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Historical revisionism

The bitter consequences of the miners’ defeat have haunted Britain since: Margaret Thatcher let slip her dogs of war against society and laid economic waste to the north of England and the working-class strongholds of north Ayrshire and north and south Lanarkshire. These were the fortresses of the miners and Thatcher ensured that they would be economically razed so that never again could they rise up in defence of their jobs and communities.

So I’m told in the comments of this piece Fatcher closed exactly one mine in Scotland while Wilson/Callaghan closed 49.

He who writes history controls the present, eh?

24 thoughts on “Historical revisionism”

  1. Just not true, any of it. They started an undeclared civil war and they lost. They will never turn our lights out again. For that we can thank Margaret Thatcher.
    As for his view of our country; not true, any of it.

  2. Ever noticed how those who complain about closing coal mines are usually the same people advocating “green” energy…

  3. The coal industry had been in decline since the turn of the century as first the Royal Navy and then the railways and industry turned to the use of oil as a more easily transported and used fuel. see the chart in the link below and how the use of coal falls in an uncanny mirror of the rise of the use of oil and then gas.

    Thatcher took advantage of a zombie industry that didn’t know it was dead to achieve a significant propaganda victory to change the perceptions of the nation. Reality is what you make it……

    http://www.economicshelp.org/blog/6498/uncategorized/the-decline-of-the-uk-coal-industry/

  4. I always find it very weird when the residents of Scotland – the richest region of the UK outside of London – claim poverty. You’d have thought the actually-poor people in Wales and NE England would be offended by the appropriation…

  5. And winners write history huh? The miners strike, the Cold War and the last recession put paid to that particular lie.

  6. A couple of things.

    It wasn’t a civil war plenty of pits didn’t strike. The public generally wasn’t overly interested in the conflict and didn’t take much of anyone’s side. The left believe it was a more culturally important conflict because they were involved and they are well known for only talking and perceiving the world from their group. In a way you would think its a civil war if all the people you knew were active on the left and went on about the strike, it would seem more important than it was because you wouldn’t realise you are just talking to oneself. Plus all the columnists today were part of that sizeable but minority political community, hence romantic revisionism.

    Furthermore, this is something I do not understand and hate. Every five years when a rounded anniversary comes up, the left recount their greatest trauma, like a highly damaged victim of abuse and relive their utter humiliation without any awareness of how debased it looked.

    If any of us knew an abused and traumatised person, would we try and snap them out of episodes when they remember the terrible things that happend? For their own sake? But the left are quite happy to humiliate themselves all the time and frankly it makes me think they brought it on themselves as they should shut up about it for good.

  7. Gotta love how doughy, soft-handed lefties who’ve worked in clean, air-conditioned offices all their lives romanticise The Working Man.

    Mining jobs were shit. Being stuck down a coal mine all day, wriggling underground like maggots, and dying by the age of 60 with pneumoconiosis wasn’t a liberating experience. It’s not as if they were well paid either – the 1970’s miner was lucky if he could afford a pokey two bedroom terrace house. A car was a luxury. Many people rented their television sets, because they were too expensive to buy on a working class income. Going out to a restaurant was something posh people did.

    Furthermore, all that poncey, postmodern garbage the Guardian-reading left holds dear, such as feminism, trans* rights, multiculturalism, and Ed Miliband?

    Your average working class man from 30 or 40 years ago would have kicked Kevin McKenna’s well-upholstered arse out of the Labour club if he’d come out with any of that nonsense.

    When Britain’s miners, beaten, wound their weary way back to work 30 years ago their tired steps should have been accompanied by the tolling of 1,000 church bells. The rest of us should have been applauding them. They had fought a last stand against a vile political system

    That political system was called “democracy”. The miners didn’t like the policies of the democratically elected government of the day, so they tried to subvert them through violence.

    They lost. Thank God.

    Margaret Thatcher let slip her dogs of war against society

    Margaret Thatcher, the Prime Minister who won three general elections in a row, was somehow at war with “society”. I feel like I’m reading Alan Moore’s “V for Vendetta” rather than a supposedly serious national newspaper.

    These were the fortresses of the miners and Thatcher ensured that they would be economically razed so that never again could they rise up in defence of their jobs and communities.

    Not giving people unsustainable subsidies forcibly extracted from other taxpayers is the equivalent of economic arson now, apparently.

  8. Sebastian Weetabix

    I bet he hates hydraulic fracking. But sending men down to do it with their hands, in conditions of great danger? All in favour.

    Twat.

  9. Surely the article’s author can easily be exposed as a Soviet agent and run up in charges of treason – his account is that blatant a piece of Stalinist revisionism.

  10. It’s that Marxist fetishisation of gruelling, horrible manual labour. By people who would never, ever wish that kind of lifestyle on themselves or their relations.

    It’s another variation on the Noble Savage myth, really.

  11. “Furthermore, this is something I do not understand and hate. Every five years when a rounded anniversary comes up, the left recount their greatest trauma, like a highly damaged victim of abuse and relive their utter humiliation without any awareness of how debased it looked.”

