limeyphil:
mines were not closed in the 60’s and 70’s.
there were however many mergers. so there was the same amount of mines, but less companies running them.
Sorry Phil, have to disagree. Between 1964 and 1970, 277 pits were closed. I accept that some would’ve been merged, and some exhausted, but I stand by my initial statement.
BTW it was all run by one company then… and IMO that was part of the problem.
It’s not how many pits were closed it’s wether we had an actual industry that mattered.So how many people were employed in and how many tonnes of coal was produced by the British mining industry between 1964-1979 compared to how many people are employed in and how many tonnes are produced by it now .
well fair play to these drivers at least they have got the ■■■■■■■■ to fight for there terms and conditions ,and just to roll over and get screwd .whar ever happens you aint getting cheaper fuel thats a fact.
Carryfast:
Idiots the lot of em.The question isn’t who was it’s who would/should have been,from the time when it all started going pear shaped during the 1970’s.Probably a Labour and Conservative coailtion with Peter Shore and Enoch Powell as leaders whereas what we actually ended up with was a bunch of tossers from Wilson and Callaghan to Thatcher and Blair who all seem to have made a great job of looking after the interests of every other country except our own and now to add insult to injury we’ve got zb Cam and Clegg.
That’s just wishful thinking, as is your comments below about whether or not we had an industry that matters. No good having an industry if it’s losing money hand over fist, and that’s exactly what it was doing. I’ve done jobs for the NCB, shifting crates of machinery from one pit to another just to use up the budget allocation in case they didn’t get it the following year. Pilfering from pits was rife, ask any ex-miner; I don’t particularly blame them for it, human nature being what it is, but the fact remained it was so easy to do. Any industry that’s nationalised loses touch with reality, just look at the ■■■■-up that is MOD procurement.
Where I do agree with you is that we spend far too much time and money gifting aid to places like India, ignoring the fact that whilst we’re feeding their starving poor and curing their lepers, their billionaires have bought up our steelworks and motor industry. That’s just plain bloody crazy.
Carryfast:
Idiots the lot of em.The question isn’t who was it’s who would/should have been,from the time when it all started going pear shaped during the 1970’s.Probably a Labour and Conservative coailtion with Peter Shore and Enoch Powell as leaders whereas what we actually ended up with was a bunch of tossers from Wilson and Callaghan to Thatcher and Blair who all seem to have made a great job of looking after the interests of every other country except our own and now to add insult to injury we’ve got zb Cam and Clegg.
That’s just wishful thinking, as is your comments below about whether or not we had an industry that matters. No good having an industry if it’s losing money hand over fist, and that’s exactly what it was doing. I’ve done jobs for the NCB, shifting crates of machinery from one pit to another just to use up the budget allocation in case they didn’t get it the following year. Pilfering from pits was rife, ask any ex-miner; I don’t particularly blame them for it, human nature being what it is, but the fact remained it was so easy to do. Any industry that’s nationalised loses touch with reality, just look at the ■■■■-up that is MOD procurement.
Where I do agree with you is that we spend far too much time and money gifting aid to places like India, ignoring the fact that whilst we’re feeding their starving poor and curing their lepers, their billionaires have bought up our steelworks and motor industry. That’s just plain bloody crazy.
Sometimes you have to spend a penny now to save a pound or more later on and that’s the position that the Labour government was in before the 1979 election of Thatcher and the Tory government during the early 1980’s and then she just took an axe to the whole lot and handed the whole market over to the foreign competition when she got in.Which was exactly the plan of that competition when it was using predatory pricing and dumping all helped by higher subsidies than we were paying our industry and/or cheap labour in the case of others.
Which is why everyone is now spending that pound or more on imported coal and gas for power generation etc whereas we could have been using our own coal supplies and keeping the money in the domestic economy instead of giving it away to make the foreign coal exporting countries richer at our expense.
But there’s also lots of fraud and corruption in the banking industry but that hasn’t stopped the tory zb’s from ploughing billions into the banking industry to keep it afloat although it actually produces sfa towards the country’s actual needs like fuel.
The issue of us giving away more billions in foreign aid and start up capital to places like China and India for them to then come back and take what’s left of our own country is just another symptom of the fact that we’re governed by a bunch of zb idiots and corrupt 'b’ankers.
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