This article reads like a pastiche. The reader would be better served with more research and less regurgitation.
The manifesting trend of [youth] violent disorder, substance abuse and criminality begins in the late 1950s and continued upwards until the 1990s irrespective of the economic ups and downs of those 4 decades. Whatever caused this, it was not local coal mines closing.
The coal fields apparently did not meet Labour’s vision either because when in government that party had commissioned an even faster pit closure programme. This rather suggests it was not a party political issue but a state decision based on the widely held (and perhaps self-fulfilling) expectation that demand was going to decline no matter what; de-industrialisation it was assumed was “just going to happen”.
When the author writes “Classes were dominated and disrupted by pupils, many from mining families, who were in complete rebellion against a society that had ceased to encourage ambition in their lives”, rebellion really isn’t the right word. There was no resistance, there was only a yielding to an imagined inevitability and because that sounds rather less cool than “rebellion” we get served up the trope that they were rebelling.
In the same sentence the author also concedes (“many from mining families“) that this was not just restricted to children from families affected by mass unemployment. Many weren’t from mining families. Many were from families like David Cameron’s. Something else had happened that simply coincided with the mass unemployment in places like Stirlingshire. Quite simply, easy availability – of drugs, of alcohol – fed a self-destructive streak in humans that’s been there from the beginning. Perhaps what was different this time was a greater sense of entitlement and an easier dimissiveness of the risks (not just health or wealth, but ostracism). The bigger the safety net, the bigger the risks.
Thatcher did sort of say there was “no such thing as society” but that omits the important context: “There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people“. A socialist could have easily said the same without any remark.
I could go on, but I will finish with this. The writer is dismissive of the new jobs that came when he writes “Industrial estates sprang up offering minimum wage roles”. Well, there wasn’t a minimum wage in 1970 but if there was it would have almost certainly been the same as the minimum NCB wage. Coal mining had terrible wages, that’s why miners felt the need to strike so often. The NCB minimum weekly wage in 1970 was £16 and male average earnings were £27, a worse ratio than the national living wage and average earnings in 2022. The important difference was and remains mass media and communications increase our awareness of material disadvantages like no time before in human history. And that is of bigger importance and effect than the coal mines closing.
I think the author did his best with the article, but what is really magic are the comments. I learn so much from the comments. If the article was meant to be thought provoking, it worked. I see history writing itself, not delivered top down. Thank you, internet. As a P.S. Jeremy Paxman’s book “Black Gold” is a very informative read.
Well put. Here in the US, large cities known for manufacturing saw their factories close and jobs shipped to Mexico and overseas. Detroit was once a “blue collar paradise” where machinists could buy a nice house in the suburbs, raise a family on one salary, and send their kids to college. I invite you took look at what Detroit is now (but definitely not in person).
There are large areas all over New England once made prosperous by paper and fabric mills. The mills closed, and nothing came in to replace them. They turned into ghost towns populated by government-imposed welfare housing. Of course, generations of illegitimate births followed, right along with illicit drug use. What has happened in Appalachia is well known.
Government can’t (nor should it try) to swoop in and “rescue” 19th and 20th Century industries in this digital age. Only the private sector has the creativity and competence to do that, and it takes time. Those mill towns I mentioned? Because property is so cheap there, and many of the buildings are still standing, entrepreneurs are buying up land and real estate and starting businesses or fixing up the mills (they’re always on rivers, so it’s pretty), and opening restaurants, boutique malls, and office space. Young couples can afford to build first homes, too, which will cause them to get civically involved. Those places will be reborn, and government will have had nothing to do with it (until tax time).
One such example: https://www.winchester-nh.gov/about
‘There are large areas all over New England once made prosperous by paper and fabric mills. The mills closed, and nothing came in to replace them. They turned into ghost towns populated by government-imposed welfare housing.’
This is a half truth at best. Between the 70s and 90s there were several computer companies in the area. In fact one of the headquarters was in a building known as The Mill.
You write as if people had many more choices than they did (or, for some) do.
