Baroness Thatcher has died.

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Dimple said:
Of course it is, you have your experiences in your area and I had mine.
I also had to give handouts to many Miner friends who hit hard times and every one I knew wanted to go back to work but scared to do so.
All of them were talked into going on strike for greed and let's face it, 100% suffered for it.
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I have a different view, I believe it was wrong to do this to swathes of the country, my town has been devastated like many others. I just feel it was wrong to ignore and seemingly fuel rampant capitalism, but that's another can of worms.
 
Dimple said:
In what dictionary does greedy miner = anti miner or disliked miner?

You should stop reading in between the lines and read the EXACT words on the page.
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Great advice, fine, how about 'millionaires'?, y'see that's the thing about espousing rules you've then to be seen to observe them yourself ;-)
 
Scream said:
Again we have the hunger strikers. Terrorists who 'chose' to starve themselves to death in their attempt to blackmail the British into their demands. Maggie stood her ground and kept the British policy to never negotiate with terrorists.
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The Government privately gave into all of the demands of the hunger strikers after the protests had ended to avoid a repeat of the situation. An open dialogue was also kept with the Provos throughout the Troubles.

'Crime is crime' was a sound bite, not policy.
 
Castiel said:
Indeed....the fact was that the Miners were not universally supported by the public, in fact the majority were against the miners, increasingly so the longer the strike went on. The Miners also did earn substantially more than the majority of people not in the mining industry (and like the Tube Drivers, were consistant in demanding ever increasing percentage rises), the tactics employed by the NUM and its members were widely seen as both inappropiate and irresponsible by the public and many pits were indeed closed shops where if you did not have a family or Union member already working in the pit then you were extremely unlikely to get a job or apprenticeship.

Dimple is essentially correct albeit anecdotally, for example the Miners accepted a 9.3% pay increase a year before the strike despite the NUM calling for Strike Action for more, the NUM was one of the most militant and powerful unions in Europe and the Coal Industry was in steep decline (like the Steel Industry before it) and the taxpayer could no longer subsidise huge losses in unproductive mines. The claim that Miners could (and did) earn millionaires wages is also not too wide of the mark, in 1983 a Miner could (with overtime) earn up to £600-£800 a week...this in a year when the average weekly wage was around £100, to a fella on £75 a week, coal miners wages would seem like a millionaires salary....British Coal made a loss of over £700m in the year before the strike, equivalent to £1.4bn today...this was clearly unsustainable. Something had to be done and uneconomic mines had to be closed. The NUM called a strike (even without ballots) and subsequently many pits were closed, not because they were unproductive, but because the NUM tactics forced the engineers to stop maintaining the pits so they became unviable and dangerous. The Govt wasn't the only agitator in this, Scargill and the NUM need to face up to their proportion of the blame as well.

Having said that, it was clear also that the pit closures without significant investment in other industries would mean a steep decline in mining regions, and the govt failed to address this, leaving many communities still feeling the effects today.
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Your post is relatively reasoned, however, seriously you say 'a miner' could earn up to £800, my guess is you have a source for this information, BUT I can say with certainty NO ONE in my coalfield earned anywhere near that, I would love to know exactly what % of miners could earn this, if at all, and bear in mind you say with overtime, given this, is this point at all salient?, I find this figure difficult to believe btw, from my memory (and this is a guess), you would be lucky if it was £150 a week.
 
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Lets not forget either that many of the coal mining communities in South Wales lost their Pits in the 1960s...when Labour closed them..I think it was Tony Benn as MoE at the time.
 
What a waste of tax.

I don't like to speak ill of the dead and even for her I will not make an exception.

However, I will not be sending flowers and am furious that in the current economic climate any of our taxes are being wasted on her disposal :mad:
 
newbiejim said:
Your post is relatively reasoned, however, seriously you say 'a miner' could earn up to £800, my guess is you have a source for this information, BUT I can say with certainty NO ONE in my coalfield earned anywhere near that, I would love to know exactly what % of miners could earn this, if at all, and bear in mind you say with overtime, given this, is this point at all salient?
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The point is salient because the mining industry paid far above the average wages in the UK at the time (on average around 50% more than the median in 1983, not including bonuses, overtime etc) there was significant losses being incurred and subsequently being borne by the taxpayer, any attempt at reform of the wages structurally or directly was met with strike action and ever increasing demands (for example it took a 35% pay offer in 1974 to convince the NUM to call off strike action, the NUM were demanding another 30% in 1982-3)...when attempts were made to bring down the costs of British Coal and to make it more competitive by increasing production, the NUM instituted an overtime ban to limit stockpiling (unsuccessfully) and production increases without significant wage increases...a mixture of militant unionism, a refusal to modernise and increased competition from cheaper foreign coal was the downfall of the Mining Industry.

The point about the money a miner could earn (even at basic plus their normal bonuses which was around the £150 figure you quoted) compared to someone like Dimpe is salient to the argument he raised about the disparity in incomes between Miners and people in other industries, which ironically was being subsidised by those people earning less in those other industries.
 
