British coal mining - what's the legacy?

Great Debates
1

I was curious about how people see the legacy of coal mining in Britain today, especially the 1980s strikes and closures.

I don’t know much detail about the topic and (not being a British citizen) I don’t have much emotional baggage one way or another. It seems like a rather complex topic, though. On the one hand, Thatcher certainly used unfair and obnoxious practices against the miners, is accused of destroying a generation of people, and was probably carrying on a personal vendetta. On the other hand, coal is generally seen as a blight that is “on its way out” worldwide and people are not clamoring to re-open the coal mines (or are they?)

So what’s the smart money on this issue?

2

I don’t have anything intelligent to say about British coal mining, or coal useage in general, but here in the US, I’m not so sure coal is on the way out. About 35% of our electricity comes from coal. Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration. That makes coal the single biggest source of electricty in this country.

3

TLDR: blame Scargill, not Thatcher.

It was Arthur Scargill who had the vendetta. Was he trying to defend miners’ jobs? Ostensibly, but Arthur Scargill tried to bring down the British Government by using the National Union of Mineworkers, repeating what happened in the early 70s. He openly admitted this: in a speech in the Soviet Union he called her ‘Thatchler’ (he also called Reagan ‘Ray Gun’). At the time, anyone who wanted to be leader of the Trades Union Congress had to have a successful strike under their belt, and he had not. Thatcher foresaw Scargill’s actions and set into place a legal and logistical framework to withstand him. Stocks of coal were piled at the power stations and she essentially allowed the NUM to ruin itself. The tactics Thatcher used were fair and legal, voted through by Parliament. It didn’t help that Scargill tried to solicit money from Libya and had strong links with the Soviet Union. It also didn’t help that this was shortly after the Falklands War, so the Tories were very popular. Nor did Scargill saying that there was no such thing as an uneconomic pit. And the government were far more adept at keeping other unions out of the fray.

As a result of the strike, even more pits were closed than had originally been planned. Scargill blundered strategically and tactically. It was he who destroyed the miners’ communities.

4

Sorry for the hijack. Coal use is declining over the past few years in the US: File:US Electrical Generation 1949-2011.png - Wikipedia. Given the level of destruction at every point in the coal value chain, it’s likely the decline will continue. In light of that, I think it’s fair to say “coal is on the way out” in the US.

5

It’s-still-being-used-and-still-a-necessity should be the answer, not just for Britain. If you don’t want your electricity to be coal-generated, then worry about building without concrete, and possibly steel.

6

There’s a lot of truth in what you say, probably Scargill’s biggest blunder is that there was no ballot for a general strike. He shattered any democratic credibility he may have had at that point.

7

The methods used by Thatcher were legal in that they went through parliament - some of the restrictions anyway. In other words they had to pass laws to make them legal. You can make anything legal by putting stuff through your legislature.

The cost of bringing coal out has been subsidised around the world for many, many decades in most nations during that time since it was seen as a critical strategic industry - remember what happened to Russia when their miners went out in support of Yeltsin?

The problem is that such industrial power then carries with it a great deal of responsibility and the fact is that were had pretty much run into a situation where the UK miners were deciding which governments they approved of, and which they didn’t - it is not difficult to imagine how this was seen in many quarters as a threat to our democracy. Arthur Scargill was seen as the unacceptable face of that power.

In order to destroy this power there were legal means, but I wonder if warrantless wire tapping was legal, or the many subsequent arrests that followed during various gatherings, where appeals overturned many convictions.

We also had extremely serious media manipulations over events at these gatherings, the most notable one was at Orgreave coke works where BBC reports showed footage of miners attacking the police without provocation - of course that footage had been edited - the miners actually ran from the police who had charged them with horses and a body of officers. Those miners ran off until they came to a dry stone wall, which was then picked up and thrown at the police in an attempt to defend themselves. The police retreated before charging again. BBC did make an unreserved apology for the editing many years later. You can multiply that propaganda by several thousand times by the rest of the media throughout the miners strike and in every national industrial dispute since then.

Personally I saw miners wives attacked by police with batons, despite there being no emergency that warranted such an assault, and make no mistake, assault it was.

There were countless such incidents, police officers removing their epaulette numbers so they could not be held to account. I also know, personally a number of former soldiers who were dressed up as police officers - (don’t ask me to name them I won’t) I wonder how the prospect martial law would have gone down with the public?

I regret that some of this might seem like tin-foil hat CT material, I also can understand why it was all done.

Thing is, you still must remember that it was seen as a defence of our national democracy, and in such a circumstance the means used to achieve it were unimportant to those in administration.

The result is that this was seen as a keystone of trade union power, by pulling it away the whole façade of union muscle was seriously damaged, and this was followed up by anti trade union legislation - the unions have been hobbled, for good or bad. This is probably the main long term legacy of that industrial dispute.

