Count the blessings the miners gave us – often at the cost of their lives
By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
In the week before Christmas, the last-ever shift of weary mineworkers, faces streaked with sweat and coal dirt, blinked into the gray winter twilight at Britain’s last-ever working deep coal-mine.
The last shift comes up from Kellingley
Kellingley Colliery in Yorkshire, where some of these great men had given 30 years of their lives in dark, difficult and dangerous conditions, is now closed forever. A 30-foot plug of concrete will seal the top of the shaft, the colliery sheds will be demolished and the site will be handed over to property developers.
The men of Kellingley are the latest in a long, ever-growing line of victims of the greenshirts’ war on jobs. The pit could have been kept open for several more years, but in the present campaign of hate against coal the Government decided it must close, saying the investment needed to open a new seam was not “value for money”.
When I was a lad, cutting my journalistic fangs at the Yorkshire Post, I went down Kellingley Colliery at the invitation of a friend who been a miner there. Before the clanking, echoing cage lurched downward, I had thought that perhaps I should become a mineworker. For the miners were paid about twice what journalists at the Yorkshire Post got in those days.
The pithead and winding gear
When we reached the bottom of the shaft, 2600 feet down, and the long, gray, dimly-lit gallery stretched away into the distance, the dust that hung in the air – not coal-dust, my friend hastened to explain, but rock-dust scattered everywhere to smother the coal-dust and make fatal explosions less likely – made breathing difficult.
At the coal-face
This was no picnic, and I’d only been below ground for a few minutes, and I wasn’t even doing any manual labor. Kellingley was a show pit – one of the safest, most modern, most efficiently ventilated of Britain’s 100 deep mines.
Conditions in just about every mine in Britain were considerably worse than what I experienced during my hour-long tourist trip below ground. I thought no more about becoming a miner. I wouldn’t have lasted a week.
On Friday, as the final shift at Kellingley ended, there were cheers, applause and tears. Some of the men carried lumps of coal as mementoes. The last ton of coal from the pit, which once produced 1000 tons a day, will go on display in a mining museum.
At the peak of the coal-mining boom in the 1920s, one British worker in 20 was a miner. Even after the Second World War there were still 750,000 miners underground in close to 1000 pits.
With the advent of gas-fired and nuclear-fired electricity, nearly all of the pits had already closed by 1983/4, when the miners went on strike to try to bring down the elected government of Margaret Thatcher, just as they had ended the Conservative government led by Edward Heath in 1974.
A decade after Heath’s downfall, the miners downed tools out of misplaced loyalty to the Communist leader of their union, Arthur Scargill. I had known Scargill when he used to visit Whitelocks, the 16th-century Leeds pub. He was good company, but his far-out politics would lead to the destruction of deep-mined coal in Britain.
When Scargill called the strike, the miners did not know that on 28 July 1979, a couple of months after Margaret Thatcher had become Prime Minister, he had boarded a Polish freighter at Tilbury, bound for what was then still Leningrad.
There, like Lenin before him, he boarded a sealed train to Moscow. He spent three weeks at the Patrice Lumumba University, where terrorist grunts from all over the world were trained. His tutors, realizing that he was a cut above your average dim suicide bomber, transferred him to the Lenin Institute, where the leaders of terrorist movements from the IRA to the PLO were taught how to undermine the free world.
Five months later, Scargill flew by Aeroflot to Paris, then transferred to a British Airways flight so that, when he landed at Heathrow, he would not be seen to have arrived on a Russian aircraft.
Our problem, at 10 Downing Street, was how to let the miners know of this surely relevant recent episode in his biography. In the end, the account I have given in the previous three paragraphs was published in a discreet column by Ronald Butt, the veteran columnist for The Times.
Since not many mineworkers read The Times, I got on my Ducati Hailwood Rep and rode out to a country house somewhere in England, where lived a property magnate whom I knew to be loyal to Britain and to the Prime Minister.
I chose David Hart to make contact with the miners because he could hold a friendly conversation with working people. Like me, he enjoyed their company and was at ease with them and – as importantly – they with him.
A country house somewhere in England
As I rode along the long drive to the symmetrical front of David’s Elizabethan mansion, later bought by Claudia Schiffer, he was on his tractor mowing the grass in the park. He heard the bike (you could hear a Hailwood Rep four counties away, like Aunt Diana in the hunting field) and got off his tractor. I gave him the cutting from The Times and asked him to visit every pit in Britain, get to know the mineworkers, see to it that they came across a copy of the cutting, and report their reactions directly to the Prime Minister with a daily one-page note.
David left his tractor where it was, showered, changed, grabbed his go-bag and got into his top-of-the-line Mercedes. That year he traveled 29,000 miles on his own time and at his own expense, visiting pits in England, Wales and Scotland. The miners, than whom there are none more loyal to Britain, were horrified to find that their leader was in thrall to a foreign power ill-intentioned towards the country they loved. David reported to the Prime Minister that in Leicestershire, in particular, the miners were so angry that they wanted to do the unthinkable: break the strike.
David – again at his own expense – funded the Leicestershire miners to set up the National Working Miners’ Committee, which eventually became the Union of Democratic Mineworkers. The Leicestershire miners went back to work, a trickle that, thanks to David, soon became a flood.
He paid for an ad campaign that ran for weeks in all major newspapers, saying: “Come on, Arthur, gizzaballot!”
The war room
In characteristically bombastic style, David set up a war-room in a rented suite at Claridges, London’s swankiest hotel. There, maps and papers were spread across the polished burr-walnut top of the grand piano, telephones were installed, and Personages discreetly came and went.
Eventually the Secretary of State for Industry, Peter Walker, who was far to the Left of the Prime Minister, discovered that David, not he, was running the response to the strike on behalf of the Government. In a fury, he telephoned David on one of the hotlines to the war room and yelled: “You can’t run this strike from Claridges!”
