydraulic roof supports, coal-cutting shearer, conveyor system and power packs.

On top of this are huge quantities of pipes and steel, cement and resins to protect the stability of the roadways for the life of the mine. Everything electrical that goes underground has to be cased in half-inch steel to be flame-proof.

In the fields near Harworth, willow is being grown for biofuel.

'Aye, that'll sort out the energy crisis,' jokes the pit manager, Geoff Mountain. A strapping, no-nonsense Yorkshireman, he looks every inch the old-school miner.

His father was a miner, as was his grandfather before him. When he went down his first pit in 1963, the industry employed half a million men and their families wanted for nothing: 'Coal, electrics, drinking water, play areas - it was all provided by the company,' he says.

'Every pit had its football, its cricket, its bars - and when

[BELIAL]

Yes but we could go nuclear, and wait for another Harrisburg,Three mile island ,Chernobyl and irradiate everything in a 2 000 mile radius. after all two heads are better than one. not sure about the superating vena cavas though or the puss filled lungs

[BELIAL]

Tower ,know that hillside

[johnsouthwales]

nowt to do with 1984..someone mentioned harrisburg. belial did lol... some strobe flashing

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYJICBRVNfY" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;