I never fully understand where some get their facts from, clearly a woke perspective on the world, of ‘if I think it should be this way, it must be!’ So, to help those who weren’t around when the miners destroyed their industry and very brief potted history.
At the time of the miners strike, the British coal mining industry was unproductive, the cost for a tonne of coal was significantly higher than importing it from half way around the word, mined by the Aussys (25% higher). UK coal also had a much higher sulphur content than imported coal which had led to ‘acid rain’ over Scandinavia and the destructions of millions of trees. The UK needed to desulphur the British coal in order to reduce the acid rain. So every tonne of coal dug out of the ground required massive subsidies from the owner of British coal, the government.
So we had an industry that refused to modernise, was inefficient and its product more costly to actually use and far more costly to produce than importing the stuff. Now, any sensible person would have said, right chaps, we need to increase productivity, modernise and make our coal economically viable. We need to ensure than all the poor people in the UK can buy out coal, support out industry and not be in fuel poverty. Well that’s is exactly what Ian McGregor tried to do…..and the Union dug its heels in and refused to accept any change. In fact the Union had already achieved a 43% wages increase in 1972 under labour and was again pushing for a further exorbitant wage increase. The Union believed that by freezing the population, and turning the lights out (coal fired power stations) it would force the government under public pressure to back down. Well, it didn’t. The union shot itself and its members in its head, and never ever recovered from it. As a consequence, despite the world wide need for coal, the British industry and all the supporting company’s died a very rapid death.
