In 1984 my 2 grandads and uncle were all miners.Sadly all passed away now I miss them all so much and that era..To whoever reads this I pray you and your family have a good life and happiness 💟
The sad truth here is that successive governments over the previous century or more share the responsibility for the tragedy brought about by the decline of the coal mining industry. They allowed whole communities to form around a single source of employment which was always going to come to an end, with inevitable consequences.
@@basicallywellfed3453 and it was getting increasingly expensive and inefficient to mine out. Also, who on earth though would want the coal industry still running these days with the level of pollution it caused.
I used to work in the coal industry from being 17 now 60 I always said that the pits should be mothballed and not filled in with concrete as they would eventually become viable. When i said that in 1985 foriegn coal was £70 a tonne I'm told it is now £700 a tonne !!
Neil Gordon Kinnock, now Lord Kinnock was born on 28 March 1942 ( age 82 ) in Tredegar, Wales, United Kingdom. Educated at Cardiff University. At the 1983 General Election he was Leader of the Labour party and leader of the Opposition.
Scargill did not enjoy the support of all the miners, and this is why he refused to have a ballot. He was, ultimately, selfish. And it is because of his selfishness that they lost.
@@alunhughes2632 whatever you think of the Notts miners, not offering a ballot was a ridiculous act of stupidity. If a ballot had been called then the strike could have been won. Instead, it made the strike illegal and they walked straight into Thatcher's trap. It's the kind of stupidity illustrated in your comment that lost the miners everything.
@@zeddeka disagree. Never would have won. She had stock piled coal and plunged thousands of people in to poverty. The first rule of the union is you don't cross a picket line. Regardless of the stance.
Having listened to the word salad coming from Mr Kinnock, you can see why Thatcher won... whether you agree with her or not, she ran rings around her opposition..
Kinnock in a really bad place here. he later said that part of the reason he was so verbose was because he had to get through the interviews while glossing over the real state the labour party was in, and the very difficult position they were in with regard to the miners.
he didn't understand modern communication. Public speaking has degraded substantially since then. We now have the monstrosity of Boris Johnson and Donald Trump.
@@zeddeka He was not verbose. It was a right wing slur used against him. It is not hard to follow what he is saying in the slightest. I think he should have backed the miners and I do not agree at all with his views of Scargill but he was not verbose. The strike would have been won if Labour and the TUC had backed it. Just like 1926 the miners were betrayed by their own side.
What a disgusting man 'Lord' Kinnock is. Paved the road to Blairism and then got his reward as an EU Commissioner, where his main act was to ensure the dismissal of a worker exposing corruption. A truly nasty piece of work whom most people have probably rightly forgotten.
It was easy peasy for Thatcher. Scargill didn't care about pits, he wanted a revolution and used the miners as cannon fodder. He split the miners and the labour movement, left Kinnock dangling. And with all those stockpiled coal reserves Thatcher was always going to hold out longer. In the end Scargill came crawling back. But then, unlike the miners, he had a job for life as NUM president.
Scargill did no such thing. The labour movement let the miners down. The strike was close to being won when the pit deputies were on the verge of going on strike in the autumn of 1984, regardless of stockpiling of coal. 'Scargill came crawling back' makes no sense. Scargill is a working class hero and history will judge him favourably. Everything he said proved true. The miners were fighting for jobs and community, which the Conservatives destroyed. Even Norman Tebbit has said they may have gone too far in not understanding or anticipating the consequences of their economic policies. The defeat of the miners was the most significant event in industrial relations of the twentieth century and has had far reaching consequences still being played out today. It was about destroying union power and the tragedy is that it succeeded.
@King Royal I understand there are climate friendly ways to extract and treat coal though I am no expert in the science of it. Coal is still imported and many other countries use it, not to justify any means of extraction that damages the environment. It is the number one existential threat to the planet. But this is not the point; the Conservatives were determined to break union power and if not the miners' strike, it would have been another industry. The destruction of trade union rights is one of the key reasons why the cost of living crisis is so acute because wages are so low while money has been transferred from the poor to the rich for the past forty years. For that, we have Thatcher's misguided and cruel ideology to thank.
@King Royal I am aware of this but the strike was used for political purposes by the Conservatives and there is no getting away from the dreadful impact this had on society and mining communities where little was done to replace the jobs lost as crime and hopelessness replaced stable communities.
@@eightiesmusic1984 That is exactly what Scargill did. I grew up in a working class ex mining town and Scargill's name was and is mud there. He was no hero.
@@CA-ee1et What did he do? He fought for jobs and community, not even money. The cause was noble and defeat of the strike an utter tragedy. The TUC and Labour Party should have backed it. History will judge Scargill favourably. I am aware that he has his detractors but the idea that his name is mud in a particular town is nonsense. I daresay many of his detractors could be found in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, where the UDM was strong. Strike breakers will, of course, want to make excuses for their own betrayal. History would have been very different if the strike was won. Neoliberalism would have been stopped in its tracks. Destruction of the power of working people via unions was a key objective of the project.
Misunderstood. He meant to stop pits from closing under the job losses planned by Thatcher on the basis of the false claim that the pits were uneconomical.
@@besserman1 He walked a line between outright support and wanting to show solidarity. The Labour Party should have been unequivocal in supporting the strike, of course. I think Kinnock calculated that it would play into the hands of the Conservatives and the media if he had supported the strike, and undermine his efforts to make Labour electable for 1987. I think it was the wrong call at the time and from a historical perspective, and that Kinnock moved Labour too far to the right thus paving the way for Blairism from 1997. Thatcher said New Labour was her greatest creation and with tragic consequences she was right.
@@besserman1 Perhaps he shouldn't have been put in the position he was. The miners were fighting for their jobs and communities; but there was one man who thought he would use the miners to try and pull down the government. A man who now resides in a luxury flat in the Barbican.
Kinnock tied himself in knots over the miners strike. He knew that Scargill was leading then disaster and that a ballot needed to be held, but his sentimental loyalty to the miners prevented him from speaking out more clearly
