Baroness Thatcher passed away

ash28

ukcarper wrote: »

The way faults are handled now is worse than in the past technicians being sent out on faults which to any train person are obviuosly in exchange.

The trouble with BT is the de-skilling over the years of their engineering (loose term now) staff...

I worked for a time at a BT training school and where at one time an engineer took several years to train and could do any aspect of the work they had to do - from working out the depth a pole had to be in the ground (and erecting it) to installing a phone in your house and everything in between.

Now they train their people to do a small part of a job...and it drove the instructors mad - they were all BT trained engineers. An example of that was a few years ago in our last house where we had a line that ran down our garden and then split into two - one to us and one to next door. That was fine for phones and dial up internet. For broadband it wasn't fine - only one signal could be carried down a line - the line couldn't be split.

We had broadband from the beginning - next door was quite a few years later.

In the bad old days an engineer would have come out and dug up the garden - done the business and then completed the work in our house and next door.

What did happen was one person came out and dug up the path outside the house than another person came and dug out a channel in the garden, THEN another person came out and did the necessary with the wiring and then another person came out to deal with the inside work. Result....we had no phone line for over a week after the work was finished because someone had screwed up...and neither did next door.

Another person came and filled in the trench in the garden and someone came and filled in and repaired the footpath.

Progress in action I suppose. One the other hand BT didn't have to pay them as much - but they needed more of them.

On the call centre front I have only ever dealt with Uk staff and in general found them more than helpful....we had a number of issues here (moved 18 months ago) in getting a number etc....it was the engineering side again that was the problem not the call centre staff.

CLAPTON

jamesd wrote: »

There is no way to credibly claim that the decline was steady or that the data makes the quoted claim of the person you were replying to ludicrous. Rather, a mirror to examine whether your own characterisation of this data is ludicrous and recanting seems warranted.

Far from contradicting it, the data you've pointed to very strongly supports the claim that Thatcher closed the coal mines, so far as employee and mine counts go.

year, mines, employees, tonnage - employee then tonnage %, productivity
1950 901 691 220
1955 850 699 225
1960 698 602 197
1965 483 456 186
1970 292 287 145 - 86% 78%
1975 241 247 126 - 93% 87% 0.51
1980 211 230 127 - 93% 101% 0.55
1985 133 138 105 - 60% 83% 0.76
1990 65 57 92 - 41% 88% 1.61
1995 65 15 51 - 26% 55% 3.4
2000 28 8 31
2004 19 6 27 ... 4.5

I've calculated the percentage remaining for employees, output and the production per employee from period to period to make it clearer. Note particularly the precipitous increase in the rate at which the employee count drops starting with the Thatcher years.

There's something else very notable about this data: the productivity per miner has hugely increased, measured in amount of coal produced per miner.

What the data really supports is a claim that Thatcher caused a massive decrease in the coal mining industry which had been inefficient compared to current efficiency levels, by enabling the closing of the least efficient pits and more efficient working practices.

That was devastating for workers and communities in the industry but could perhaps have been hugely profitable if you were an owner, except for the pension cost issue of supporting the large workforce pension payments on a much smaller industry size.

good set of figures


just looking at the number of miners (which the strikes were about)

at the peak there were 699,000 in 1955
by 1970 this had fallen to only 287,00 which is a masive drop in actual numbers and as a percentage
doubtless many of the strikes etc in the 1970s were a result of all these job loss

by 1980 the number were 230,000

by 1990 the number was 57,000

so during maggies period there were job losses of 173,000
but prior to that period, the job losses were 469,000

However you look at it, there were very significant job losses in the 80s but there had already been a mssive decease in the previous 25 years

basically imported coal was cheaper and the retail market was decimated by clean air acts, north sea gas and central heating

under private management (without the pension liabilities which were assumed by the government) the declined continued as it wasn't economically viable

The decline was inevitable, but is was turned in a tragedy by the combination of the autocratic communist Arthur Sargill and the autocratic Thatcher so no compromise was possible.

PaulF81

ukcarper wrote: »

Was it cheaper in absolute terms the coal might have been cheaper but if you add in cost of lost tax, benefit payments etc it probably cost us more.

But then the shipping industry loses profit, its all swings and roundabouts, but the subsidies and third world conditions miners worked in did it for the industry imho.

ILW

CLAPTON wrote: »

good set of figures


just looking at the number of miners (which the strikes were about)

at the peak there were 699,000 in 1955
by 1970 this had fallen to only 287,00 which is a masive drop in actual numbers and as a percentage
doubtless many of the strikes etc in the 1970s were a result of all these job loss

by 1980 the number were 230,000

by 1990 the number was 57,000

so during maggies period there were job losses of 173,000
but prior to that period, the job losses were 469,000

However you look at it, there were very significant job losses in the 80s but there had already been a mssive decease in the previous 25 years

basically imported coal was cheaper and the retail market was decimated by clean air acts, north sea gas and central heating

under private management (without the pension liabilities which were assumed by the government) the declined continued as it wasn't economically viable

The decline was inevitable, but is was turned in a tragedy by the combination of the autocratic communist Arthur Sargill and the autocratic Thatcher so no compromise was possible.

I believe the NUM actually went on strike (or threatened to) during WW2.

PaulF81

ILW wrote: »

I believe the NUM actually went on strike (or threatened to) during WW2.