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I had this awful dream last night. In the dream Thatcher wasn't dead she was just in a heavy sleep and had woken up. I had this vision that when she had gone for real - again, we would have to put up with all the sycophantic outpourings all over again. :eek:
 
Castiel said:
Lets not forget either that many of the coal mining communities in South Wales lost their Pits in the 1960s...when Labour closed them..I think it was Tony Benn as MoE at the time.
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IIRC one of the factors in the terrible Aberfan disaster was that the mines safety officers were reluctant to report their concerns about the unstable spoil tip because they were afraid that the Government would use them as an excuse to shut the pit


(Aberfan was one of my most powerful early memories, I was only six, I can still remember the grainy B&W Tv pictures to this day. I often think about it, even now after all these years. Despite my tender age I somehow still appreciated the sheer enormity of the catastrophe! :( )
 
Dimple said:
Thatcher devastated Stoke On Trent, we were a mining and steel city (as well as Pottery) but something needed doing with the greedy Miners. I was working in a factory on about £75/week but my Miner mates were getting 'millionaires' wages and wanted more more more and would keep going on strike to get it. I know it sounds like jealousy but mining jobs were 'Family' jobs and you could only get in if you had family already there. When you're working class you should all be on the same steps of the ladder and it was quite hard to share your pub with greedy Miners. Something had to happen and she was the person to do it.
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Something just occurred to me, you say in your post "something needed doing with the greedy miners" now did you mean just the Stoke miners?, because then you go on to say "she was the person to do it". Now as I recollect, she then took on not just the Stoke miners, which you must know too y?. In summary, I'm sure any fair minded person would agree that it would seem VERY strange that you would hope that she would deal with just the Stoke miners, hugely improbable I'm sure you agree.So we can infer that when you say "she was the person to do it" you did indeed mean all miners.
 
Castiel said:
The point is salient because the mining industry paid far above the average wages in the UK at the time (on average around 50% more than the median in 1983, not including bonuses, overtime etc) there was significant losses being incurred and subsequently being borne by the taxpayer, any attempt at reform of the wages structurally or directly was met with strike action and ever increasing demands (for example it took a 35% pay offer in 1974 to convince the NUM to call off strike action, the NUM were demanding another 30% in 1982-3)...when attempts were made to bring down the costs of British Coal and to make it more competitive by increasing production, the NUM instituted an overtime ban to limit stockpiling (unsuccessfully) and production increases without significant wage increases...a mixture of militant unionism, a refusal to modernise and increased competition from cheaper foreign coal was the downfall of the Mining Industry.

The point about the money a miner could earn (even at basic plus their normal bonuses) compared to someone like Dimpe is salient to the argument he raised about the disparity in incomes between Miners and people in other industries, which ironically was being subsidised by those people earning less in those other industries.
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Whilst eloquent your post provides no proof of this £800 figure, I'm sure you understand my reluctance to accept this as correct. In addition, it is wildly wrong to represent miners per se as earning lucrative sums, why not find out average wages instead of tabloid esque claims, it does make me question peoples motives.
 
The whole "not" a state but is a state funeral thing is disgusting, its going to cost £10m (reportedly) and I dont see why the Thatcher estate cant pay for the funeral in total, Mark Thatcher probably has some conflict diamonds he could cash in and pay for everything :p

And now the so called politically neutral police are planning to pre-arrest people who want to protest, so much for free speech, good old met doing the bidding of the government, wasnt it all the met officers that went to the miners strikes and waived their payslips in front of miners.

And as for the recall of parliament which should only be done in a national emergency, its all quite disgusting how much crying the tories are doing over Thatcher, shes dead and hasnt been in power for 23 years, get over it already! its just a shame that Thatcherism lives on
 
Castiel said:
The point about the money a miner could earn (even at basic plus their normal bonuses which was around the £150 figure you quoted) compared to someone like Dimpe is salient to the argument he raised about the disparity in incomes between Miners and people in other industries, which ironically was being subsidised by those people earning less in those other industries.
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When do we get to demolish the City of London then? ;)

PS this thread has turned to totally uninteresting ********.
 
newbiejim said:
Whilst eloquent your post provides no proof of this £800 figure, I'm sure you understand my reluctance to accept this as correct. In addition, it is wildly wrong to represent miners per se as earning lucrative sums, why not find out average wages instead of tabloid esque claims, it does make me question peoples motives.
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It was illustrative of Dimples point. Basic wages for a pit face miner in the early 1980s was (according to a family member who was a miner for 40 years) around £140 a week including bonus...overtime came in a double or triple time depending on production ramping and staffing, (he called it getting triple man Shift bonus) he was the one who said he could earn the figures quoted and I have no reason to question that, again it is anecdotal, but then it was referring (and offering persective) to Dimples argument rather than directly disputing whatever it is that you have said in this thread thus far.

Even at average wages you are still looking at at least 50% above the median for the rest of the UK, and substantially more than that in many of the coal regions, including Stoke if Dimples experience is anything to go by.
 
Biohazard said:
When do we get to demolish the City of London then? ;)
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Actually that is a good point, however given that the coal industry was heavily subsidised for decades, I suspect that in comparison the City is still extremely profitable with a very good chance of paying dividends on the taxpayers investment. Perhaps with a little less militancy and a bit more foresight the miners could have salvaged far more of their industry than they did by excessive wage demands and strike action.

The point I am illustrating is that both sides were at fault here, the NUM and several Govts....Thatcher, right,y or wrongly was just the one who refused to blink first.
 
Castiel said:
It was illustrative of Dimples point. Basic wages for a pit face miner in the early 1980s was (according to a family member who was a miner for 40 years) around £140 a week including bonus...overtime came in a double or triple time depending on production ramping and staffing, (he called it getting triple man Shift bonus) he was the one who said he could earn the figures quoted and I have no reason to question that, again it is anecdotal, but then it was referring (and offering persective) to Dimples argument rather than directly disputing whatever it is that you have said in this thread thus far.

Even at average wages you are still looking at at least 50% above the median for the rest of the UK, and substantially more than that in many of the coal regions, including Stoke if Dimples experience is anything to go by.
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It still beggars belief that this £800 figure was actually earned, certainly this was in no way prevalent and this being the case would Dimple not be a tad unfair to feel so much antipathy towards the miners?, even accepting this overtime and bonuses are true a tiny amount of people would earn this. Oil workers always earned more as did other sectors, odd that there seems to be a desire among people on here to paint miners as greedy and not deserving.
 
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