Miners Strike | Pit Closures | Strikes | Trade unions | Showdown at Cortonwood | TV Eye | 1984 

In some areas, yes. These miners lived this type of life no matter what era they lived in. But most of 1980’s elsewhere was loud, colorful and very wild.

It's called the tory era.

Even do I’m not English, or living in England, I’m fascinated by this show

@@georgescuion428 Same!

Pittsburgh Pennsylvania?

Crazy I could never imagine it as a shopping industrial estate 😮

Yes I agree with you Alan the mines struggled to get the coal out as you know and the government were buying it from Poland in bulk. My dad used to work in the workshops at Elsecar he got the option just before the strike to move down the road to cortonwood but didn't because they all knew it was about to close so rather than be out of work he stayed at Elsecar only to be made redundant after the strike. So I think it was a waste of time stopping at a pit that closed without prior warning from the office.

You wern,t a miner

While scargill went on to be a millionaire.

I'm sorry for all you went through. So glad you never regretted the decision to stand by your brothers, your an inspiration. I'm a woman and my husband knows I'm all for the workers and Solidarity to all who feel they have no other option but to strike. I'm part of The People's Assembly and fully support the RMT and pain them a visit on a picket in Manchester. Solidarity ✊

@Bessie Hillum bigot comment

@Bessie Hillum haha the bigot comment was in regards to what you said about women, bigot. I know all those proposals regarding trade union legislation, they are all bad. Union power is the only way that labour can actually fight for any kind of rights and you and i both know that its just going to suppress any kind of working class voice anymore, but thats what youre in favour of so good for you??? (I dont actually know why you bought it up or what you want me to say about that??) All ill say on that is this - the right to strike and industrial action is a pillar of a democratic and liberal society. When you take away the tiny amount of rights that working people have, you create authoritarian rule. I could care less if you know me or not, youre still a bigot. Say that to more women, i hope more people call you a bigot.

Get over it.

@@tonytomlinson5869 guess you were not involved much if at all

Easy way close pits & pay people to stay home ..sounds about right

That's South Yorkshire for you.

To me it is nostalgic, controversially and ironically the pits closures put 25 years on my dad's life due to better health choices.

@@ianraybold3513 possibly

What is going to happen in Australia is the same as Britain because nobody is going to want your coal not even the Indians and Chinese, the stone age did not end because we ran out of stone, in the same way the coal age is ending because we have better sources of energy now.

Labour closed more mines than the Tories

Some poor people built a house and they called it the labour party they lived in the house for a short while but pretty soon squatters moved in from the universities from the intellectuals from the middle-class -they put the poor people into the basement they keep them down there they let them out to vote just to keep the house standing

@@grahamariss2111 you’re living in cloud cuckoo land even if you write a good story

@@KKTR3 g You’ve summed it up perfectly. 👍

They were undercut by EU country’s and the cost of materials ie aluminium was high and allso electricity prices went through the roof and it was hard for them to get electricity at a competitive price from there supplier. To melt aluminium uses an enormous amount of electricity

@@diggmore1362 the answers are much deeper than that. British industry has been in decline since the 1800s. undercut? No. The fact is that we prices ourselves out of markets because we were so inefficient and, as James Callaghan said, "paying ourselves more than the value of what we produce". Even now, the average British worker is 20% less efficient than the average German. The reasons lie deep in our culture. Chronic underinvestment, appalling levels of skills and education in both workers and management, short termism and an inherent conservatism that means we are very slow to adopt new methods and move into new industries. Andrew Carnegie, the American steel magnet, said over 120 years ago "The reason why America and Germany is making Britain a back number is because Britain is still using machinery and methods that are 20 years out of date."

I'm afraid the problem is a lot older than the EU. The answers are much deeper than that. British industry has been in decline since the 1800s. The fact is that we priced ourselves out of markets because we were so inefficient and, as James Callaghan said, "paying ourselves more than the value of what we produce". Even now, the average British worker is 20% less efficient than the average German. The reasons lie deep in our culture. Chronic underinvestment, appalling levels of skills and education in both workers and management, short termism and an inherent conservatism that means we are very slow to adopt new methods and move into new industries. Andrew Carnegie, the American steel magnet, said over 120 years ago "The reason why America and Germany are making Britain a back number is because Britain is still using machinery and methods that are 20 years out of date."

