Hatfield has last laugh on Thatcher.

epz_2

geoffky wrote: »

some of you remind me of the council house buyers of the times...thought they were tories because they had bought a council house.
.when in reality the tories are there to conserve the wealth and power of the elite....
they could not give a toss about mr and mrs average...anyone who thinks different is kidding themselves..

The fact is most left politicians(and people in general) are hypocrites, how many labour politicians that espouse the ideas of comprehensive education and healthcare yet send their families private.

The general theory of the right is to remove government form peoples lives and let them make their own decisions. When the government is less involved in peoples lives they make the decisions that best suits them.

IMHO brown has actively forced a great number of people onto benefits to try and build up labor constituency, much like maggie did with the council houses.

tuggy12

On the other hand let's have the pits reopened and bring back:

1) Pneumonoconiosis
2) Bronchitis
3) Emphysema
4) Hundreds of deaths each year.
5) Thousands of serious accidents each year.

Yes!!! let's have it back.

Julu

tuggy12 wrote: »

On the other hand let's have the pits reopened and bring back:

1) Pneumonoconiosis
2) Bronchitis
3) Emphysema
4) Hundreds of deaths each year.
5) Thousands of serious accidents each year.

Yes!!! let's have it back.

Nothing like being hundreds of feet under the earth for hours at a time, sweating buckets, working like a slave then looking forward to an early death!

Maggie did them a favour!

moggylover

Tribulation wrote: »

Wonders how much money has been spent since on benefits etc for the aftermath of the numerous communities that she completely destroyed.

Scargill was branded a nutter by the press. But looking back, I think almost every single thing he warned about came true.

I found it quite telling that the number of miners laid off when the pits closed closely resembles the number of long term unemployed in this Country;)

Maybe those who don't give a d*mn about the fact that a whole industry was decimated might mind a lot more if they looked at the false economy that was perpetrated in order to smash the unions. The total cost of unemployment in those areas (which mostly received precious little in the way of any investment afterwards and most of which have had very few available jobs at any time since) has probably run in to several million times more (especially when you take into account the poor health and the costs this produces and the increased crime....and so forth) than updating and continuing to run the mines would have done:rolleyes:

Course you don't mind folks, you were happy to spend your tax money for 20+ years so that maggie could destroy the unions! Only you do mind which is why there is so much bleating on about the cost to your own pocket of keeping the lazy so and sos that are long-term unemployed. Don't seem to be being lazy once there are jobs there for them though do they:D

But, of course, I shall be shouted down as a leftie who obviously knows nothing about politics (because anyone who does could not possibly be left wing:rolleyes:) because to admit that it was a really stupid move might actually make people think about basic economics (like a housewife has to;) ) and realise that putting all our sustainability into products/produce from foreign countries is a long, slow suicide with an increasing home labour surplus:rolleyes:

Despite ALL the claptrap about how necessary it was to bring down the unions, it remains a fact that Britain was considered the "sweatshop of Europe" at that time, with some of the worst working conditions (for those doing REAL work not those shifting paper) and worst rates of pay in relation to cost of living.

Apply what happened to those real and hard-working people to your own jobs and then see how you might feel;) . Think about how that might be if you had below average educations and had never had much money in the first place, and moving around the Country in search of a job was a logistical nightmare as you simply didn't have either the knowhow or the wherewithall to do so!

As a middle class economist in those days I walked away from a very well paid civil service job and had a breakdown, because of the viscious and despicable way that things were being done and the fact that any attempt to ask that Social consequences became part of the equation was met with a steel wall. The new breed of economist was all the rage at that time. They were merely number crunching accountants (which most of them still remain) without the skills (and social and historical knowledge) we had previously been required to have, to look at what the probable long-term outcomes of their proposals would be, and we have reaped the cost of what they sowed.

These were PEOPLE! Not numbers on a calculator to be played with in a battle of wills by a very sick woman!