David calmly replied: “Well, Peter, perhaps you’d like to speak to Sir Ian McGregor, the Chairman of the National Coal Board, who runs all the pits? He’s with me now.”
From left: Sir Peter Walker, David Hart, Sir Ian McGregor
Without David Hart, the Communists would have won the strike. David is now merry in Heaven as he was always merry on Earth, and it is high time that his central role in bringing Scargill down and defending democracy was recognized. Our war was never against the miners: it was always and only against their Communist leaders.
Some weeks later, just before the winter set in, Scargill announced that the mineworkers would stage a demonstration in London. I was at Downing Street that afternoon. Shortly after lunch, Oliver Letwin, then a fellow member of the Policy Unit and now a Cabinet Minister, ran into the room.
“It’s so unEnglish!” he wailed. “It’s the miners – they’re rioting all over Parliament Square!” Oliver tended to talk like a tabloid headline when he was agitated.
“Not to worry,” I said, “They do that in Yorkshire every Friday night when the pubs close. They mean no harm by it.”
“That’s all very well,” said Oliver, “but they’re marching on Downing Street!”
Sure enough, yelling mineworkers had gathered at the far end of Downing Street, where in those days a few flimsy barriers were all that stood between them and us.
“Tell you what,” I said, “I’ll go and talk to them.” I reached for my bowler hat.
“But, but, but, they’ll eat you alive!” said Oliver. “Surely you’re not going to wear that ridiculous Charlie Chaplin hat!”
Monckton in a reinforced hunting bowler
“Watch and learn,” I said. I had had crowd-control training from a phlegmatic, pragmatic Yorkshireman in the Wetherby Division of the St John Ambulance Brigade.
“The most important thing if you want to approach an angry crowd and calm them down,” our instructor had said, in his matter-of-fact, down-to-earth, no-nonsense style, “is to wear a hat. Doffing it is the only way to make an unmistakably polite gesture at a distance.”
A sketch of the big black door, signed by Margaret Thatcher
It worked a treat. As I stepped out of the big black door and Jim the Door closed it behind me, the miners jeered at the apparition of a pinstripe-suited twerp complete with bowler hat and furled umbrella.
I marched steadily towards them and, when I had halved the distance, I lifted my hat to them and smiled. Instantly, the jeers turned to cheering that you could have heard as far away as Kellingley.
The St John Ambulance instructor had said, “When addressing a rowdy crowd, just talk quietly to one man at the front. Don’t worry about the others. They’ll all go quiet so they can hear what you’re saying.”
That worked a treat too. After a quick word of reassurance to the nervous policeman at the barrier, I addressed a miner at the front of the crowd. “Gentlemen,” I said, “You’ve come a long way to give your message to the Prime Minister, but she’s out today. If you’ll come across the road with me I’ll get you all a pint in the pub. It’s the least I can do. Then you can tell me what you wanted to tell her, and I’ll put a note of it in her box this evening.”
The Downing Street barrier, now replaced by cast-iron gates
The miners formed a docile crocodile as we crossed Whitehall to the pub. Their main grievance was that they were not paid enough. On this point, I agreed with them. Coal mining, as I had seen down the pit at Kellingley, is one of the hardest, most dangerous and most unpleasant jobs on Earth.
We parted as good friends, and two miners came to my farewell party in the State Apartments at Downing Street a few years later – the first miners, as far as I could discover, who had ever been inside the Prime Minister’s residence during a Conservative administration. What a curse is undue partisanship.
After the strike collapsed, the remaining pits were closed down one by one, for opencast mining was safer and cheaper and imported coal was also far less costly than our own hard-won deep-mined product.
I salute these great men who gave their all – and too often gave their lives – to power the industrial revolution. Eleven men died at Kellingley alone during its half century of operation, and that was one of Britain’s safest pits. Thousands more throughout Britain died of pneumoconiosis – dust on the lung.
In the 1950s and ’60s the particulate pollution from the coal-fired power stations of Britain used to kill an estimated 37,000 people a year through respiratory diseases. But, though it is not fashionable to say so, millions more were spared death by the many benefits of coal-fired power. The environmentalist totalitarians have yet to learn that an equation has two sides: benefit as well as cost.
What a tragic paradox it is, now that coal-fired power using pelletized, fluidized-bed and high-temperature combustion with filtering and fly-ash trapping is the cleanest source of energy per megawatt-hour delivered, that the men who made that great, life-saving revolution possible are now cast on to the tailings-heap of history by the totalitarian foolishness of the soi-disant “greens” whose generation-long refusal to allow poor nations to build cheap, clean, base-load power stations is killing tens of millions a year before their time by denying them the benefits of base-load power.
On the sad day that Britain’s last deep coal-mine closes, it is right to give thanks for the strength, the courage and the loyalty of those heroes of labor who dug the darkness underground to bring men light.
With gratitude we will remember them
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“…He heard the bike (you could hear a Hailwood Rep four counties away, like Aunt Diana in the hunting field) and got off his tractor….”
I can hear it now.
My wife and I were married in 1984 and spent our honeymoon in Scotland. When we arrived there in August we had dinner with acquaintances from a previous trip. We sat in their living room in Edinburgh sipping single malt and watching the news, including an interview with the head of some miners union local from up north. We couldn’t understand a word he said. When we mentioned this to our hosts they admitted they couldn’t either.
Well, British dialects are exceptionally hard for an American to penetrate. As witness the following “cocktail party:”
The miner in question may have been speaking Doric, a rare and impenetrable Scots dialect that is spoken on the north-east neuk of Buchan and is incomprehensible even to most Scots. When my lovely wife and I bought a stately home there, one of the locals spoke to her in Doric and, to his astonishment, she understood him at once. She is Danish, of which Doric is an old variant. I had to learn it so that I could be understood when giving the opening speeches at local events. In the Second World War Doric was used apron the battlefield for radio communications because the Germans had no hope of understanding it, just as U.S. forces used Choctaws.