In the shorter term, we are no paying to import subsidised coal from other countries -it isn’t saving us any money. Coal was integrated into whole system of rail, electricity generation, steel making etc. and these industries were sited in proximity to improve logistics. The removal of a major part of that has been extremely damaging to those other industries - all are either costing us a lot more, or have declined drastically - you might argue that the whole set up of state control was no longer viable anyway.

Part of the destruction of the unions was to break up these formerly state controlled industries and sell them off in much smaller pieces. We now have far fewer people working in any of those industries, railways receive greater state support under private ownership than they did under the national BR board,

The energy companies have partly reintegrated themselves in such a way that there are 6 big players who generate, transmit and distribute power - however their system of inter-charging different arms of the same organisation based upon their function means that they have an effective monopoly whose accounts are incredibly difficult to work out, suspicions are that the combined profits for those companies is not the 5% they claim, but across the industry as a whole its upwards of25%. There is more than a little suspicion that this industry is operating as a cartel (I have been deliberately conservative on that figure - mush higher ones are in circulation)

So we a paying more for everything, and the owners are usually foreign multinationals.

Socially the effects in the various mining communities have been mostly disastrous, think of any one-industry town where the company closes down and you can imagine - crime has climbed dramatically and whole regions are blighted with unemployment. It has also made the divide between the South East of the country and everywhere else much greater.

It is pretty much the London-centric polices of successive administrations that have led to calls for independence by Scotland and Wales - to such an extent that Scotland is going to have a vote whether to leave the Union - in short, Thatcher - that great national patriot - has actually done more to break up the United Kingdom than the Spanish, French or the Germans - I hope her supporters understand that.

The reduction of the emission of greenhouse gases was and continues to be a smokescreen, physically and metaphorically, it just simply would not do to admit that somehow a better outcome might have been achieved, and no Conservative politician will admit the truth, that the miner strike was pretty much a war against one section of the workforce - which it was, and probably was necessary too.

Folks who live in the South East pretty much cannot see what really happened, or don’t want to admit to themselves the reality of those unpleasant means to achieve a certain end.

8

And this is why relying on Wikipedia gives a skewed perspective, and can be silly at times.

I am a technology lead consultant in the fossil and renewable energy industry with about 25 years of experience. Coal is seeing a short-term decrease due to cheap natural gas from fracking, a “perfect storm” of 3 key environmental legislative drives, and a desire for utilities to get rid of their oldest and most costly coal plants which cannot meet emissions.

It’s likely the decline will not continue due to no significant legislative efforts past 2015 envisioned, a slow increase in natural gas prices, and no movement on “new nuclear”. Coal will likely stabilize at 30-35% of electricity generation, and then barring a nuclear resurgence may climb to 35-40% again by 2035-2045.

9

Bolded part mine, and I’m not sure what you mean by that at all. It doesn’t sound like you’re questioning the wikipedia cite, and don’t think that it is silly per se, but rather my extrapolation from it. Given that we’re in the beginnings of seeing CO2 regulated as a pollutant, I think not foreseeing any significant legislative efforts past 2015 is improbable. But politics is hard to predict, and if there isn’t any regulatory change, you’re probably right. But given how boned we all are if we don’t aggressively move off coal, I certainly hope you’re not.

10

Can you provide a cite for that last part? The only statistics I can find are well out of date but say that coal was 20% cheaper in 1995.

BTW the UK taxpayer still subsidised coal production by £72M in 2012

11

Do you actually believe that coal we are importing is being given to us for free?

Of course we are paying for it.
How hard is it to find a cite on the amount being imported? 10 seconds got me this

All the money spent importing that coal is a loss to our economy - whilst the money paid for stuff we used to mine went into local economies. For every pound spent importing coal, that another one we take out of our taxation due to the loss of employment and industrial activity.

12

No - I asked about the last part, not the first. The only stats I could find were that coal was 20% cheaper in 1995 than before.

And really, it doesn’t matter if foreign coal is being subsidised by foreign governments - it’s the price we pay that matters. And if it’s cheaper than subsidising our coalfields, then why not take advantage of their largesse? Or do you, like Scargill, believe that there’s no such thing as an uneconomic coalfield?

13

I am confused. Is mining coal in England economical or not? My understanding is that :
-English mines are very deep
-the veins are small
It either makes sense to mine cola or not-is imported coal cheaper because of subsidies?

14

CO2 regulation is cool and all, but we as a nation have no plan to significantly replace coal, and no political will to do it. Not only does coal provide more than a third of the overall generation, it provides a greater portion of the baseload generation. Nuclear plants can do that (provided we built a bunch more) and gas turbines are getting better at it, but right now we can’t shut down the coal plants.

