80s Time Warp: 25 years ago - The Miners' Strike

[inbhirnis]

The BBC is just going out of its way to make me feel like an old fart... Interesting that they picked all black and white pics, making it look as if this all happened a VERY long time ago.

Here's a fascinating montage of images and music of a very tense time in the UK. Time for a trip to iTunes to get some of those songs, I think..

Plans by Mrs. Thatcher's Conservative government to close large numbers of pits resulted in clashes between miners' unions, those who were recruited to cross picket lines, and the police, which lasted for a year.

It was a brutal clash. With the benefit of 25 years of hindsight, it's easy to see that with coal reserves declining, the industry in Britain needed drastic reorganization, but as usual, Thatcher used a mallet when a scalpel and some empathy would have been better. A decent plan for retraining and promotion of new industries for these areas that were utterly dependent on coal would at least have shown the government was not ignoring their plight. But, trimming union power was also part of the agenda, so the mood for compromise was slight. And, Arthur Scargill, leader of the miners' union, was no angel - he used this as a way to gain national prominence and an attempt to push the Labour Party further into the control of labour unions.

The losers, of course, were the workers and those communities that depended on the industry. Well-paying jobs gone, unemployment through the roof - it would be good if the Beeb followed this up with a trip to some of the villages and towns to show what has happened in the last 25 years.

Comments

[badgerpdx.livejournal.com]

And how do most gay Americans know about the miner's strike? Billy Elliott....

[inbhirnis.livejournal.com]

That's right!

I thought the Dad was quite a nice looking chap.

[badgerpdx.livejournal.com]

Me too. Damn sexy, actually.

[tilia-tomentosa.livejournal.com]

Didn't they take mostly black and white pics at that time?

That was interesting, Roy. Thank you.

[inbhirnis.livejournal.com]

Color photography had just been invented.... :-)

Maybe they just relied on press photography at the time, which would have been black and white. Obviously, there were no websites, so they couldn't take images from that - even if web pages from 25 years ago had been preserved.

[cuboz.livejournal.com]

Growing up in New Zealand, we were heavily exposed to British politics and news, but as a young kid, I didn't really understand what was going on...

Seeing "Billy Elliot", both on screen AND on stage (and again next month in Melbourne!), gave me more insight, actually!

And yes - I watched the scene with Billy's dad in the bath over and over and over....! *slurrrrp*

[inbhirnis.livejournal.com]

Yeah - Daddy's a hot Scot... (http://us.imdb.com/name/nm0507207/) :-) Turns out he's pretty political too, and was involved in the miners' strike.

[fba.livejournal.com]

Well,Thatcher's aims were manifold. Destroying unionisation was certainly a big part of it, but it was also the start of moving Britain from a manufacturing economy to a service economy (look how well thats turned out). You have to remember that Thatcher was quite brutal and everything (including the Falklands War) was politically motivated. There is supposed to be quite a lot of high-quality (i.e. valuable) coal in some of the areas that were closed down - but the government was too interested in crushing the miners union to investigate the modernisation that would make accessing those seams feasible.

Interesting thing - there was a lot of fundraising crossover between the miners and the gay community. I guess it was a case of the different groups persecuted by Thatcher's government banding together...