Probably not Doric as there were no mines in the north east. Apart from one outlier at Brora, there were no coal mines anywhere north of Fife. The most prominent Scottish miners leader was Mick MacGahey, and he was a Glaswegian, and had quiote a strong accent. I can’t recall any others.
Hard to imagine a union spokesman would use Doric in a TV interview broadcast at least to the rest of Scotland. I think the accent was just so thick and regional that neither we nor our hosts could penetrate it.
A few years ago I visited a gold mine in Mexico and was greeted with Cornish pasties for lunch. The British miners used to tuck a couple of these under their mining hats just before descending underground. The Mexican miners they were training adopted the practice and although the mines have since closed those delicious pasties live on.
One day the greenies are going to close all the gold mines. Then the diamond mines.
Greenies will mine the metals for the future they envision, although they’ll have robots doing the work. That will give them more time for hair designs, computer games and playtime.
http://cdn.mamamia.com.au/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Adultpreschoolinstagrammichellejoni.jpg
As long as there are women in the world, they will not be closing the diamond mines.
But diamonds are (gasp, horror!) Carbon.
Thanks, Christopher, Lord Monckton.
This is a very good human story, about we carbon-based creatures that suffer the consequences of this man-made scam about global warming.
A great pleasure, Andres. I have long thought that David Hart’s central role in bringing the strike to an end should be revealed and recognised with gratitude, and that someone should say Thank you to the miners.
Well said sir.
I suspect that at some point we will dig up all that coal to make coal-to-liquid fuel for a substitute petroleum, but given today’s glut…not for a while.
Mr Homewood had a quite a nice link about what you guys are up to over there.
The English really go full bore when they do something don’t they ….
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2015/12/19/say-goodbye-to-gas/#more-19218
Its a bit of a gamble. They want wind, solar, puppies and mountains. No more fossil fuels. The gamble is that they’ll be smart enough to secure the development of nukes before the climate turns cold. They don’t know that’s the gamble because they think they only have to worry about heating the place up, but that’s the real danger.
Could very well be that fossils will be brought back if they don’t get the timing down for their brave new world.
Coal liquification is the wave of the future. And always will be. There are at least 35 different coal-to-liquid schemes. I did a study covering every one of them as of 1977. Every time the price of gasoline goes up, the price of liquefying coal goes up along with it. It’s the kind of thing you do if your Festung Europa hasn’t a lot of oil fields.
Christopher Monckton,
I beg a little poetic license. Sounds like poetic justice that Arthur Scargill flew on wings of coal too close to the sun.
John
There was a good lesson learned from the rotating shutdowns of electricity,it made you appreciate it.
But as usual, many of the ‘Dimwits’ were calling for Scargill to be hanged by the neck because they missed the TV Soaps.
Sad but true.
me Lord, my respect grows.
Anyone saddling a Duc is alright by me. Fine ride.
+1
a red one no less
I owned two successive Hailwood Reps, on which I traveled all over Europe. On one occasion I had been with my fellow Knights of Malta on a visit to Lourdes in the French Pyrenees, whose chief miracle is that it is the best place in the world geared up to give severely disabled people a wonderful holiday. I had taken the bike, because the disabled children used to enjoy clinging on tight and going for short rides, and having their pictures taken (OSHA wouldn’t have liked that, but the kids’ shrieks of delight showed that they did).
On the evening of the last day of the trip, I saw the sick folk and their helpers off on the train at Lourdes station and set off for Calais 700 miles to the north for the crossing back to the UK. The train hammered nonstop through the night, reaching Calais at dawn. I also thundered through the night and was on the platform at Calais Maritime to meet the train (no Channel Tunnel in them days). I had been there three hours when the train pulled in.
My last bike was a Ducati 996 S, which I bought in Cyprus. Every Sunday at 7 am I used to ride out on the first-class, curvaceous biking roads of Cyprus with about 100 lusty Cypriot youths. I got into trouble with the Cypriot chief negotiator for admission to the European Union because my accent, after speaking the local Homeric dialect with them, was not that of Attica.
I was once arrested for murder while riding the bike back from Nicosia to Limassol. A guy on a red bike had shot a family of four in their car in Nicosia and the police needed to say on the 8 pm news that they had arrested the suspect. They knew perfectly well from the start that I was blameless, for I had heard them talking on the radio. My leather jacket was red, white, blue, yellow and black for high visibility, but the murderer’s jacket had been brown. After I had alerted London and threatened the Cypriots with an international incident, the police wrote me a letter of grovelling apology and released me.
I had to stop riding when a very rare disease led to removal of my adrenal glands, interfering with my ability to react to unfolding events on the road. I miss my bikes. I used to keep one in Cyprus, one at Heathrow Airport (from there to my London club was just 15 minutes), one at our apartment in Cannes and one in Scotland. I used to ride about 40,000 miles a year. Two wheels good, four wheels bad.
Marvelous moments. Freedom, the open road, unpredictability and friendly lassies.
Always wanted a bike and toyed with a few but my mind wanders on the road. It’s perhaps the hum and the speed. Not a safe combination.
Thanks for sharing.
I’m shocked, shocked I tell you, to have read (ok, skimmed) so many comments before I finally, finally, got to a comment about that bike.
That beautiful bike. That very beautiful bike.
Happy holidays to all.
Best wishes.
I’m with you Tom Judd. As usual, I’ve enjoyed his lordship’s latest contribution to the site. But I just couldn’t get past that beautiful bike.
Having said that, I’m not at all sure I’d like to ride it. My WR-250 has forks at least double the diameter of those spaghetti noodle things and has suspension technology light years ahead of what the old Duke is using. The brakes on my FZ-07 can do more with a gentle two finger pull than the old Ducati’s in a full panic stop. Which is probably a good thing, since – with those tyres – it wouldn’t be able to handle it anyway.
Still, a gorgeous bike.