Martin Bollis
1 year ago
Oh for heaven sake, not another paean to the happy days of the pit village.
No mention here of the stultifying conformity of such narrow, inward looking places. No mention of the ongoing battles between the temperance people, the Presbyterian people, and those who liked to get to drunk on a Saturday, and beat the wife.
Of course when it is all swept away, the whole thing falls down a hole of drunken, drug ridden lawlessness. Well not, actually. The sons of the ones that used to beat their wives, probably lost the community discipline that might of kept them on the rails. The overwhelming majority no doubt had lesser lives, but got on with the things that teenagers do – rebel, get drunk, fight and try to have s e x. As with every society, only a proportion took that to extremes, the majority just grew up.
Of course the old, out of context, “no such thing as society,” has to come trotted out, because what would such an article be without it?
Of all the cataclysmic changes that globalisation brought about, has any been more romanticised than the loss of the pit village?
And no, I don’t deny there are huge grains of truth in it but, as with all this sort of writing, it’s unbalanced and romanticised.
The left has spent 40 years trashing every social more and moral code. Why does it persist in eulogising communities that enforced those moral codes with a rod of iron. Where’s their sympathy for all the Billy Elliots whose dads didn’t come round?
Last edited 1 year ago by Martin Bollis
Brendan O'Leary
1 year ago
Good article and very heartfelt.
But…
If the coalfields were unprofitable, would it really have been better to continue to prop them up … for how long? Or let them fade away gradually? Survive to be shut down by net zero fanatics? Did the Union really have the miners’ interests at heart or their own power? What was their solution apart from bringing down the government.
These questions bugged me at the time and still do.
Like Corbyn and Benn, Thatcher would never let the facts get in the way of ideology. Out went the Engineering baby with the communist bathwater. Ironicallyall she had to do was listed to other Volk. ( Her favourite word, afterall) Herr Kohl ran a country with profitable mines and Unions on their board. Pretty simple balance – Mine owners don’t get to kill for profit with poor safety. Miners don’t get to go to the Bierkellar, get all riled up and take on Elected Government. Thems the laws east of the Rhine.
Postwar German unions were and are nothing like UK unions.
For couple of things, the german unions see the success and profit of their employers’ business as mutually beneficial, and they’re not on a mission to bring down their government.
You can hardly accuse the owners of UK mines- the people in the form of the UK government – of “killing for profit” since they weren’t even breaking even.
Perhaps you would like to back your claim that the injury/fatality rate in UK mining was higher than in Germany with some facts. Or that it was worse between 1979 to 1991 (Thatcher) than the preceding decades.
I can’t easily find the stats here, but I would be surprised if hte UK safety record was out of line with the rest of the world or suddenly got worse after 1979.
Please share your data.
Saul D
1 year ago
Returning to the mining towns and pit villages some years ago, after about two decades away, what most struck me was the loss of ‘agency’ – doing things for yourself – the clubs, the bands, the gardens, the competitions, the pride. It felt as if everything was zombified, always waiting for the council, or the state to do things. Be it for money, or permission to breathe or go out – the leaden hands of ‘the council’ and petty officials could be felt smothering any self-help or community action with policies and paperwork. I don’t know if it’s as true now, but towns that were traditionally full of ‘doers’ started wasting away to become fragmented towns of ‘donters’.
Doug Pingel
1 year ago
It’s not just the Tories vision of modern Britain to shut the pits. A few years back a group of ex-miners wanted to re-open a drift overlooking Ebbw Vale (The head of my valley.) The local council (Labour) would have none of it – they didn’t want the dust and dirt associated with minework spoiling their nice clean town.
Alan Thorpe
1 year ago
How anybody wanted a job in a mine is beyond my comprehension. My father and his father were Yorkshire miners and my father was determined that I did not follow him into the pit, and I didn’t.
Ian McKellar
1 year ago
When I was born, my father was senior constable at Fallin and we lived there for another year or so before moving into Stirling.As it was he would on occasion have to go down the pit to investigate a fatality and prepare a report for the Procurator Fiscal.