    If you’re fuelled by negativity and hate and define youself in terms of what you’re *against*, you have to go stoke the fires of negativity every now and again, otherwise people might think “well, the 2nd decade of the 21st century is actually pretty cushy, and weren’t we nasty little cnuts back in the day, eh?”

  12. @ Rob Harries
    “plenty of pits didn’t strike.”
    It was around *those pits* that the fighting occurred as Scargill’s “flying pickets” tried to assault or intimidate (or both) miners who had voted not to strike.
    The Metropolitan police were sent to Nottinghamshire because the local police were so heavily outnumbered that they could not on their own protect the innocent civilians going to work, let alone control the thugs. *Oviously* not soldiers ‘cos if there had been any soldiers the thugs would have got a taste of their own medicine and the local hospitals would have been full.

  13. The Scottish independence referendum was a bad mistake. Should have just kicked them out on the spot.

  14. John77

    Thank you. If you try to bring the country to its knees.and bring down democratically elected governments then you are engaged in a civil war.

  15. “Incomes for the majority of Britons have fallen drastically in the last 30 years …”

    Bollocks!

  16. “Furthermore, this is something I do not understand and hate. Every five years when a rounded anniversary comes up, the left recount their greatest trauma, like a highly damaged victim of abuse and relive their utter humiliation without any awareness of how debased it looked.”

    Because they’re spoilt teenagers impotently screaming “it’s not fair” as their response to what they perceive as injustice. New Labour were like grown-ups. They looked at reality and knew that Bennite views were just dead, that free markets and some redistribution was the answer. And the left hated them for it in the same way that when Dylan went electric.

  17. Good point Sebastian. The North is covered with dodgy ground and leaning properties due to subsidence. The shale will still be there, albeit a bit more honeycombed, when the gas is extracted, but that can support the overburden much better than a void full of methane & water.

  18. I have learnt so much about the malign influence of this evil, evil woman who was last in power 25 years ago, thanks to the many young Guardian readers from around the internet who were probably too young to have been around when she was wreaking havoc on the country, but who are all too eager to remind me of how she decimated the coal industry.

    I say “decimated”, but I am not sure that it is quite the right term for a reduction in output of 10%, but at least it has got a 10 in it. Anyway her cruel victimisation of the miners and the 160 mines that she closed was in marked contrast the to the 290 mines closed by Wilson, and mark my words, she wouldn’t have dared to take on the 550,000 miners working in 1962. It was only due to the unstinting efforts of the Labour party under Wilson and Callaghan in reducing the workforce by 350,000 that Thatcher was able to take them on.

    And how she provoked them. In 1983 Thatcher and Peter Walker connived to offer every miner at pits scheduled to be closed either a voluntary redundancy package or a job at another mine. And to add insult to injury she offered to invest a paltry £800 million in the coal industry. Scargill quite rightly rejected this offer saying that there was no limit to the price worth paying to keep up the number of NUM members paying his salary.

    Scargill was of course correct in his thinking that it was better to extract coal at a cost of £40 a ton at the pithead than to pay South Africans, Americans and Venezuelans £28 per ton for coal delivered to any UK port. Who needed any of this so-called high quality foreign coal when there was plenty of the British stuff full of ash and sulphur? Of course the devastation in Scargill’s home area was tremendous, with wide scale unemployment in villages that had been mining coal as far back as a few decades.

    And we have only just begun to realise the environmental impact. For years the abundant growth of the Scandinavian pine forests was kept in check by the natural control of the acid rain from UK coal fired power stations. With the replacement of coal by so-called ‘natural’ gas, those trees now have to be felled using petrol driven (CO2 emitting) chainsaws.

  19. Ever noticed how those who complain about closing coal mines are usually the same people advocating “green” energy…

    And they really hate anyone who points that out.

  20. I say “decimated”, but I am not sure that it is quite the right term for a reduction in output of 10%, but at least it has got a 10 in it.

    ‘decimation’ means ‘kill one in ten’. It was sometimes handed out as a collective punishment to a Roman legion.

    The uneducated or illiterate might use it incorrectly, though.

  21. “I say “decimated”, but I am not sure that it is quite the right term for a reduction in output of 10%, but at least it has got a 10 in it.”
    ‘decimation’ means ‘kill one in ten’. It was sometimes handed out as a collective punishment to a Roman legion.

    Redolent of ferrous material?

  22. Scargill is a member of The Stalin Society:

    The Stalin Society was formed in 1991 to defend Stalin and his work on the basis of fact and to refute capitalist, revisionist, opportunist and Trotskyist propaganda directed against him.

    I love that they charge money for their pamphlets.

    Kinnock eventually said that one of his greatest mistakes as party leader was not backing the government against the NUM. The strike was illegal, he said, and any responsible political party who wanted to demonstrate that they were fit for government should have opposed it — even if they supported the motives behind it.

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