I was at the IOMTT when Ducati released their latest iteration of the Hailwood replica saw some of the fast guys (including King Carl Fogarty {quietly revealing my age here}) take some “parade” laps on a few.
Actually, the Hailwood Rep, though underpowered by today’s standards, was able to hold its own against its then Japanese rivals because it handled so well. One could flick it in and out of roundabouts and around corners at mad lean angles, precisely because of its narrow wheels. And the forks were a lot stronger than they looked: I never had any trouble from them. The electrics were dreadful, though: the Italians, not a logical race, have never really understood how current works.
I rode my Hailwood Reps for tens of thousands of miles. They had to be carefully and regularly serviced, but as long as they were looked after they went like the wind and drew admiring crowds everywhere. One had to be strong and fit to own one, because there was no electric start, and turning over the big 900 cc engine took some doing.
[..] On the evening of the last day of the trip [..]
I have to say that I hadn’t released that you were writing a book (upstream comment). I will certainly be in line to get a copy. I imagine that some individuals will not be as keen though :^)
Merry Xmas to all.
Why not save the mine as a National Industrial Herritage site. People love to visit locations like this.
As for coal and steel we will need a lot of the stuff in the near future to replace our worn out infra structure. Bridges, thousands of bridges, viaducts, nuclear plants, you name it.
China has planned to revive the Silk Road and has planned for a second Channel to compete with the Panama Channel.
I think a lot of people will be sorry for decisions like this especially if the Climate Hoax dissepates.
Today NASA reported that fossil fuels cause cooling…
Wattsupwiththat?
One event which did nothing to improve the striking miners any good was a killing of an innocent motorist. He was driving his car and striking miners threw a concrete post over a bridge which crashed through the drivers windscreen killing him instantly. By all means take industrial action if you need to but leave innocent people out of it.
A fair point. There were Communist thugs among the miners, but they were very much in the minority.
I had always considered Scargill a thug just as I considered Ian Paisely a thug too. Your account of his time in Russia just re-enforces my opinion of him.
Are you saying that it’s OK to destroy company property during a strike?
Where do I suggest industrial action includes violence and destruction of corporate property? I do not. The violence and destruction didn’t help their cause but, IMO, that one event pretty much started the turn of public opinion against the strike.
Shame that Margaret Thatcher became the first leader to endorse the global warming scare, something which our illustrious Lord of this piece conviently forgets. Of course closing down coal mines and breaking NUM was helped by the green scare which Thatcher found politically usefull at the time.
I think she was the last leader to endorse the scam.
False. The Communist miners’ leaders had long been utterly defeated by the time the global warming scare arose. It was my successor at 10 Downing Street, George Guise, who wrote with her the 1988 speech in which she predicted 1 K/decade warming driven by CO2. She, like me,later revised her opinion on the basis of the evidence and the data.
I have been trying to respond to this post. She was NOT the first leader to endorse the scam but the very last.
She was the last.
Nice eulogy, mi lord, but short on fact and long on ideology with regard to the miners’ strike. That was nothing about Scargill and everything about destruction of the power of Trade Unions, and Briain is forever poorer for what happened. I was there, I remember. Praising the last deep pit miners on the road Thatcher sent them down 30 years ago won’t change what happened, even if it does salve your conscience.
Just goes to show that we “remember” things we want to remember. I, too, was there, working on the railway, frequently in South Wales, which was closely associated with the coal industry.
The strike was precipitated by Scargill’s determination to emulate the NUM of 10 years previously which, arguably, brought down the Heath government. They tried to do it in c. 1981 but the government backed off, leading, some years later, to Mick McGahey’s quote that it “wasn’t a u-turn but a body swerve”. After that, it’s undoubtedly true that the government planned assiduously for a head-on confrontation with the NUM by, in particular, building up massive coal stocks at power stations and by appointing Ian MacGregor to run the Coal Board.
The most egregious errors were undoubtedly Scargill’s. Firstly, the strike started in the spring, just as electricity demand fell for the summer. Secondly, he steadfastly refused to countenance a ballot, as required under NUM rules. I’ve never understood the reason for this, as he would undoubtedly have won, at which point ALL miners would have stopped work. What would have happened after that is pure conjecture but things would definitely have turned out differently.
Whilst McGahey argued against a national ballot, it seems that in later life he regretted some of the tactics employed by the NUM and, in particular, the split in the work force which gave birth to the UDM. Scargill, on the other hand, remains as obdurate as ever, refusing to countenance even the possibility that he may not have got everything right.
We remember things quite the same way but with different perspective. I recall quite clearly the strike being called over job cuts, disputed by the government of the time, but exposed in papers afterwards. this is not the forum for an in depth discussion on one key part of British mining history though.
In response to Jeef, the facts are as stated in the head posting.
It was the trade unions that destroyed Britain, not the other way around.
I don’t accept that you were responsible for defeating the miners by claiming that Mr Scargill was working for Russia. I was supporting the miners at the time and I don’t recall anyone believing that.The miners were divided by the issue of not being given a ballot on the strike and picketing . I don’t think that your argument that everything global warmists say is true but we simply can’t do anything about is very satisfactory, if global warming is a problem than solutions can be found we have managed cure most illness after all. I prefer to follow the scientist like Richard Lindzin who point out were the idea is wrong.
I refer Mr Penman to Ronald Butt’s article in The Times on Scargill’s Moscow training. And, as the heD posting points out, David Hart ran the Gizzaballot campaign.
Also remember that this was at the height of the cold war. The USSR was financing any organisation that could cause trouble for any government that did not overtly support the USSR.
Soft support – educational holidays in the east for student leaders, ‘charity’ courses in Moscow for local council union officials and favoured workers. The list is endless.
The complete history of soviet infiltration of the left in the UK government is still emerging.
Mr Richards is right. An acquaintance of mine at Cambridge was invited for interview at the BBC in 1973. When he returned, I congratulated him on having got the job, given that he had answered “Yes” to the sole question the BBC had addressed to him at the interview. He looked startled and said, “How did you know they only asked me one question?” I did not answer that, but I told him what the question was: “Are you a Marxist?”
