22 Years on,who remembers the miner,s strike?

[London Calling]

Supported the Miners in Nottinghamshire, now that was fun. The only other Southern accents in Nottinghamshire were coppers and a few Kent miners, who of course didn't know me.

Went up to Wakefield in 1986 - the heart of the English coal mining area. Most of my mates or their relatives were miners or ex-miners.

One of my jobs up there was putting forward the economic and social case for keeping the mines open.

Kellingley - was one of the pits the tories had put forward as an costly inefficient pit.

Nice to know the private sector see it as a profit making colliery.
LC

 

[Leekbrookgull]

Gully,spot-on.

 

[Trish]

The 1972 and 1974 miners' strikes were probably more noticed in Sussex because of their real impact on power supplies.

Scheduled power cuts (on a pre-planned, area-by-area basis) forced people to abandon plans to spend evenings at home in front of the television and go instead to pubs half a mile away.

Marvellous times.

I don't remember getting down to a pub because I had a young family at the time. We had to arrange mealtimes around the power cuts. I do remember there was a power cut during a children's Halloween party and it all turned out a great success.

 

[Kent Seagull]

One of my jobs is to buy coal for the Kentt & East Sussex Steam Railway. It saddens me that I have to import coal from Russia which is of a better quality than British and about £10 per tonne cheaper. The most suitable British coal available is Scottish open cast which is of a very variable quality and is often very poor, for which I have to pay more. It's quite frankly ridiculous given that the UK has ample high quality coal, if only the pits were still open to mine it. Did you know there are only 8 deep mines still working in Britain? Tower (South Wales), Rossington, (Yorks), Thoresby, (Notts), Daw Mill (West Midlands), Kellingly (Yorks), Harworth (Doncaster), Maltby (Yorks) and Welbeck (Notts).

Even Scargill got the sheer amount of closures wrong, and the Tories said he was lying! After the damage the Tories did to the mining and Railway industries, not to mention 3 million on the dole, I'll never ever vote for them.

 

[Kent Seagull]

Kent still has Hops

Unfortunately they sell them to Shephard Neame to turn into ditchwater! Don't they know that they could make beer from them!

 

[Gully]

One of the arguments of the Tory Govt was that you could import brown Polish coal for something like £10 a tonne cheaper than it cost to mine it in the UK. That was the crux of their argument for closing down the mines, there was and still is coal under this country it is just expensive to dig up. What they forgot to calculate was the social damage caused by the closure of the mines, I think the cost was far greater than the tenner a tonne saved by importing.

Flawed economics, you decide.

 

[Tom Hark Preston Park]

Every policeman in the South had a new and expensive VCR called 'Arthur' - bought and paid for on the strength of overtime payments made by Maggie bussing 'em up to Yorkshire to defeat 'the enemy within'. Disgusting scenes.

 

[Deleted User X18H]

Orgreave fascinating..............documentary fantastic social document

 

[Skintagain 1983]

I was a member of the Labour Party Young Socialists in Dundee and then Edinburgh at the time and we spent many hours collecting / organising support for the Fife miners and Lothian miners. 2 mates of mine worked in pits in mid Lothian and West Lothian. I was at a mass rally at Cockenzie Power station near Edinburgh, and also invited to the Miners Welfare in Oakley, Fife.

I also (vaguely - I was a bit tipsy) remember attending a meeting of Lewes Labour Party to drum up some support on a visit home.

Seems a long time ago...

 

[Yorkie]

Orgreave fascinating..............documentary fantastic social document

Orgreave - just around the corner from my mother in law's house.
Our vicar made up food parcels every week.

 

[A Melbourne Albion Supporter]

I assume that most of the mines are now closed? So 25 years on is the country better off with the mines closed?

Here there is enough room to have open cut mines and there are very few mining accident's. Incidently the average miner in the NT gets 90k per year, which is twice the yealy wage.

 

[Kent Seagull]

I assume that most of the mines are now closed? So 25 years on is the country better off with the mines closed?

Here there is enough room to have open cut mines and there are very few mining accident's. Incidently the average miner in the NT gets 90k per year, which is twice the yealy wage.

See my post above, only 8 deep mines remain in use.

 

[Norman Baker suck my lozenge]

I remember most of the old bill paid of their mortgages in about 6 months.

 

[Pavilionaire]

The benefit for Britain was that when the rest of Europe sank into recession in the early 90's we were to some extent immune and therefore recovered earlier.

I think you'll find that 1990-1992 was the worst UK recession in the last 25 years, so I don't know where this "immune" idea comes from.

 

[Seagull over SW France]

I was one of the old bill from Sussex who went up there (based in Grantham),have to say,a lot of my colleagues bought more than VCRs based on the money we were paid,but being perfectly honest the trouble really only occured when the tabloid press turned up and skirmishes were orchestrated...........played a lot of footie against the pickets until the shifts changed over,then a bit of argie bargie till they went in.....unless Scargill turned up!!