I can remember him commenting at the time of the 1974 strike (by that time a Chief Superintendent) about Fallin pit. that in 1948 the Coal Board had opened a new face, I think called “Western Drift” with the comment that “this should give some 40-50 year’s work”. So bear in mind in the intervening years, methods of winning coal had improved so it was likely that the pit would have had to close in the mid 80s/early 90s- which it did
The Stirling coalfield was an old field and pits like Pirnall, Manor Powiis and Plean had gone by the early 1960s
Now there was one other employer in the area and that was the Royal Navy at Bandeath some three miles away at Throsk. That depot closed with the ending of the Cold War and that employed some 40-50 men.
What’s its future. Well the Carse is quite pleasant. There are some wonderful views over the river to the Ochils Basically it should be allowed to extend as a commuter village for Stirling and Falkirk/Grangemouth
JR Stoker
1 year ago
This is a rehash of a lot of lefty shouting about something that was inevitable and merely accelerated by the NUM. Let’s move on.
And Mr Newlands perhaps ought to stick to fiction unless he can improve his research
Great article especially as it’s published in the same Unherd issue as Gary Gerstle’s article on the end of neoliberalism.
Neoliberalism was supposed to replace the old manufacturing industries, and jobs depending on physical labor, with higher value jobs requiring education. Didn’t really happen. More and more young people went to university and graduated with degrees for which there was no demand. Only the IT and engineering-minded kids benefited. Communities like Fallin proliferated throughout the developed world.
Now there’s a suggestion that the post-neoliberal world will provide lots of good jobs by on-shoring (or is it re-on-shoring) jobs making microchips, PPE, and other goods deemed essential for national security and welfare. It would be a good thing if it happened, but I remain skeptical. I expect there will be a vigorous campaign to court developing Asian countries not yet under Beijing’s sway. They have the potential to do our essential manufacturing and at a fraction of the cost of western workers. Plus ça change…
It’s fine for Capitalism to outsource our essential industries until the political scene changes. Look what’s happening in Europe with gas, oil, coal, etc and elsewhere re “chips”. The UK must keep alive a core of essential industries to prevent us from being blackmailed/held-over-a-barrel by our “friends” all over the world. In the past the NUM said that they would ‘black’ an anthracite mine planned for the Swansea area and the eco-freaks are against a coking-coal mine in the NW of England. I know we can make steel using ‘Electric Arc’ but how many windmills does that method need, even for a modest plant? The Government must set aside certain industrial plant which cannot be exported. Even things like ‘artificial’ food production (Quorn) has been sold to a Scandinavian Country without any ban on exporting the factory or method. If, in the future, we have to eat non-farmed foods then I would prefer “Quorn” burgers to Insect burgers. Even TVP is better than Insects.
Last edited 1 year ago by Doug Pingel
AC Harper
1 year ago
The closure of the pits was undoubtedly traumatic to the communities that depended on them for employment (and by extension, meaning).
But the world changes and nostalgia can often be a corrosive emotion that slows adjustment to new circumstances.
Surely the point is that the communities were left to rot. Even coalmining is better than rotting. I sometimes visit old industrial places that have been turned into theme parks and “museums”. Depressing places. The people have simply vanished. Not prospered in this new progressive world – just vanished.
I agree, but you make my point for me. As long as people chew over and over the assertion that ‘something should have been done’ the sense of drift and rot will continue.
A town near me, founded on coal mining, built and ran a Science Museum reflecting the past history after the pits closed. The town, pining for the past perhaps, struggled. Eventually the Science Museum closed through lack of attendance.
The town started to redevelop the run down shopping centre. The Science Museum has been relaunched as a Discovery Centre and Country Park.
Could the transformation happened sooner without being hobbled by nostalgia?
“The town started to redevelop the run down shopping centre. The Science Museum has been relaunched as a Discovery Centre and Country Park.” Essentially unproductive activities. This at heart is what bothers me about modern Britain – A theme park.