@@th8257 one of the things that I was saying in my first comment was that as a teenager in the early 1980s with the industrial decline and then miners strike was how was I ever going to get a job . The foundry that I worked at survived to 2010 it closed with about 100 employees. I had moved on about 18 years before. They could not compete with other company’s. what did not help is that as part of a group of foundry’s they had been stripped of investment in latter years

Fast forward to 2021 and ask yourself why anyone would want to work down a coal mine anymore. Hard graft and an early death from silicosis.

Don’t see any Welsh miners in this documentary being supportive either.

@@jasonallen9144 Don't have a go at the Welsh boys, Jason. We had been out on strike the year before and received very little backing from the English coalfields. Now they were asking us for help, why should we ?. But we did , and at the end when we all went back, South Wales still had 93% out on strike, more than any English region.

@@alunhughes2632 Don't slag off the English FFS it seems like any excuse to have a go at us. There were Scottish miners too.

@@jasonallen9144 Wasn't having a go at the English boys Jason, there were only two kinds of miners in the 84/85 strike, striking miners and scabs.

​@alunhughes2632 There wouldn't have been any scabs if Scargill hadn't been working for Maggie, why would anyone, with the miners interest at heart, call a strike, with coal stocks at record high, without a national ballot and in the summer.

Firstly those reserves are of coking coal, & at a loss of £13 per tonne (in 1984 prices) the right decision was made to leave it where it was unmined...

@@_Ben4810 😎£€$¥ There is more to life

@@_Ben4810 I checked it is 2 hours ago you said - that the electricity company says I owe them £4K the gas people say I’m upto date at the moment having them paid them £2700 last year . And yes that is all today March 2024

@@_Ben4810 and your point is ? Coking coal can make electricity, and the price difference changes. But it’s not just the price on the tin , if you don’t keep the beans in tin , it’s still going to cost to feed the people something else

"But it's not just the price on the tin" 🤣🤣🤣 So you buy your beans at Harrods to safeguard the community of Knightsbridge...???🙄🙄🙄

No it’s not! It’s Sir Alastair Burnet. Look up his images

try saying that to scargill which i already have it simply falls on deaf ears & he still claims he won when all he actually did was help thatcher with the closures so the 84 strikes were for nothing cos 38 years onwards not one pit is in production cortonwood is now a retail park & just about all of them demolished

@@jasinere35 I am glad then it was a victory, because imaginechow bad a Scargill defeat would have looked like then!

We now import 6.5 million tonnes of coal a year

And Dole was 15 quid it said so your mathematics at two quid are on the wrong side of the fence straight away regardless of anything else

@@KKTR3 Errr, Only if a mine produces just one ton of coal per miner per week!

Well how do people like your grandad sell carpets if nobody has a livelihood? Thatcher replaced jobs with welfare and Major created the underclass monster that we have today. Full employment replaced with sink estates, drugs and crime, all thanks to your lady friend Thatcher and the puppet masters that used her to end full employment in the UK.

Labour closed more mines than the Tories

@@At_the_races Okay, so how do people sustain a meaningful existence without a livelihood? The mines were in decline, but what were they replaced with? Full employment was abolished and replaced with sporadic employment, self-employment and welfare. So where there was once a community of working people, is now a mass underclass littered with degradation, carelessness, violence and crime. Society gets fragmented and the wealth gap gets bigger and bigger...

@@At_the_races Thanks for your neo-liberal history lesson pal, but again livelihoods were taken away from 1979 onwards and replaced with nothing but a fragmented monopoly free market that sent large private industries overseas for the cheap labour and sub-contracted national industries into skeleton crew workforces. Creating a wider wealth gap of the have's and have not's and a whole new underclass problem, that will eventually effect everyone. Do you want to see more cutbacks, more policing cutbacks, unsafe streets, more rioting and more societal deterioration? Then you should keep worshipping thatcherite nonsense and greed, but some of us want to see a more equal society and where nobody needs to be a c**t.

@@At_the_races lol listen, when the rioting kicks off and the shit hits the fan, which it will do... show yourself and I'd love to come meet ya :)

The sheer ignorance of this comment - peoples lives and lively hoods at stake, hell a way of life even. Peoples lives are worth more than economic prosperity for the upper class torys.

@@alfielisles6097 you think we should still be mining coal in huge quantities for what purpose given that no one will buy it?

@@michaelsalt4565 people do buy it, or did still at least back then. Coal was cheaper imported and still is from China than to dig it out of the ground here. That being said we speak enough nower days of protecting british industry, so why not back then? between 1979 and 81 2 million people lost their jobs in industry with a catastrophic impact on peoples lives inducuing mass poverty! Plus if we look at todays politics it could be said that the less interaction and trade done with china the better.