As a postscript. I had the pleasure of meeting Arthur Scargill on two occasions and he was far from the nutter portrayed by the press and nowhere near as much a "communist" either. He was, however, a man who cared passionately about the people he worked to try to get decent conditions for and a man who could have been talked to and worked with to get a very much better and more sensible outcome. Every single prediction he made was right, and the cost to the infrastructure AND the working class (and that is all of us who work for a living and were not born to inherited wealth and gentry, btw) and Society as a whole, of this Country has been vastly underplayed and overshadowed by the "fake" wealth of the last 20 years.

moggylover

epz wrote: »

The fact is most left politicians(and people in general) are hypocrites, how many labour politicians that espouse the ideas of comprehensive education and healthcare yet send their families private.

The general theory of the right is to remove government form peoples lives and let them make their own decisions. When the government is less involved in peoples lives they make the decisions that best suits them.

IMHO brown has actively forced a great number of people onto benefits to try and build up labor constituency, much like maggie did with the council houses.

Don't talk rot! I don't think there is anyone in Government that thinks many on benefits bothers to vote:rolleyes: Certainly the majority of the statistics taken suggest that it is far too few a number to make any appreciable difference at all.

moggylover

dervish wrote: »

then that is their own fault for living in the past and not moving on.

The fellows have had 25 years to retrain and get new jobs...

Retrain for what dervish? There has been little or no investment in proper work in those areas in the last 25 years! They get sent on silly two-week Government training courses (for jobs which do not exist in their areas) but haven't the necessary core education qualifications to undergo OU courses and so forth nor the financial wherewithall to move elsewhere.


http://www.radstats.org.uk/no079/webster.htm


Long link, but if you want to understand how the stats for jobs versus available for employment get cooked then worth reading.

moggylover

Julu wrote: »

Nothing like being hundreds of feet under the earth for hours at a time, sweating buckets, working like a slave then looking forward to an early death!

Maggie did them a favour!

But Julu! These men WANTED those jobs;) To you and I it would be terrible (and I have been down the pit at Mansfield Woodehouse and also Big Pit here in Wales and was terrified just going down in the cage and could not walk into any of the shafts:o ) but to them it was a way of life and one they wanted to have continue.

Many of the pits were beyond economic help and running out of coal. It is frightfully non MSE to throw away what there was though, and of course, the previously cheap sources of coal soon got dearer once we had no option but to use theirs. Furthermore, much of the cheap imported coal had to be used in greater quantities for the same end result because it was also of a much poorer quality: something that was never discussed or part of the media attention at the time.

ffacoffipawb

tomstickland wrote: »

I don't really understand the "Thatcher destroyed industry" argument. Why would any PM want to reduce production output, unless something was just a way of wasting money?

Gordon Clown has inflicted far more damage on this country than Mrs Thatcher, bless her, ever could.

Rochdale_Pioneers

dervish wrote: »

:rolleyes: :rolleyes:
Remember everyone that ROCHDALE PIONEER has admitted to be a card carrying Labour and Union man as well as a previous communist.

Disregard what he says as it is vile-ridden and jaundiced against Conservatism.

lol - please do two things:

1. Show me where I have ever said I was a Communist. (HINT - I haven't because I wasn't! The closest I ever got was having "discussions" with the Trots at uni which usually involved one of them talking about the Paris uprising of 68, then 2, then 4, then very quickly about a dozen trots all trying to convince me that the revolution would happen next year)
2. Show me where I am wrong. It is a statement of fact that thatcher saw the battle against the miners as being far more strategic than just about pit closures - she said so in her autobiography. It is a statement of fact that many of the "unprofitable pits" miraculously survived to turn a profit for new owners. And its a statement of fact that by shutting down the pits we were then left with a large chunk of our generating capacity entirely reliant on foreign coal. Now even you market lovers will know that the pricing of commodities goes up as well as down, and when the buyer has no other options the price mysteriously only ever goes up. Which is exactly what we have seen with coal imports. The Tories as free-marketeers knew this and didn't care.

Running_Horse

Running_Horse wrote: »

Who is going to pay for the long term industrial diseases and injuries?

Sorry to quote myself, but serious question, and one it would be nice to have an answer to between all the sterile pro/anti Maggie nonsense.

The taxpayer has spent billions compensating miners for previous industrial injuries (much of it stolen by lawyers). When the Hatfield miners become crippled and start dying, who is going to pay the bill?