I have a second-hand view having visited a former pit community a few times over the past 15 years or so. The pits closed. The miners got very favourable redundancy terms – lots of cash in the bank. They were allowed to purchase their homes at knock-down prices. They were in a position to ‘invest’ in themselves. Some did, taking themselves off to college but, many did not. Whose fault is that?
Graeme Laws
1 year ago
Remember agriculture? Went mechanical and decimated rural communities. I used to live in a village in South Wales. A hundred years ago there were 120 kids in a village school. Long gone. Economic change involves upheaval. Always did. Always will. The alternative? Pol Pot.
Or the great railway workshops in the “middle of nowhere”, in this Woodford Halse, a veritable Mecca for steam enthusiasts of the 1950’s.
Now returned to grass, and even HS2 avoided it.
Richard Ross
1 year ago
You lost me at “Coalfields were not profitable…….., and so they went”. Why on earth – or under it – would you run a dangerous, dirty industry full of angry militants that loses money? Just to give young men “something to do”? Sounds like Mrs. Thatcher did the country yet another great service.
ARNAUD ALMARIC
1 year ago
Why are we not investing in in robots to dig this ‘black gold’ out of the ground?
Billions were spent on the Selby Coalfield, for example, even involving the diversion of the East Coat Mainline, yet it remains idle in the face greatest energy fiasco since the closure of the Suez Canal in 1973.
I believe all the workings in my valley were flooded, in some places knocked through to the nextdoor levels, and would probably cost-the-earth to reopen. I live high on the valley side but new houses have been built in areas where, according to some mineworkers in my village, they would be swept away if the pressure gets too high and the water makes its way out (as water will). There are places where new shafts could be sunk but even ‘opencast’ has been stopped due to dust (black gold indeed, more like black death.) We must keep our options open or we might end up like the Germans – losing Nuclear and having to replace it with brown coal. As for stopping tne use of gas – The people advocating that (most of them without any accountability or responsibility to the citizens) need to be firmly put in their place.
Paul Ashley
1 year ago
Not to worry. The WEF’s Fourth Industrial Revolution will turn every city and town into a pit town filed with depressed people with no incentive to live.
mike otter
1 year ago
Not much about the rave scene in that piece! Sure there were drugs in the UK rust belt but Es were just added on to the existing menu of dope, speed, downers and junk. I remember the midlands mining areas in the 70s when face workers, “mechanics of the mine” and NACODs men had good enough money to afford drugs alongside imported cars and foreign holidays. Trouble is the jobs were stopped brutally and irrationally by Thatcher & Co, but many people carried on with the drugs. Though they did quit their Tony Iommi mustaches and Kevin Keegan perms. Other areas too, Myrthyr and Barnsley had massive drug markets that survived the worst of the destruction by, er, selling drugs!
Gerald Brown
1 year ago
At nationalisation there were 1000 pits employing 1m. By the start of MTs premiership there were 75% less. So what happened to the 750 “pit villages” closed by previous administrations? Harold Wilson “closed” more mines than MT. At the time of the miners UNOFFICIAL strike the government was investing £millions to open up the Selby coalfield – including diverting the main line from England to Scotland!
Brendan O'Leary
1 year ago
There’s still coal-seam gas or coalbed methane potential in the Forth Valley. Gas seeped from the spongy ground anyway. Fields of Fire indeed if you lit a BBQ on a warm summer’s day. I worked briefly on some service jobs at the first project mentioned here, near Airth, 30 years ago. https://www.gov.scot/publications/expert-scientific-panel-report-unconventional-oil-gas/pages/6/
Locals loved us then, bringing a bit of life and revenue to the village.
Now the opposition is organised before any projects are even announced.
The current residents (if the objectors are actually residents) it seems would rather be nostalgic for industry past than have any industry present.
It wasn’t all sweetness and light. I was also told of bluenose villages where Papish names wouldn’t be welcome, but I went there anyway.
Last edited 1 year ago by Brendan O'Leary
Philip Stott
1 year ago
Tl;Dr
Read Trainspotting instead of this low rent knock off
Peter Dunn
1 year ago
The imbibing of rave music to any group of youngsters anywhere, almost always leads to zombification..booze&drugs finishes the job..
