The Miners Strike

[SLUDGE FACTORY]

One by product of the demise of the pits was the flooding of the labour market, particularly construction. Certainly not knocking the ex miners but the redundancy pay/severance pay, whatever it was called, subsided retraining enabled them to square up their debts and make a fresh start. The ‘go to’ industry was construction. Cardiff and I’d imagine places like Sheffield, Newcastle, Barnsley etc were hit by the working man’s worst nightmare ‘Glut of labour/lack of work’. We still had our ‘city’ mortgages & bills to pay and, unfortunately, peace work was the norm on sites, the ‘new tradesmen’, fresh from their crash courses were undercutting us left, right & centre due to their relatively lower outgoings. Our little Saturday fiddles went west as well, especially for valley based brickies, chippies, for years the miners had the cash to have these minor house improvements done (it made the world go around), now they were doing them themselves.

I stress that I’m not knocking the lads at all, they had to do what they had to do but I lived through it and the situation in my trade was dire, we’d done four year apprenticeships and the six month diluties (as we called them) were killing us. Where we’d once had the whip hand it now became a dog eat dog world, negotiating money had gone out of the window, it was take it or leave it.

All part of that woman’s master plan in my opinion, keep the workers in fear for their jobs. Legitimate unrest in the workplace completely quelled, 15% interest rates for those of us with mortgages meaning a fair wedge to be shelled out monthly. People with a council house having the safety net of rent subsidies should work dry up being encouraged to buy said council house to put that monthly noose around their necks.

We had the added blow of East Moors closing in Cardiff as well which flooded the labour market a few years previously as well. The knock on effect of the crushing of the pit men & steelworkers reached far & wide not just in their communities.

Ironic though how the greedy and ruthless attitudes of those in power of those days has come back and bitten society on the arse. Apprenticeship & training schemes were obliterated, the short sighted reason being that it wasn’t cost effective having youngsters making mistakes, working at a slower pace, having time off site to attend college etc. The result being now that decent tradesmen are at a premium and demanding the type of remuneration that must sicken any of those advocates of Thatcherism who are still around who wanted the likes of me kept firmly in my place in the pecking order.

So, the miners strike did define the intervening years, no long term investment in pit communities to provide sustainable long term employment to replace the coal face. Quangos like the WDA milking money off their government mates , building phoney units on ‘made up’ trading estates, then disappearing when the grants dried up and these units employing low paid staff changing hands and types of business many times over the years.

Bit of a long rant for a Saturday morning, sorry for that. F*ck Thatcher & Up The City.

Dreadful woman . It wasn't just the miners strike.

The sale of council houses pitted those who could afford against those who could not and was the start of sink estates where the most vulnerable were shoved ......they couldn't be offered decent council housing .....that had all been sold

Privatisation of everything that wasn't nailed down

Private finance in the NHS and social care ....leaving the mess we have today where profit is put before people

Thanks Thatcher

[splott parker]

Dreadful woman . It wasn't just the miners strike.

The sale of council houses pitted those who could afford against those who could not and was the start of sink estates where the most vulnerable were shoved ......they couldn't be offered decent council housing .....that had all been sold

Privatisation of everything that wasn't nailed down

Private finance in the NHS and social care ....leaving the mess we have today where profit is put before people

Thanks Thatcher

The social cost cannot be measured. The bastards were clever enough to run the country, yeah right, but not clever enough to find an alternative solution to the loss of heavy industry, then again did they want to? Permanent, long term employment is vital to everyday life, gives people confidence, a few bob in their pockets, the dignity of not relying on handouts. Youngsters can’t be riding around football pitches on mopeds at three in the morning if they’ve got to be up for 6 till 2.

Thing is now though, as the years have gone by, relying on handouts doesn’t bear the stigma it used to (and shouldn’t I may add), I fear it’s gone too far and it’ll never be got back. There’s a couple of lost generations all due to that woman’s vision. I often say that I’m glad I lived in the era I’ve lived in, even though in my previous post I bemoaned those dark Thatcher years. I fear things aren’t going to improve any time soon and society is going to continue to crumble unless we get a government that can grab things by the scruff of the neck and drag the country back to decency. The gap between the haves and have nots is staggering and a lot of the haves are among the shadier section of the population.

I’ve not got the answer but there’s got to be some clever f*ckers with the brains to sort things out. I’ve no faith in anyone in politics at the moment sadly.

[bobh]

The social cost cannot be measured. The bastards were clever enough to run the country, yeah right, but not clever enough to find an alternative solution to the loss of heavy industry, then again did they want to? Permanent, long term employment is vital to everyday life, gives people confidence, a few bob in their pockets, the dignity of not relying on handouts. Youngsters can’t be riding around football pitches on mopeds at three in the morning if they’ve got to be up for 6 till 2.

Thing is now though, as the years have gone by, relying on handouts doesn’t bear the stigma it used to (and shouldn’t I may add), I fear it’s gone too far and it’ll never be got back. There’s a couple of lost generations all due to that woman’s vision. I often say that I’m glad I lived in the era I’ve lived in, even though in my previous post I bemoaned those dark Thatcher years. I fear things aren’t going to improve any time soon and society is going to continue to crumble unless we get a government that can grab things by the scruff of the neck and drag the country back to decency. The gap between the haves and have nots is staggering and a lot of the haves are among the shadier section of the population.

I’ve not got the answer but there’s got to be some clever f*ckers with the brains to sort things out. I’ve no faith in anyone in politics at the moment sadly.

agree 100% Bastard of a woman, she was.