I wondered if WUWT might note the end of British deep coal mining.
This was fairly big news here in Yorkshire on Friday, when production at Kellingley ceased.
Indeed, there is a big damp patch in front of my TV, caused by a surfeit of politicians’ and pundits’ crocodile tears, overflowing from my TV set. These had been shed specially for the occasion that they had tirelessly worked to achieve. Commendations for special hypocritical tearfulness from local MPs Nigel Adams (Selby, Conservative) and Yvette Cooper (Wakefield & Pontefract, Labour).
We were also treated to sobs from Michael Heseltine, who, no doubt Christopher Monckton will remember. “When plans were made in 1992 for the privatisation of British Coal it fell to Heseltine to announce that 31 collieries were to close including many of the mines in Nottinghamshire that had continued working during the 1984-5 strike.” (Wikipedia).
I have a lot of time for Christopher Monckton. (Not so much for Heseltine!)
But it is a pity that Monckton’s interesting and, at times informative posting, diverts attention away from the end of deep coal mining in the UK for a frankly partisan discussion of the Miners’ Strike 1984/1985. (NOT 1983/84!).
In the interests of transparency, I started work for the National Coal Board as a Chartered Civil Engineer in 1976, following the 1974 “Plan for Coal”, endorsed by every political party in the UK and prompted by the quadrupling of oil prices after the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
My career in the Coal Industry hinged around keeping spoil heaps safe (following the 1966 Aberfan disaster), building new mines and redeveloping old ones (following the “Plan for Coal”) and then closing them all down safely, following Margaret Thatcher and the incompetent nitwits (not least John Major, Ed Miliband, Ed Davey & David Cameron) who followed her.
Obviously the Miners’ strike is important in that narrative. As are a lot of other things. I don’t expect Christopher Monckton to give an unbiased account, any more than I expect him to admit that Margaret Thatcher must bear a very heavy responsibility for breathing life into the Global Warming scam. The fact that, no longer in power, she went through a moment of epiphany and recanted, hardly helps us now.
The well known fact that Arthur Scargill, Mick McGahey (and others) were hard line communists isn’t exactly news (at least McGahey never pretended not to be!). But the fact that NUM leaders in 1984/5 were communists is a poor reason to close down Kellingley in 2015, a mine which was privatised with the rest of the industry in 1995!
Of course the Government in 1984/5 couldn’t allow Scargill to win (although it was a close-run thing in November 1984 when it looked if the Deputy’s Union NACODS might join the strike). If Tony Benn had been Prime Minister he couldn’t have allowed that. But he, or a less dogmatic PM than Thatcher could have made a sensible compromise and ensure the industry was less damaged than it actually was.
But it must be pointed out that a more sensible strategy for privatisation would have kept the industry going far better. And when the ridiculous decision was made in 2002 to close the highly successful Selby Coalfield, much newer, much bigger, much more productive than Kellingley, no-one in Government objected. The decision was made at a time when international coal prices were at one of their historic lows. And the privatised industry entered into long term contracts with the generators just at the time when prices were at the bottom! The coal industry had to try to survive with that millstone round its neck for more than a decade. For a lot of that decade British coal went to the power stations much cheaper than imported coal, but having shut Selby, they could no longer produce enough!
It is interesting that British coal production costs were a THIRD of German coal production costs in the 2000s. Interesting also how much better the German industry and German miners (look at their pensions!) have done!
So don’t believe all the stuff about British Coal being “uneconomic”. It was as “uneconomic” as stupid greenie policies (not least George Osborne’s “Carbon Floor Price”, Miliband’s Climate Change Act 2008 and massive subsidies for renewables) made it. And inept management certainly played its part!
Mr Brumby errs. The miners’ union received some $30 million that we could trace (and that was a lot of money in those days) from the KGB via the then Czechoslovak Embassy in 1984. The strike was a deliberate attempt by the Soviet Union to overthrow one of the most effective and vocal critics of Communist totalitarian dictatorship.
Mr Brumby errs again. The Selby drift mine was closed owing to the discovery of a geological fault that made further working disproportionately costly and dangerous.
I think you’ve got that mixed up with Asfordby. Lots of small and even medium sized faults. And Selby (neither then Gascoigne Wood drifts nor the five shaft sites) was certainly NOT closed because of geological conditions.
I’m sorry, absolutely incorrect.
Whilst you are correct about the communist involvement in the 1984/5 strike, which I didn’t dispute, I’m surprised you didn’t mention the funding by our old chum Muammar Gaddafi.
So not ‘erring’ at all. You might pretend that the only way to deal with the situation in 1985 was the one adopted by Thatcher. For the sake of argument, let’s say you are right. But after 1985, when Scargill was an irrelevance, did that necessitate the decimation of the industry in the run up to privatisation? Hardly!
A perfect example of how green policies often ruin the environment is the UK Drax power station.
It’s been converted from burning coal to burning biomass – in other words, it’s burning trees.
Coal is more efficient than wood, so you need a huge amount of wood. I believe that now large numbers of trees are being cut down in Californian and shipped almost half way around the world to feed Drax. How mad is that?
Here’s a simple question for the greens: suppose you dig up a ton of coal. You then cut down trees to provide the same amount of energy. Which destroys more wildlife habitat? The answer is obvious. It doesn’t matter how many tons you extract from a deep coal mine, the resulting habitat destruction is zero.
Ironically, the advent of coal in the nineteenth century probably saved many forests around the world from destruction, just as oil possibly saved whales from extinction.
And the final irony: the extra CO2 from burning coal is almost certainly helping to make the world greener.
Many thanks to Christopher Monckton for this excellent piece and for his untiring work in the pursuit of the truth and the integrity of science.