Steve Wiggins
1 year ago
Thanks, Tom. Well written & thought-provoking. It hadn’t occurred to me how the internet could be such a boon to people in small places like Fallin.
Chuck Pergiel
1 year ago
“community initiatives which multiplied as uselessly as weeds”. What a fine line.
This article reads like a pastiche. The reader would be better served with more research and less regurgitation.
The manifesting trend of [youth] violent disorder, substance abuse and criminality begins in the late 1950s and continued upwards until the 1990s irrespective of the economic ups and downs of those 4 decades. Whatever caused this, it was not local coal mines closing.
The coal fields apparently did not meet Labour’s vision either because when in government that party had commissioned an even faster pit closure programme. This rather suggests it was not a party political issue but a state decision based on the widely held (and perhaps self-fulfilling) expectation that demand was going to decline no matter what; de-industrialisation it was assumed was “just going to happen”.
When the author writes “Classes were dominated and disrupted by pupils, many from mining families, who were in complete rebellion against a society that had ceased to encourage ambition in their lives”, rebellion really isn’t the right word. There was no resistance, there was only a yielding to an imagined inevitability and because that sounds rather less cool than “rebellion” we get served up the trope that they were rebelling.
In the same sentence the author also concedes (“many from mining families“) that this was not just restricted to children from families affected by mass unemployment. Many weren’t from mining families. Many were from families like David Cameron’s. Something else had happened that simply coincided with the mass unemployment in places like Stirlingshire. Quite simply, easy availability – of drugs, of alcohol – fed a self-destructive streak in humans that’s been there from the beginning. Perhaps what was different this time was a greater sense of entitlement and an easier dimissiveness of the risks (not just health or wealth, but ostracism). The bigger the safety net, the bigger the risks.
Thatcher did sort of say there was “no such thing as society” but that omits the important context: “There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people“. A socialist could have easily said the same without any remark.
I could go on, but I will finish with this. The writer is dismissive of the new jobs that came when he writes “Industrial estates sprang up offering minimum wage roles”. Well, there wasn’t a minimum wage in 1970 but if there was it would have almost certainly been the same as the minimum NCB wage. Coal mining had terrible wages, that’s why miners felt the need to strike so often. The NCB minimum weekly wage in 1970 was £16 and male average earnings were £27, a worse ratio than the national living wage and average earnings in 2022. The important difference was and remains mass media and communications increase our awareness of material disadvantages like no time before in human history. And that is of bigger importance and effect than the coal mines closing.
Exactly, thanks
I think the author did his best with the article, but what is really magic are the comments. I learn so much from the comments. If the article was meant to be thought provoking, it worked. I see history writing itself, not delivered top down. Thank you, internet. As a P.S. Jeremy Paxman’s book “Black Gold” is a very informative read.
Well put. Here in the US, large cities known for manufacturing saw their factories close and jobs shipped to Mexico and overseas. Detroit was once a “blue collar paradise” where machinists could buy a nice house in the suburbs, raise a family on one salary, and send their kids to college. I invite you took look at what Detroit is now (but definitely not in person).
There are large areas all over New England once made prosperous by paper and fabric mills. The mills closed, and nothing came in to replace them. They turned into ghost towns populated by government-imposed welfare housing. Of course, generations of illegitimate births followed, right along with illicit drug use. What has happened in Appalachia is well known.
Government can’t (nor should it try) to swoop in and “rescue” 19th and 20th Century industries in this digital age. Only the private sector has the creativity and competence to do that, and it takes time. Those mill towns I mentioned? Because property is so cheap there, and many of the buildings are still standing, entrepreneurs are buying up land and real estate and starting businesses or fixing up the mills (they’re always on rivers, so it’s pretty), and opening restaurants, boutique malls, and office space. Young couples can afford to build first homes, too, which will cause them to get civically involved. Those places will be reborn, and government will have had nothing to do with it (until tax time).
