My favourite PSB song. It's so tragically confident and captures the promise and the reality for those kids going dowb the pit for the first time. It's so powerful.
Watching this shortly after the last coal fired power station closed here in the UK. We have moved on to better things, but respect is due to the role played by coal in our society for over a century.
The footage of the large headstock is of 'Big A', formerly a landmark of Hem Heath Colliery, Staffordshire, England. The colliery opened in 1924, closed in 1996 and the headstock was demolished shortly after.
Leaving towns where unemployment lead to enforced idleness, poverty, drug dependency and crime. The unemployed were encouraged to claim incapacity benefit, a scam that manipulated the jobless figures in the government’s favour. The children born to those families saw emasculated fathers living on state handouts, thought it was normal and the pattern was set. The result was the “Jeremy Kyle” generation and the “Benefit Stick.” Thatcher claimed to want to stop state dependency among the British public yet she left millions of people in exactly that position. Christ knows why people still venerate her, she did more damage to this country than the sodding Luftwaffe.
@@joolzfunkster Fuck that place the blame where it's appropriate, Thatcher and the Tories got rid of the coal industry as part of their continuing efforts to sell off the UK's public assets for profit. Blaming someone for standing up for their co-workers and communities is nonsense.
@@joolzfunksterThatcher didn't need to kill communities and discard the men and families in such a brutal and callous way. Then again, since the industrial revolution started, it's been the same for all workers. Scargill and other union leaders were justified in shouting about it, but it did no good.
Thatcher didn't kill the coal industry. It was dead in 1945, but the British refused to accept it. They held on to the familiar stuff, like with so much other industry, imagining the world would go back to what it used to be. That the world would still want what Britain had always produced. By the 80s, years of rampant industrial action was adding to it, like a corpse trying to commit suicide. There is a reason coal suddenly, massively imploded over the course of one strike. She did not kill something that was alive and thriving. The great shame is not having a plan for those areas and people affected, though. Although I suspect people forget how poor Britain actually was in the 70s and 80s.
Public Service Broadcasting are one of the most important socio-politically active bands around at the moment. I don't really care whether one is left or right - just take an active interest and don't sit on your hands!
Great music. Both political parties treated mining communities with distain, neglected them, and neither did anything to regenerate the area's or bring in new employment. The legacy of neglect lives on, the North, the Midlands and Wales. Both political parties failed the citizens of GB. Always obsessed with short term votes rather than long term goals, and the metropolitan elite, who wouldn't know hard work, even if danced naked around a room in front of them.
Been looking forward to the visuals from this one since I saw it at leeds o2 last year. Wonderful job guys. With regards to this film, the ending really shows that what was lost when the mines were shut down was not just the jobs for these people but a whole community. How many young men who would have joined their colliery brass band never did because they had to go elsewhere for work?
That's I think where they went wrong. The way I see it, it wasn't all that bad that the mines were shut down, that would have happened inevitably. Its the fact that they didn't provide the workers with new jobs to transition into afterwards, left them to their fate.
A late thank you message to these men and the many like them who did that thing called mining, it would have kept me warm when I was born in the late 80's much appreciated. Yes we need coal, let's go!
Can't wait for the day it's no longer needed. It served our civilization in our industrial infancy. But now.. we need to find a new answer and soon. Awesome history lesson.
Wales was, for a time that seems short in a general history of britan, the center of the country, its coal and metal mining was incredibly important, to a degree no government has admitted, and for the thatcher government to just leave Wales in the sate they did was despicable
And now with potential blackouts we need our mainly Welsh boys in hard hats and coal sodden faces even more so, such a short minded thing to do to cut our nose to spite our face and not even re train the areas to the latest power tech to create a bunch of developers and engineers for the future, it feels like we will have to sod being green and efficient and open up our plants again, it's a shame we won't produce our own unless we are extremely desperate, how Maggie neolibrialism has put us on our knees and ironically made us more needy of the welfare of others.
An even sadder part is this country does have the capacity to make vast amounts of cleaner energy, we just chose to instead close all the coal mines with no real effort to provide for the people put out of work and then not bother to reach the energy production we are capable of cleanly.
What they did to all our production based communities, from the farmers in our greenhouses and fields to our lot in our factories to our hard grafters in pits and fixing jobs... lost the past two and a bit generations and fucked ther society around them...
Maggie did untold damage to the fabric of British society - I don't care if we needed to change (tbh we probably did) but there was different ways of achieving it
It was a horrible and also hard graff as a job there's no denying it, alas it gave men an almost guaranteed pay packet and a community a purpose. A town or village needs an identity. I hope he's smiling down on this earth right now
I know I am replying to my comment an all but I've gone back to this brilliant song and I've been re reading the comments and I feel the need to clarify, this comment has nothing to do with race or heritage, and everything to do with politics, community, economics, a settled place in life and pride in who you are.
DEEP Green misanthropy! Also the coal miners did not just have nuclear families their clubs were self policing, a society within a society, a high trust low crime place to be.
It is interesting how at some point the video was alternating between frames of pit men (hustling in dirt, covered with black wet dust) and glamour ladies (wearing hoses over a smooth-as-satin skin and wearing cologne). There is a hidden message in this contrast. I do not know how many of you noticed, but this says: Man has contributed so much to your happiness. Appreciate that, next time you hate on men.
It isn't something sexistic behind the pictures but the intention to compare hard labour with a luxerious life style, those two are quite contrary to eachother. We know what happend to the miners, when it wasn't longer competitive with other coal and energy sources. Those intended and shown contrasts also criticises our behavior, in the name of luxory and convenience we forget the "dirty secret" behind it, why can we afford nice clothes, parfume and travelling around the world? Because we use so much energy, an energy which has an effect on the people and now we know much better, even effects the global climate - and all that, not for the better. In addition to that, the speakers words are very noticable - a promise of 400 years or more of coal, work and welth, there was no critics or sensible reasoning, just advertisment or propaganda. So in the end this special music piece combines so much, its content is so meaningful and shows us to be careful about those who promisses all of the world but never mention the downsides.
@@Cheerios3000 I am saying this in the light of some modern women who are quick to say the relationship between man and woman have always been the one of oppression. But they fail to see how much men have contributed to women’s lifestyle as a whole. ‘Contribution’ being the key word here. It does not mean women have not contributed their quarter. The more I watch this band, the more I get a male fetish and the more I enjoy the masculine mystic. The more I see videos of jobs or career that provides essential services to women, jobs and career that women generally shy away from due to the inherent high risk and mortality rate, such as drilling an oil rig, fixing high tension cable power systems, building ship, building dams, etc.
@@ivausateousa9948 It's just showing the history. As PSB always does. Around this time, many men had hard jobs while women were mainly stay-at-home or in the entertainment industry. That's changed somewhat nowadays but that's neither here nor there. The reason women are saying that (and have been saying that for a while) isn't because they don't understand that men provided. It's because women have been protesting for a long time that they can also provide, and historically, men ignored and dismissed this notion. There were historically very few nations run by women and not due to them being unfit or incompetent - but to due to the masculine belief that only physically strong and emotionally absent men could handle the responsibility. Some take it too far and make their message about hating men, but what do you expect. There's extremists with any movement, no matter how sensical the original idea was. As long as you just do your part to treat people with equality and unbiased respect, there's no need to worry about what others think of men.