Chris
[snip – policy violation -mod]
War on stuff eh? I recall driving down the A339 from Basingstoke to Newbury….and “encountering” the Greenham Common “women” protest “camp”. In my car, the car was spat at, “mud” like blobs (It was human excrement) were thrown at it. And for what?
Good to hear this side of the story.
But, the UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher wasn’t innocent to the part per million level metathesiophobia of planetary proportions. http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/107817. Cannot exclude an intentional mousetrap from her part though – judging from the speed green leftists are running towards the cheese in it. Hope to live long enough to see it unfold.
I tried posting this over four hours ago but it disappeared. OK, almost no-one will read it now. But there are some points here that need to be made, if only for the record.
I wondered if WUWT might note the end of British deep coal mining. This was fairly big news here in Yorkshire on Friday, when production at Kellingley ceased.
Indeed, there is a big damp patch in front of my TV, caused by a surfeit of politicians’ and pundits’ crocodile tears, overflowing from my TV set. These had been shed especially for the occasion that they had tirelessly worked to achieve. Commendations for special hypocritical tearfulness from local MPs Nigel Adams (Selby, Conservative) and Yvette Cooper (Wakefield & Pontefract, Labour).
We were also treated to sobs from Michael Heseltine, who, no doubt Christopher Monckton will remember. “When plans were made in 1992 for the privatisation of British Coal it fell to Heseltine to announce that 31 collieries were to close including many of the mines in Nottinghamshire that had continued working during the 1984-5 strike.” (Wikipedia).
I have quite a lot of time for Christopher Monckton. (Not so much for Heseltine!)
But it is a pity that Monckton’s interesting and, at times informative posting, diverts attention away from the end of deep coal mining in the UK for a frankly partisan discussion of the Miners’ Strike 1984/1985. (NOT 1983/84!).
In the interests of transparency, I started work for the National Coal Board as a Chartered Civil Engineer in 1976, following the 1974 “Plan for Coal”, endorsed by every political party in the UK and prompted by the quadrupling of oil prices after the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
My career in the Coal Industry hinged around keeping spoil heaps safe (following the 1966 Aberfan disaster), building new mines and redeveloping old ones (following the “Plan for Coal”) and then closing them all down safely, following Margaret Thatcher and the incompetent nitwits (not least John Major, Ed Miliband, Ed Davey & David Cameron) who followed her.
Obviously the Miners’ strike is important in that narrative. As are a lot of other things. I don’t expect Christopher Monckton to give an unbiased account, any more than I expect him to admit that Margaret Thatcher must bear a very heavy responsibility for breathing life into the Global Warming scam. The fact that, no longer in power, she went through a moment of epiphany and recanted, hardly helps us now.
The fact that Arthur Scargill, Mick McGahey (and others) were hard line communists isn’t exactly news (at least McGahey never pretended not to be!). But the fact that NUM leaders in 1984/5 were communists is a poor reason to close down Kellingley in 2015, a mine which was privatised with the rest of the industry in 1995!
Of course the Government in 1984/5 couldn’t allow Scargill to win (although it was a close-run thing in November 1984 when it looked if the Deputy’s Union NACODS might join the strike). If Tony Benn had been Prime Minister he couldn’t have allowed that. But he, or a less dogmatic PM than Thatcher could have made a sensible compromise and ensure the industry was less damaged than it actually was.
But it must be pointed out that a more sensible strategy for privatisation would have kept the industry going far better. And when the ridiculous decision was made in 2002 to close the highly successful Selby Coalfield, much newer, much bigger, much more productive than Kellingley, no-one in Government objected. The decision was made at a time when international coal prices were at one of their historic lows. And the privatised industry entered into long term contracts with the generators just at the time when prices were at the bottom! The coal industry had to try to survive with that millstone round its neck for more than a decade. For a lot of that decade British coal went to the power stations much cheaper than imported coal, but having shut Selby, they could no longer produce enough coal to meet all the demand!
It is interesting that British coal production costs were a THIRD of German coal production costs in the 2000s. Interesting also how much better the German industry and German miners (look at their pensions!) have done!
So don’t believe all the stuff about British Coal being “uneconomic”. It was as “uneconomic” as stupid greenie policies made it (not least George Osborne’s “Carbon Floor Price”, Miliband’s Climate Change Act 2008 and massive subsidies for renewables). And at times, inept management certainly played its part!
Mr Brumby errs. The head posting does not suggest that the Communism of Arthur Scargill caused today’s Kellingley closure: it states, in terms, that it is the climate scam that prevented Ministers from authorizing the investment that would have kept Kellingley open for several years, working the remaining untapped seam.
Monckton of Brenchley (replying to Martin Brumby)
So, repeating your words back so you can determine if “I” understand them correctly,
The “climate scam” gave Mrs. Thatcher sufficient political and economic and ecological “power” to close down the mines “early” (even though at least one seam had sufficient coal left to justify the mine remaining open). Thus, the communist-led strikers were cut off of their economic and business “power” and leverage, and so failed in their ultimate goal: Destroying Thatcher’s government while appearing her “innocent victims” of her economic power as a capitalist.
But! Did not those same communists learn: Are they not using that same “ecological/green/save-the-planet/stop-the-rise-of-CO2” power to destroy the US, the UK, and the rest of the western world that they despise and hate? (With, of course, the enthusiastic support of today’s Washington, New York, UN, and London elites and government-paid bureaucrats? )
Mr Cook is confused. Margaret Thatcher left office in 1990. Kellingley closed in 2015, a quarter of a century later. And, as I have already made clear, by the time Margaret Thatcher spoke about climate change in1990 the miners had long been defeated. The mine closure program had been decided before the climate scam got going. Kellingley was not part of that program.
wickedwenchfan December 21, 2015 at 11:27 pm
You are right here and Christopher Monckton is being disingenuous with his response.
Yes, the NUM leaders had been defeated in 1985 (although they still can be seen on the BBC today!)
Probably rightly too. I have no time for Scargill, famed for only ever negotiating one pay rise – his own. And his leadership during and after the strike was inept, to say the least, as Mr. Green Genes points out.
