Miners dispute | Arthur Scargill | Roy Lynk | Miners Strike | TV Eye | 1985 

Welcome to capitalism- the notts mines closed in 2015.

The UDM if privatisation had gone as planned were going to get rid of NACODS union to run the Collieries themselves.

Notts were going it alone with or without a national ballot. The area incentive scheme proved that

@@markwoodland2886 Thanks for replying. I do think not having a national ballot was a huge mistake, it gave the NUM's enemies, from Thatcher to Kinnock, an easy weapon. Having said that, they'd soon have found something else with which to batter the NUM - 'support' for Notts going back to work (as you say) being an example.

you cut straight to the point, they would never have honoured any national ballot in favour of action..the motivation was that Scargill was fighting on issues that had no relevance for them...they were wrong...

@@kailashpatel1706 Hi, thank you. Yes indeed. I wonder though whether it would have been better for the Labour Party if Kinnock had supported the strike. It couldn't have been worse as it turned out - two deserved humiliations in 1987 and 92! And today of course we have Starmer failing to support the rail workers. I suspect that will turn out to be a bad move too.

@@markwoodland2886 from what I know is that the Yorkshire Area NUM had Scargill, when he won the President job NUM,the Nottinghamshire Area didn't want a left wing President in power ?

So what about about the fact it was the cheapest deep dug coal in EU ?

@@KKTR3 The EU was not created until November 1993.

@@JamesRichards-mj9kw nit picking

How refreshing to read the comments and see someone talking sense- what you have said here is totally true.

With SCARGILL in charge divided we fall as have been proved .

With Colonel Gaddafi...? 🙄

@@_Ben4810 President of Libya

Your family has profited from everything the old Labour Movement fought for. And now what has North Notts got? (1) Sports Direct and Amazon jobs - no contract, no pension, no redundancy payments, no sick pay, no unions (2) private landlords and a lack of council housing (3) lots of Eastern Europeans, who came over because of the collapse of communism, that had kept their parents in work.

@@grahamjohn678 slightly racist! Where did the Libyan and Russian money go? Nice place Arthur had.

@@Intravenusdimilo slightly racist? how? what was racist in this guys comment? you virtue signalling politically correct fool

Are you going to talk about them kids on drugs in them places ,are you talking about them kids who didn’t make it out to university and now work in a sports direct warehouse,?

The strike if it had been supported by Notts miners or not would have failed and the only thing it did was weaken the industry and accelerate its decline, because deep mined coal was simply not going to be economic in the UK or the wider world in the coming decade, as Trump demonstrated by giving subsidies and lowering safety standards to cut cost, but after four years there was less coal being mined and less miners in the USA.

The problem was , they could fetch coal from the other side of the world far cheaper than it could be produced here..the master tactician Scargill failed to get his troops together, and played into the hands of a tory government bent on curbing his power. People like Lynk sprang up and whether they wanted to or not, him and Scargill helped Thatcher close pits faster than she could have dreamed of.

@@Mark-vq5dz I completely agree with you.

I guess you had to be there Terry, requests for a ballot were turned down, even the NUM of Notts leaders like Richardson and Chadburn asked for one, before they were intimidated/browbeaten into toeing Scargills line. I remember 4 months into the strike playing cricket in Derbyshire and in the next field there were about 150 men talking about going back to work, and some said they were too frightened, 'as you know what will happen' etc etc. He picked his fight at the wrong time, could have put Cortonwood into the review procedure which would have taken 3 months at least, and gathered his men together. Instead he tried to bully folk out, and in Notts the people are stubborn, as in Leicester, Staffordshire and the North West. I felt for those who believed in what they did, and still do, but he and Thatcher , and cheap import costs were the perfect storm. As for predicting closures, it didn't take a brain surgeon to work out we were in a job where so many pits didn't make money. In South Notts in particular, people were earning paltry bonuses, literally pence per shift. We wanted a ballot, were swamped by pickets immediately, and men were attacked in the car parks as they got out of their cars to go in to work on many occasions......with things like that, they had zero chance of getting a strike vote. I recall the day we had a vote, as I drove in, for a mile and a half, bulk freight lorries were backed up waiting to be filled with coal and I could see the lights of 2 trains waiting also to be loaded. I voted, to strike btw!!, came out of the pit at the end of the shift, and the tip was empty, every bit had been taken, i'll never forget that. Bentinck Colliery 1984. She waited for him, triggered him, and destroyed him....in the end he was a man suing the NUM for his Barbican flat...Champagne socialist.

@@Mark-vq5dz Brilliant description of the those times..Scargill was a tyrant who turned families and good men against each other.A nasty far left rabble rouser and no more.

Hardly.

He was only right about the EU.

Coal mining should have been phased out during the 1960s.

Yup I agree Thatchers hair always looked like she had been dragged thru a hedge backwards

Hang about, weren't you the people who gave us the skinheads? The hair dressers, or🤔 maybe sheep shearers had to find a job somewhere during those times.

hahaha brilliant

Coal mining should have been phased out during the 1960s.

You talking about Scargill?

Not true

True but it was 5 million

@hffp1 Nice work when you can get it

I read somewhere that Arthur tried to purchase the flat on the cheap so he could re sell it for treble the price…

Scabs!