One such example: https://www.winchester-nh.gov/about
‘There are large areas all over New England once made prosperous by paper and fabric mills. The mills closed, and nothing came in to replace them. They turned into ghost towns populated by government-imposed welfare housing.’
This is a half truth at best. Between the 70s and 90s there were several computer companies in the area. In fact one of the headquarters was in a building known as The Mill.
You write as if people had many more choices than they did (or, for some) do.
Oh for heaven sake, not another paean to the happy days of the pit village.
No mention here of the stultifying conformity of such narrow, inward looking places. No mention of the ongoing battles between the temperance people, the Presbyterian people, and those who liked to get to drunk on a Saturday, and beat the wife.
Of course when it is all swept away, the whole thing falls down a hole of drunken, drug ridden lawlessness. Well not, actually. The sons of the ones that used to beat their wives, probably lost the community discipline that might of kept them on the rails. The overwhelming majority no doubt had lesser lives, but got on with the things that teenagers do – rebel, get drunk, fight and try to have s e x. As with every society, only a proportion took that to extremes, the majority just grew up.
Of course the old, out of context, “no such thing as society,” has to come trotted out, because what would such an article be without it?
Of all the cataclysmic changes that globalisation brought about, has any been more romanticised than the loss of the pit village?
And no, I don’t deny there are huge grains of truth in it but, as with all this sort of writing, it’s unbalanced and romanticised.
The left has spent 40 years trashing every social more and moral code. Why does it persist in eulogising communities that enforced those moral codes with a rod of iron. Where’s their sympathy for all the Billy Elliots whose dads didn’t come round?
Good article and very heartfelt.
But…
If the coalfields were unprofitable, would it really have been better to continue to prop them up … for how long? Or let them fade away gradually? Survive to be shut down by net zero fanatics? Did the Union really have the miners’ interests at heart or their own power? What was their solution apart from bringing down the government.
These questions bugged me at the time and still do.
Perhaps you should ask Arthur Scargill Esq, I gather he is still ‘ticking’.
Like Corbyn and Benn, Thatcher would never let the facts get in the way of ideology. Out went the Engineering baby with the communist bathwater. Ironicallyall she had to do was listed to other Volk. ( Her favourite word, afterall) Herr Kohl ran a country with profitable mines and Unions on their board. Pretty simple balance – Mine owners don’t get to kill for profit with poor safety. Miners don’t get to go to the Bierkellar, get all riled up and take on Elected Government. Thems the laws east of the Rhine.
Postwar German unions were and are nothing like UK unions.
For couple of things, the german unions see the success and profit of their employers’ business as mutually beneficial, and they’re not on a mission to bring down their government.
You can hardly accuse the owners of UK mines- the people in the form of the UK government – of “killing for profit” since they weren’t even breaking even.
Perhaps you would like to back your claim that the injury/fatality rate in UK mining was higher than in Germany with some facts. Or that it was worse between 1979 to 1991 (Thatcher) than the preceding decades.
I can’t easily find the stats here, but I would be surprised if hte UK safety record was out of line with the rest of the world or suddenly got worse after 1979.
Please share your data.
Returning to the mining towns and pit villages some years ago, after about two decades away, what most struck me was the loss of ‘agency’ – doing things for yourself – the clubs, the bands, the gardens, the competitions, the pride. It felt as if everything was zombified, always waiting for the council, or the state to do things. Be it for money, or permission to breathe or go out – the leaden hands of ‘the council’ and petty officials could be felt smothering any self-help or community action with policies and paperwork. I don’t know if it’s as true now, but towns that were traditionally full of ‘doers’ started wasting away to become fragmented towns of ‘donters’.
It’s not just the Tories vision of modern Britain to shut the pits. A few years back a group of ex-miners wanted to re-open a drift overlooking Ebbw Vale (The head of my valley.) The local council (Labour) would have none of it – they didn’t want the dust and dirt associated with minework spoiling their nice clean town.
How anybody wanted a job in a mine is beyond my comprehension. My father and his father were Yorkshire miners and my father was determined that I did not follow him into the pit, and I didn’t.