But there is no question whatever that the big scary CO2 scam which Margaret Thatcher started was used specifically as another stick to beat coal, not only at the time of Heseltine’s “31 Pit Closure” programme but ever since. And the scam is still alive and well and still costing jobs and increasing energy costs.
The fact that Margaret Thatcher recanted once out of power, didn’t help at all.
Mr Brumby errs. Since the miners had been defeated by spring 1985, and since Margaret Thatcher’s speech on climate change was not till 1988, the frequently-asserted suggestion that she took up the cudgels on climate change to beat the miners has no shred of factual justification, and I was correct to say so.
Margaret Thatcher was unusual in her willingness to admit a mistake when she made one. She was misled during the late 1980s on the climate question but changed her mind – as did I – when the evidence became clear.
Mob
In the name of a person’s honor and if you are indeed closer to the source, I hope you do the best you can to articulate this in your memoirs.
Ms T has taken quite a beating on this urban legend.
I think a note on the Miners’ strikes of 1972 & 1974 might also be worthwhile.
The miners at that time were certainly NOT led by hard line communists, Scargill & his chums were activists but the NUM leadership was actually fairly moderate, despite the fact that earnings were trailing well behind car workers, for example. And the working conditions were absolutely dreadful, not a lot better than they had been before the war. Yes, there were excesses (like the infamous ‘flying pickets’) but Ted Heath lost the strike and the election not because of hard line miners, but because he was a complete drip.
It is a fact that Al Capone only ended up in jail for tax evasion and not for racketeering, running vice gangs, murder and all the rest.
I feel similarly about Ted Heath’s loss of power. Rather than an industrial dispute, it should have been just deserts for his conspiracy to mislead and betray the people of the UK by dragging them into the “Common Market” whilst taking great care not to admit exactly what kind of organisation we were joining. Treason which has been emulated by all his successors. Margaret Thatcher at least saw the light BEFORE losing power!
Mr Brumby errs. Scargill and McGahey, both Communists, played significant roles in the 1972 and 1974 miners’ strikes, which were, like the 1984-5 strike, attempts by an alien power to overthrow a legitimately elected government with which it disagreed. The earlier attempt was successful, but Margaret Thatcher was ready for the Communists by 1984. They lost, and their defeat played no small part in the ultimate defeat of the entire Soviet Communist system and the liberation of half of Europe from totalitarian tyranny.
Your Lordship,
As you may know, Khrushchev poisoned Hugh Gaitskell so that the Commie stooge Harold Wilson would be the next Labour PM instead of a loyal, honest British civil servant.
No.
The 1972 and 1974 strikes were about poor wages and the fact that miners were still expected to go home filthy, with no proper work clothes and had to try to get washed at home, (like a scene from “How Green was my Valley!”). Only being paid whilst actually underground. I have no doubt you will privately admit that this wasn’t handled sensibly!
The fact that the Government thought that they didn’t deserve better treatment played straight into the hands of communist agitators, naturally. The fact that the USSR and their useful idiots tried to exploit every industrial dispute anywhere isn’t news and isn’t surprising. People like Ted Heath played straight into their hands. There is better evidence that the communists were a significant factor in strikes in other sectors (car workers, dockers, railways) than in the mines.
But Heath’s inept handling of the situation only boosted the support of the hard liners in the union, leading eventually to the departure of moderate and rational people like NUM President Joe Gormley, who resolved so many disputes with NCB Chairman Derek Ezra over a sandwich and a pint, (and who got his members decent pay rises which they richly deserved),
So Joe Gormley used the likes of Scargill as an ‘attack dog’ to nip management ankles and then put him back in the kennel whilst a cosy deal was struck. Unfortunately the threat that people like Scargill presented to the UK and to the miners themselves once he was in the driving seat wasn’t fully recognised. Yes, Margaret Thatcher had done her homework and had been preparing for a showdown for years. And Scargill showed how daft he is by picking a fight over a pit that really wasn’t worth saving (at Cortonwood) at the time that Thatcher had chosen and had prepared for.
He then chose not to have a ballot when both miners and management, not only in Yorkshire and Scotland but in Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire thought then and think today that he would probably have won. And, to be frank, I have had the ‘benefit’ of discussing this with them face-to-face times a’ many, over the last thirty years! But, of course, Scargill fell into the common trap of believing his own bullsh*t. And still strutted about claiming a famous victory, even as his members’ lives were in tatters.
It was interesting to read your account about David Hart’s activities. Obviously I didn’t move in those circles at that time, but I was and have been on decent terms with a few senior managers who were much closer to what went on behind the curtain. I have no doubt that you know very much more of what actually went on, than you could possibly admit even today. And even I’m well aware that some things actually weren’t very legal anyway. Of course, thirty years ago, Hart with the Prime Minister’s backing could probably get away with stuff that would be more difficult today. I’m very hesitant to agree that the ends justify the means, but sometimes they do, I suppose. Maybe.
We finished up at the end of the 80s and early 90s with a coal industry which was fairly lean and mean. By no means perfect. But more efficient, more productive and safer than it had been before or has been since. Although the early years after privatisation were pretty good, too. Good for the miners, for the industry and good for the Country. No subsidies whatever. A pity that the way privatisation had been done with the Generators and with Coal led to the situation that, as Richard Budge (Coal’s new CEO) pointed out, every tonne of coal he produced made enough profit to buy a paper of chips. But that same tonne of coal burned to produce electricity, made enough profit to pay for a candle-lit dinner for two with a decent bottle of wine!
But by then the green nonsense-monster that Thatcher had breathed life into, in the late 80s, really got going. Eventually it will fail as it must. But how much damage will be done in the meantime cannot be overestimated. The wicked destruction of the coal industry is perhaps just some ‘collateral damage’. And it was interesting to see last week that even industry management and what’s left of the NUM were opining that Carbon capture and storage might have saved them. Even after all these years not understanding that destroying efficiency, hugely increasing prices, wouldn’t have helped anyone except BigGreen!