And as far as the 'Notts' miners are concerned,they're from Mansfield and not to be trusted.And i live in Nottinghamshire!

Scargill began a fight he could not win.

I never wanted to vote on another man's job,

@@paulmchugh7600 The Ballot would have been won. United and with sympathy and support in the Country. You would have won in weeks .

Spencerite type area would have still scabbed. Anyway Yorkshire coalfield lasted longer than Notts. So there you have it.

@@andrewfincher4435 You are wrong 😑!!! The Notts miners adhered to the overtime ban all through the strike and would have joined the strike. If they had been a Democratic ballot instead of intimidation , the miners would have had much more support in the Country. “There you have it”. Should have had a Ballot !!!

Never crossed a picket line and I'm wrong....now ain't that rich...Ive become used to selfish I'm alright Jack attitudes. The rest is history....Solidarity

Labour tried to prevent democracy in 2016-19.

Your joking right, the man lied more than anybody, and took the country into illegal strikes, whilst.

@@almostanengineer scab

Yeah course he did he just feathered his own nest.

Notts miners were fools, big incentive production bonuses / job security - they got shafted as well. National ballot would Not have made a difference

Coal industry for whom exactly? To stock pile under a nationalised coal industry?

Probably that lifetime pension and and that flat in Central London that was part of the deal of being President of the Union of miners. I’m a capitalist but working class. We need unions to keep the bosses in check but these clowns from this period messed it all up. Now employees have no rights and redundancy within a month because no one trusts unions growing up in the 70’s.

@@mrlotusmic When you say you're a 'capitalist', that would imply that you have substantial private corporate capital, and that you have a say in how capital is used to create profit - 'working class' people have 'no say' as to how corporate capital is spent and how company policy is directed

I’m a capitalist and very proud of it

Yes

He's a tyrrant

Yes, we did. It's much better now that we've sold it all off to the world's billionaires.

You did not live through this shit. I did -what has come since is nothing to do with what what went before - the miners winning would not have changed the billionaires - but it made life better for us average schmucks.

@@benjaminprentice7186 It didn't. It made it worse.

It was painful & petty...

Labour closed more mines than the Tories ever did

@@jaywhyeff3797 She set up a lot of the problems communities are experiencing today as well, all for short term gain, prime example being the housing crisis, I mean look at communities now, nobody talks to each other, neighbor against neighbor, look after no1 mentality, also I don’t see other heavily debted countries massacres there manufacturing base like we did here in the U.K.

Let's open the mines!

@@HenningDiesel importing it from the likes of Australia like we did for 20 years seemed crazy idea, but to be fare Im all for the U.K. getting rid of cheap coal because climate change.

@@jaywhyeff3797 You forgot to mention that she and the conservatives were the ones that sold all the good housing stock off for pennies 85% discount in the first place, and failed to rebuild enough back, result being a huge shortage in housing, resulting in the crisis we have today, now we playing catch up to build enough housing.

I agree the enemy with in Just that , that was the university’s not lads digging coal

But all those corrupt colliery pit bosses who for years took backhanders & kickbacks from contractors weren't thieves...???

I think he has lost it, but he made a cool profit when he brought his council flat, worth £2 million for just over £1 million. So much for wanting to help his people. Just in it for himself, like when he was president of the NUM, driving around in flash cars. He was then and now minted for life.

​@dcarter3921 at the start of the strike he had a 2 up 2 down terraced house , after the strike he had a 4 bed bungalow with land . Probably bought with money donated for the miners from other country's. No miner received a penny

Do you believe in democracy ?

Cynthia, learn punctuation will you? Your contribution reads like jumbled none sense. The only single punctuation mark in the entire contribution, is a full stop you managed to remember at the end.

@@tracybeckett4107 Dont fuss...its You Tube.

The end result was that he ended up in a big house and no Union . Today we use nuclear and renewable power, you could see that as far back as the late seventies coal was not going to be used as fuel for power stations. The 1984-85 miners strike did not stop anything, it closed those mines down even faster . For a long while the NUM should have worked with both the Labour and Conservative governments to help get mine workers retrained in other fields so that community’s did not get damaged because of the mines being shut down. Today there’s 500 years worth of coal under central Britain which will never be used because of climate change. So many workers could have been helped into other jobs , but politicians and unions got in the way ………. I blame them both, and many suffered needlessly when common sense should have took presidence .

That comment you made are some of The best & most constructive I’ve seen written about all of this tragic set of circumstances that took place… Shame the powers that be didn’t have your views & outlook… They were too opinionated on both sides..

They beat us because they stock piled millions of tonnes of coal Thatchers government wasn't going to go like in the seventys once bitten and all that cobblers

@@nigelkent-ux7ye we were grateful that they did stockpile coal, so that the nation couldn't be blackmailed/coerced by the miner's because we would have to give in to all demand's that the miner's made (because we would have all froze to death in the dark) it's just a shame that we couldn't have stockpiled Teacher's, Nurses & junior Doctors.lol

And what did Roy Lynk achieve?

Lynk got shafted

Now lives in bitterness due his betrayal

Lynk is no hero, even the notts miners know there got shafted by Roy and Maggie , but once a scab always a scab