@@michaelsalt4565 should be powering our coal stations and giving the working-class people good jobs mining coal/if the UK ceased to exist overnight if the whole place disappeared along with any global warming affect which is generated by the United Kingdom within seven months China would’ve taken up all of that deficit-we are pissing in a pot as regard to global warming caused by Britain and yet you’re putting the poorest people in fuel Poverty and ripping out working class jobs

That's sounds about right but I think it was the way Thatcher ( tories)did everything with that fxxx you and die sort of attutude!!!

Mrs T gave them a good hiding. Miners were complete fools to be led by the nose by Scargill. The strike was *ILLEGAL* that's all that matters.

Michael Saul We are still using coal, but now we are importing poor quality coal from distant countries, so there obviously *was* a future for coal...

@@jerrytugable yes we are still using coal. The NUM position was that coal should be mined regardless of cost and demand. That position is economically unsustainable. The option should have been a managed decline which allowed the miners and communities they lived in to move to new employment. Of course the NUM was opposed to that it was a politically motivated strike to bring down a democratically elected government. Thankfully the NUM failed and the miners paid the price for that failure, so blame the NUM for that

@@CashelOConnolly On 19 April 1984 a Special National Delegate Conference was held where there was a vote whether to hold a national ballot or not. Scargill was opposed to a national ballot as he feared he would lose the vote. So to say Scargill voted against the strike is ridiculous

@@CashelOConnolly want to try that again?

@@jerrytugable the amounts we use are tiny and ever decreasing. The reason we import it is because the stuff that was still in the UK was largely too expensive to mine out. Long before Thatcher, the British tax payer was having to subsidise coal production because it was so expensive. Coal is not like a crop. It doesn't grow back. Once it's gone, it's gone. If anything, it's the failure of many successive governments. They knew for decades that bit by bit, coal would have to be closed down. And yet they did nothing to plan for the future after that.

Calling a strike, with coal stocks at record level, without a national ballot, and in the summer, it makes you wonder who Scargill was working for, it definitely wasn't the miners.

Almost 1st

@@manatee2500 👌🏻👌🏻👌🏻

Really have ya seen price of utilities bills lately.

@@fishermansid8861 LMFAO

How many people are going to die, because can't heat their homes this winter. Let's blame Putin? . think about it.

Troll much James?

@@allwrighty100 nowt down pit bottom lad

She was tough, heath caved in. You wonder who the woman was. He was a waste of space for a Tory, As piss weak as labour. You vote Tory for strong leadership and make the tough decisions. People pick on Maggie but someone had get the .uk going again. It was a joke in the 70s.

@@martinjenkins5471 and now we import all our coal to run the last couple of coal powerstations left , amid daily gas price increases due to the market 🤣 at the mercy of a dictator in the kremlin

@@martinjenkins5471 if you wanna see what a Tory world looks like look outside in 2022

The Crazy UK! Where is the common cause, Common Strategy and Common Sense? Here we are in 2024 with the Crazy anti fossil fuels as National Policy. We had a Power Generation Body Called the Central Electricity Generating Board.. along with the Energy Secretary back in 84. The strategy should be formed from Balance/ Security and Economics as well as environment. and every interested party should be around the table including the Unions .. IT was Crazy to have 100’s of pits that were small/ exhausted and uneconomic. IT was Crazy to shut the whole Coal industry down and “Dash for Gas” -Stupid on Both counts. We as a nation were well down the road to Carbon Capture Technology for coal burning. Safety needed to be drastically improved to for the remaining Miners but it was doable! Why do we go for Irrational decisions in this country lately We are Mad

@@MrDodgedollar The coal industry had steadily declined since 1910. Nobody wanted British coal when they could buy coal much more cheaply from China and elsewhere. Coal mining in the UK would have ended anyway due to the Climate Change Act.

@@JamesRichards-mj9kwWhich Amounts to diverting Tax payers money into Energy subsidies.. My point is Energy is a Business that is the life blood of any modern economy .. In fact a third world economy too. The British government is simultaneously restricting supply, subsiding a pig in a poke… and we indirectly chopping down the worlds forests to burn in power stations.. Indirectly tearing into the earth ( Mining ironically) to get at precision metals and lithium pits with no environmental standards and child labourers! All because the people making these decisions have a degree in politics philosophy and economics; no profession, Never had a proper job and are pig ignorant!- Fact

Labour caused Brexit.

@@JamesRichards-mj9kw And David Cameron LOVES SHOWING HIS ID CARD TO THE EU! NOT!

It's good. Coal is environmental disaster