When I was born, my father was senior constable at Fallin and we lived there for another year or so before moving into Stirling.As it was he would on occasion have to go down the pit to investigate a fatality and prepare a report for the Procurator Fiscal.
I can remember him commenting at the time of the 1974 strike (by that time a Chief Superintendent) about Fallin pit. that in 1948 the Coal Board had opened a new face, I think called “Western Drift” with the comment that “this should give some 40-50 year’s work”. So bear in mind in the intervening years, methods of winning coal had improved so it was likely that the pit would have had to close in the mid 80s/early 90s- which it did
The Stirling coalfield was an old field and pits like Pirnall, Manor Powiis and Plean had gone by the early 1960s
Now there was one other employer in the area and that was the Royal Navy at Bandeath some three miles away at Throsk. That depot closed with the ending of the Cold War and that employed some 40-50 men.
What’s its future. Well the Carse is quite pleasant. There are some wonderful views over the river to the Ochils Basically it should be allowed to extend as a commuter village for Stirling and Falkirk/Grangemouth
This is a rehash of a lot of lefty shouting about something that was inevitable and merely accelerated by the NUM. Let’s move on.
And Mr Newlands perhaps ought to stick to fiction unless he can improve his research
It’s been forty years.
Nearly a century if you count 1926.
Great article especially as it’s published in the same Unherd issue as Gary Gerstle’s article on the end of neoliberalism.
Neoliberalism was supposed to replace the old manufacturing industries, and jobs depending on physical labor, with higher value jobs requiring education. Didn’t really happen. More and more young people went to university and graduated with degrees for which there was no demand. Only the IT and engineering-minded kids benefited. Communities like Fallin proliferated throughout the developed world.
Now there’s a suggestion that the post-neoliberal world will provide lots of good jobs by on-shoring (or is it re-on-shoring) jobs making microchips, PPE, and other goods deemed essential for national security and welfare. It would be a good thing if it happened, but I remain skeptical. I expect there will be a vigorous campaign to court developing Asian countries not yet under Beijing’s sway. They have the potential to do our essential manufacturing and at a fraction of the cost of western workers. Plus ça change…
It’s fine for Capitalism to outsource our essential industries until the political scene changes. Look what’s happening in Europe with gas, oil, coal, etc and elsewhere re “chips”. The UK must keep alive a core of essential industries to prevent us from being blackmailed/held-over-a-barrel by our “friends” all over the world. In the past the NUM said that they would ‘black’ an anthracite mine planned for the Swansea area and the eco-freaks are against a coking-coal mine in the NW of England. I know we can make steel using ‘Electric Arc’ but how many windmills does that method need, even for a modest plant? The Government must set aside certain industrial plant which cannot be exported. Even things like ‘artificial’ food production (Quorn) has been sold to a Scandinavian Country without any ban on exporting the factory or method. If, in the future, we have to eat non-farmed foods then I would prefer “Quorn” burgers to Insect burgers. Even TVP is better than Insects.
The closure of the pits was undoubtedly traumatic to the communities that depended on them for employment (and by extension, meaning).
But the world changes and nostalgia can often be a corrosive emotion that slows adjustment to new circumstances.
Surely the point is that the communities were left to rot. Even coalmining is better than rotting. I sometimes visit old industrial places that have been turned into theme parks and “museums”. Depressing places. The people have simply vanished. Not prospered in this new progressive world – just vanished.
I agree, but you make my point for me. As long as people chew over and over the assertion that ‘something should have been done’ the sense of drift and rot will continue.
A town near me, founded on coal mining, built and ran a Science Museum reflecting the past history after the pits closed. The town, pining for the past perhaps, struggled. Eventually the Science Museum closed through lack of attendance.
The town started to redevelop the run down shopping centre. The Science Museum has been relaunched as a Discovery Centre and Country Park.
Could the transformation happened sooner without being hobbled by nostalgia?
“The town started to redevelop the run down shopping centre. The Science Museum has been relaunched as a Discovery Centre and Country Park.”
