He said: “Over 300,000 miners and their families have been punished to the grave, men who fought in two world wars and helped rebuild the country afterwards.
Mining was a reserved occupation. You couldn’t get conscripted if you were a miner. More than that I think – they’d not accept you volunteering either if you were? In fact you could get conscripted to be sent down the mines…..
The article doesn’t say whether the government’s guarantee of the Pension Scheme has been cancelled now that they’re not getting their half of the loot.
I thought some were recruited for their engineering and tunnelling skills, or was that WW1?
Time to go down a rabbit hole …..
Well, that didn’t take long if I’m to believe Brave’s AI search algorithms – WW1 only.
Ah, the Bevin boys. I didn’t know that some were enslaved until around 1948.
But I thought the age of conscription in WWII was set so that no-one served in both wars – obvs some did but they wouldn’t have been conscripted the second time, or they heroicly lied about their age.
I think the call up age went all the way to 51.
I reckon a chap had to be pretty unlucky to be so, though.
Friend of my late father’s was a Bevin boy, conscripted and sent down a mine. I suppose it was better than being shot at, but not much. He ended up being a steam engine fireman on BR after that, so he must have liked shovelling coal.
My great uncle served in the the Great War, he clocked then that farm workers were exempt, so got into farming in the 1930s, and sat WW2 out on his farm, which was very sensible as he’d have been called up in that one too I think. He was born in 1900, so was just old enough for WW1 and would have been caught by the conscription act of 1939 which included men aged 18 to 41.
Ah yes, men who were meant to give the country security of electricity supply but who then went on strike whenever there was trouble with Middle Eastern oil. Fuck ’em.
A fifth of members get as little as £10 a week from the pension scheme, with the majority of them getting £50 a week or less.
@ Boganboy
The chances of a (UK) Labour government removing the guarantees for the mineworkers pension scheme is zero. This is a way to socialise the risk – the miners get to take all the surplus right up to the point it goes into deficit, then expect the government to bail it out.
This is what the deal was (now reneged upon) – from https://committees.parliament.uk/work/1114/mineworkers-pension-scheme/publications/:
The Government guaranteed that pensioners would always receive the benefits they had earned up to privatisation, and that these benefits would increase in line with inflation. However, in return for this guarantee, the Government is also entitled to receive 50% of any surplus in the Scheme’s value at subsequent valuations (to the extent that these funds are not needed to maintain benefits). The remaining 50% of the surplus is to be distributed to pensioners through improved benefits.
Like any insurance scheme, you can’t realistically expect to get your premium back at the end of the year if you didn’t claim. But then reality and people’s expectations are very far apart!
All (of the few remaining) DB pension schemes will have members on very small pensions, because they worked in relatively poorly paid roles and/or for only a few years. This excuse is always trotted out when there are complaints about ‘gold-plated’ pensions for civil servants, but it doesn’t alter the fact that if you put in your time and end in a senior position, you’re on the gravy train for (the rest of) your life.
Anecdotal but my grandfather was a miner, volunteered and served in WW2 so while it was exempt there was some acceptance of volunteers
WW1 there was a parallel underground battle with tunnel’s through no mans land that involved miners and tunnel crews from underground etc., I thought this was covered well in the novel Birdsong.
Joe Smith
Thanks for the info!!