Probably whining on about how Churchill was a Tory and had supported concentration camps when he was a former minister.

grizzly1911

CLAPTON wrote: »

good set of figures


just looking at the number of miners (which the strikes were about)

at the peak there were 699,000 in 1955
by 1970 this had fallen to only 287,00 which is a masive drop in actual numbers and as a percentage
doubtless many of the strikes etc in the 1970s were a result of all these job loss

by 1980 the number were 230,000

by 1990 the number was 57,000

so during maggies period there were job losses of 173,000
but prior to that period, the job losses were 469,000

However you look at it, there were very significant job losses in the 80s but there had already been a mssive decease in the previous 25 years

basically imported coal was cheaper and the retail market was decimated by clean air acts, north sea gas and central heating

under private management (without the pension liabilities which were assumed by the government) the declined continued as it wasn't economically viable

The decline was inevitable, but is was turned in a tragedy by the combination of the autocratic communist Arthur Sargill and the autocratic Thatcher so no compromise was possible.

As easily reached, economically viable (at a given point) coal is a finite resource it is not surprising that the labour intensive smaller pits closed.

Increased mechanisation would also have a dramatic effect.

Not dissimilar to agriculture.

Agree with your final paragraph.

ash28

seven-day-weekend wrote: »

Margaret Thatcher did a great deal of good, but at a terrible cost.

She got the Communist Trades Unions who were ruining the country under control, that was good, but the breaking up of the Miners Union left whole areas of the North and Wales devastated with no work and no support. Arthur Scargill used the miners as a pawn just as much as the Government of that time.

She allowed people to buy their Council houses, but refused to allow the money to be used to build others, which has left millions of people unable to get an affordable secure tenancy (You will note however that no later Governemt has repealed the RTB).

She was instrumental in ending the Cold War. She was decisive in the Falklands War.

Some good, some bad.

Labour made it much less attractive to buy a council house - moving away from the 70% reduction to a fixed amount - varied from about £16k to £38k depending on the where you lived. We used to live in Berkshire and the cash discount from the valuation made it hardly worthwhile.

My aunt lives in Cramlington and her son wanted to buy her council house - they missed the deadline for the changes brought in by Labour and the price under the old scheme was £16k, the price under the Labour scheme was £52k - they didn't buy the house - but as the scheme Labour introduced has been replaced by a discount or a £75k reduction they will probably buy it now.

She lives on this road and to be honest I would have thought £52k would have been a reasonable price for a house like that - £16k would have been an absolute steal. As it is she will get a 60% discount from the valuation and it will probably make it worthwhile for her son to buy it.

http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-37990576.html

That’s why, last year, Conservatives in Government increased the Right to Buy discount to a maximum of £75,000 or 60% of the house’s value (70% if the property is a flat). This is four times what the discount cap was for London properties under a Labour government, and three times what it was in most of the rest of the country.

http://www.conservatives.com/Policy/Issues/Right_to_Buy_is_reinvigorated.aspx

I think you'll find that historically (back in 1979) Labour had no objections as such to the right to buy - as long as houses were sold for a fair price and the money re-invested in housing. They also saw the future of the rented sector in council, housing association or housing cooperatives along with regulated rents and tenancies and not in the private sector.

Generali

ash28 wrote: »

The trouble with BT is the de-skilling over the years of their engineering (loose term now) staff...

I worked for a time at a BT training school and where at one time an engineer took several years to train and could do any aspect of the work they had to do - from working out the depth a pole had to be in the ground (and erecting it) to installing a phone in your house and everything in between.

Now they train their people to do a small part of a job...and it drove the instructors mad - they were all BT trained engineers. An example of that was a few years ago in our last house where we had a line that ran down our garden and then split into two - one to us and one to next door. That was fine for phones and dial up internet. For broadband it wasn't fine - only one signal could be carried down a line - the line couldn't be split.

We had broadband from the beginning - next door was quite a few years later.

In the bad old days an engineer would have come out and dug up the garden - done the business and then completed the work in our house and next door.

What did happen was one person came out and dug up the path outside the house than another person came and dug out a channel in the garden, THEN another person came out and did the necessary with the wiring and then another person came out to deal with the inside work. Result....we had no phone line for over a week after the work was finished because someone had screwed up...and neither did next door.

Another person came and filled in the trench in the garden and someone came and filled in and repaired the footpath.

Progress in action I suppose. One the other hand BT didn't have to pay them as much - but they needed more of them.

On the call centre front I have only ever dealt with Uk staff and in general found them more than helpful....we had a number of issues here (moved 18 months ago) in getting a number etc....it was the engineering side again that was the problem not the call centre staff.

I take your point but in the old days we'd all have to wait 18 months for an over skilled engineer to be able to visit.

Perhaps it's better that most are connected in days and a few wait years?

Tancred

If Thatcher had not existed, someone else would have taken her place and still gone ahead with most of her policies. The Tory right wing had other people in it - maybe not as charismatic, but sharing the same ideas.

ash28

Generali wrote: »

I take your point but in the old days we'd all have to wait 18 months for an over skilled engineer to be able to visit.

Perhaps it's better that most are connected in days and a few wait years?

I take your point but it is down to changes in technology that have made connection etc easier - digital exchanges etc - you should be able to be connected at the flick of a switch now.

But if you do need more complex work done it can be a real pita.