15

I don’t think anyone’s suggesting that we’re going to close down all the coal plants right now. What I am saying is that we’re likely to see a long and gradual decline in the use of coal - both in absolute numbers and in percentage of our total power generation - over the next few decades.

16

Legacy? The most immediate being I’m probably of the last generation of kids who grew up without grandfathers, dead by 60 from silica dust on their lungs, the waterways around mining areas are filled with arsenic and other heavy metal and require constant, massive investment to keep them remotely pollution-free, the environment is still scarred from open cast mining and slagheaps, the refuse from mines churned up from the bowels of the Earth and piled sky-high, and the memorials to the 350 men and boys killed in an instant continue to rust.

It’s no coincidence that middle class Guardianistas seem to pine the hardest for the glory-days of the pits. Working class lads like me from the Lancashire coal fields would have been shoved down them, extracting the black stuff and working ourselves into an early grave, whilst their own kids would have been packed off to university. Mining communities were black holes of ambition, and partly still are, as a holdover from the industry today. Blame Thatcher all you want, but the attitude of the North to any sort of work that isn’t inextricably linked to heavy industry or working with your hands is at least as responsible for the North lagging behind the South as she was (incidentally — Labour closed more mines than Thatcher, for all the attention that’s lavished on her over this issue).

Not all of us who grew up in the North look back as fondly on the mining industry as you do, casdave.

17

Those pits were not remembered too fondly for their effects on local populations but you need to look into why all these small towns and villages were so dependent upon coal to understand why the closures were so devastating.

It was a long standing policy that planning permissions would not be granted to any significant industrial undertaking in any coal mining village. The reason was simple enough, it was well known that if there had been any alternative employment, then workers would choose to work in above ground industries rather than down the pit, so the policy of ensuring these were one industry towns was carried out to ensure a supply of workers.

Those pit towns also tend to have, and largely still do, poor road and rail links - so when the one industry shuts down then these communities were left devastated.

I still think that the miners union had to be crushed for reasons of democracy, I remember enough WW2 and National Service vets who would comment that they wondered what they had been fighting for when a group or unelected unaccountable workers could change governments upon a whim.

It wasn’t so much the closure of the pits, its what was done afterward - which was nothing. These places were entitled to regional development grants from Europe, but the UK government refused to accept this support because there were conditions upon what the money could be used for and how it would be accounted for in national budgets. This support was denied by our own governments (note the plural) for decades who all wanted to spend it on their own little pet projects and then call it national spending - as if the money and the initiative had come from them, instead of the development funds of Europe.

Eventually our own administration relented and allowed these grants to be used - all you need do is look at other regions in Europe that were supported in this way and see the difference - those former coal mining areas might have had a much less traumatic time. This was all far too little and far too late.

We can easily trade pit tragedies, the Oaks pit isn’t at all far from me and no doubt someone from Wales could outdo that. This is not just a reflection about the dangers of coal mining, its also about the contempt for the lives of the lower orders that our glorious leaders had. If you look at the truly appalling infant mortality rates prior to around the 1920’s from malnourishment, unsanitary housing, unfit water etc, and the death rate of up to 33% and its obvious that more children were dying of easily preventable causes every week than ever were lost in one pit disaster.

They shut the pits and then simply abandoned those populations, had that work been replaced, had there been any alternative then I think many former miners would say good riddance to the coal mines.

When you look at the way Northern towns have been treated, with denials of redevelopment, concentrating everything into financial services in the South East you only need wait too see what will happen - we are living with the effects of that now.

This is symptomatic of the view that many Conservatives still take of the North

18

Same for me, My dad was down the pit at 14 and held a lifelong antipathy for it. I grew up in the north-east and the one thing that stands out from the Thatcher era was the sense of hope in the 90% of communities that didn’t revolve around coal.

New tech, manufacturing and retail along with urban regeneration, it was an attempt at a leap into the 21st century, imperfect as it was.

I don’t know too many people who now lament the closing of pits.

19

There is a whole mythology built up by the left wing in the UK about Thatcher and the mining industry

She did anticipate Scargill and prepare, however more mines were closed in the 10 years before and the 10 years after than were closed during her time in office

Mining had been in decline since the 50’s

Some will still insist it was all her fault though because she stood up to the Unions demands

20

The mines that closed prior to Thatcher were pretty much worked out, the mines that closed after her did so because the coal supply contracts that tied the generators to those mines finally reached the end of their terms - that’s when we got the ‘dash for gas’.

The ending of those contracts was certain, there was never going to be a re-negotiation of them at any cost, not after all the industrial strife, so yes, Thatcher’s strategy did close those pits all those years after her departure but it was not possible to break the binding terms of those contracts at the time.