Brumby forgets that Wilson closed more pits than Thatcher ever did. But the Tories under Thatcher always seem to get the blame every time! WUWT?
Mr Brumby errs. The roles of communists such as Scargill’s and McGahwy in causing and aggravating the 1972 and 1974 strikes were far more central than he will admit. He also errs in implying that David Hart’s talking to the miners, setting up the National Working Miners’ Committee, initiating and funding the Gizzaballot campaign and working with the chairman of the National Coal Board were illegal. At no point was anything illegal done.
I fear you are again being disingenuous. The strike was exactly about what I said it was (or as ‘exactly’ as any brief posting will permit). Are you prepared to state unequivocally that poor pay and conditions had nothing to do with the strike?
And your comments about what I wrote about David Hart’s activities are a classic ‘straw man’. Where did I say that “talking to the miners, setting up the National Working Miners’ Committee, initiating and funding the Gizzaballot campaign and working with the chairman of the National Coal Board were illegal”, pray?
Are you suggesting that the activities I repeat in quotes represent the exact and total scope of David Hart’s activities?
Pull the other one!
Mr Brumby errs. The pretext for the strike was one thing: the real, Communist reason quite another.
Mr Brumby errs again. He now attempts to deny he had implied David Hart had acted illegally. However, he had written: “I’m well aware that some things actually weren’t very legal anyway. Of course, thirty years ago, Hart with the Prime Minister’s backing could probably get away with stuff that would be more difficult today.”
Neither David Hart nor the Prime Minister acted illegally in any matter, whether the matter was or was not one of those mentioned in the head posting. It was important to us that in every respect our conduct should be fully compliant with the law. Let us have no more unfounded nonsense to the contrary.
Brilliant
Back at the local level ….
Gird yer loins.
Consortium of mayors/corps
http://thecityfix.com/blog/compact-of-mayors-380-cities-cut-emissions-17-percent-2030-wee-kean-fong-elyse-myrans/
OK, then. Let’s just say, if it makes you happy, that “the real, Communist reason” was the cause of the 1984/85 strike and that no striking miner had the least concern about job security, wages, conditions, and so on. If it makes you happy then the 1972 and 1974 strikes were also because every one of 200,000 miners was either a KBG plant of at least a stooge for the Kremlin and was perfectly insouciant about having to change into and out of proper protective gear and shower in his own time. And that his wife would have to try to wash his work clothes clean of sweat and coal dust at home?
Did you “err” in your head-posting expressing some sympathy for the plight of the Kellingley miners? After all, it seems a little strange to me that you should start a posting on the loss of jobs due to the Green Blob’s nonsense, to which all our political “elite” have signed up, only to launch into a discussion about who was to blame for what happened 30 years ago, when, as you sort of point out, we didn’t really have a Green Blob or a bogus CO2 scam anyway.
Where did I now “attempt[] to deny [I] had implied David Hart had acted illegally? What I actually stated, you quote yourself “I’m well aware that some things actually weren’t very legal anyway.”
I feel confident that, with thought, you will realise that you are so eager to show that I have “erred” that you haven’t paused to understand my point. And yes, there were plenty of things that “weren’t very legal” in addition to some of the very silly things Scargill and his henchmen got up to. Was it really legal to intercept groups of unarmed miners on motorway slipways and confiscate their car to prevent them from picketing Nottinghamshire pits? I’m not sure, but I do remember legal opinion at the time was very far from unanimous on that subject. Was it legal to reduce miners’ eligibility to child care and other benefits by the amount of their strike pay that they weren’t receiving? Was the police action at The Battle of Orgreave entirely legitimate? If so why did half a Million pounds have to be spent in compensation? These are but three examples from a host.
Before you start frantically typing that I “erred”, you might wish to sit back and note that
(a) I have no idea whether any of these things were actually illegal but I don’t think I’m unreasonable to suggest that they “weren’t very legal”!
(b) I have no idea whether David Hart (or you, or Mrs. Thatcher) had any involvement whatever in the three particular issues I mention. Perhaps not, I am ready to be surprised.
(c) I am not for a moment suggesting that the Battle of Orgreave should have been supported, or was a sensible idea tactically or strategically. I think there would have been a great deal of laughter in No.10 if the pickets had been successful at Orgreave or had forced a closure at Ravenscraig.
Neither did I, nor would I now support flying pickets, especially violent flying pickets. I’m not a big fan of benefits, or of strikes (except as a genuine last resort and I can’t think of many instances where you could genuinely make a case for that!) but I think the financial treatment of miners’ families was shabby. Just my opinion. I very much doubt that today’s judiciary would have allowed that.
And, if I might be so bold, might I ask a couple of questions?
Firstly, I have been told numerous times by mineworkers and management alike and not just in Yorkshire but in Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire as well (including a couple of management guys who were life-long Tory activists), that when the flying pickets did arrive at the the Notts pits, allegedly trying to reason with the Notts lads who had yet to decide whether to strike or not, there were some blowhards who immediately started throwing rocks about. It has been said many times that none of the miners (nor the pickets) recognised the rock-throwers.
Using Occam’s razor, perhaps these were rent-a-mob types from London or Manchester. Perhaps they were the legendary lesbians and gays (see “Pride 2014” – if you really must). Perhaps everyone I spoke to was telling me porky pies. But it is interesting how often quite level headed people wondered if these were agents provocateur. Nah! Couldn’t be! Do you agree?
Secondly, you had the evidence. Why didn’t you have Scargill in Court after the strike? There must have been half a dozen serious offences he could have been charged with. Was he just too useful, popping up and discrediting not just the miners but HM Opposition as well?
Could have been charged with? COULD…the operative word. And no charge would have stuck. That’s why none were. Why is that? Scargill was a thug, just like Ian Paisely.