Essentially unproductive activities. This at heart is what bothers me about modern Britain – A theme park.
If you think modern Britain is a theme park, you should visit France…
Or Ireland.
This cannot end well
I have a second-hand view having visited a former pit community a few times over the past 15 years or so. The pits closed. The miners got very favourable redundancy terms – lots of cash in the bank. They were allowed to purchase their homes at knock-down prices. They were in a position to ‘invest’ in themselves. Some did, taking themselves off to college but, many did not. Whose fault is that?
Remember agriculture? Went mechanical and decimated rural communities. I used to live in a village in South Wales. A hundred years ago there were 120 kids in a village school. Long gone. Economic change involves upheaval. Always did. Always will. The alternative? Pol Pot.
Or the great railway workshops in the “middle of nowhere”, in this Woodford Halse, a veritable Mecca for steam enthusiasts of the 1950’s.
Now returned to grass, and even HS2 avoided it.
You lost me at “Coalfields were not profitable…….., and so they went”.
Why on earth – or under it – would you run a dangerous, dirty industry full of angry militants that loses money? Just to give young men “something to do”? Sounds like Mrs. Thatcher did the country yet another great service.
Why are we not investing in in robots to dig this ‘black gold’ out of the ground?
Billions were spent on the Selby Coalfield, for example, even involving the diversion of the East Coat Mainline, yet it remains idle in the face greatest energy fiasco since the closure of the Suez Canal in 1973.
Mainly because the viable coal has been extracted. The seams are heavy with dangerous faults
Does that go for all the UK’s coalfields? Thus ‘robots’ would be useless?
I believe all the workings in my valley were flooded, in some places knocked through to the nextdoor levels, and would probably cost-the-earth to reopen. I live high on the valley side but new houses have been built in areas where, according to some mineworkers in my village, they would be swept away if the pressure gets too high and the water makes its way out (as water will). There are places where new shafts could be sunk but even ‘opencast’ has been stopped due to dust (black gold indeed, more like black death.) We must keep our options open or we might end up like the Germans – losing Nuclear and having to replace it with brown coal. As for stopping tne use of gas – The people advocating that (most of them without any accountability or responsibility to the citizens) need to be firmly put in their place.
Not to worry. The WEF’s Fourth Industrial Revolution will turn every city and town into a pit town filed with depressed people with no incentive to live.
Not much about the rave scene in that piece! Sure there were drugs in the UK rust belt but Es were just added on to the existing menu of dope, speed, downers and junk. I remember the midlands mining areas in the 70s when face workers, “mechanics of the mine” and NACODs men had good enough money to afford drugs alongside imported cars and foreign holidays. Trouble is the jobs were stopped brutally and irrationally by Thatcher & Co, but many people carried on with the drugs. Though they did quit their Tony Iommi mustaches and Kevin Keegan perms. Other areas too, Myrthyr and Barnsley had massive drug markets that survived the worst of the destruction by, er, selling drugs!
At nationalisation there were 1000 pits employing 1m. By the start of MTs premiership there were 75% less. So what happened to the 750 “pit villages” closed by previous administrations? Harold Wilson “closed” more mines than MT. At the time of the miners UNOFFICIAL strike the government was investing £millions to open up the Selby coalfield – including diverting the main line from England to Scotland!
There’s still coal-seam gas or coalbed methane potential in the Forth Valley. Gas seeped from the spongy ground anyway. Fields of Fire indeed if you lit a BBQ on a warm summer’s day. I worked briefly on some service jobs at the first project mentioned here, near Airth, 30 years ago. https://www.gov.scot/publications/expert-scientific-panel-report-unconventional-oil-gas/pages/6/
Locals loved us then, bringing a bit of life and revenue to the village.
Now the opposition is organised before any projects are even announced.
The current residents (if the objectors are actually residents) it seems would rather be nostalgic for industry past than have any industry present.
It wasn’t all sweetness and light. I was also told of bluenose villages where Papish names wouldn’t be welcome, but I went there anyway.
Tl;Dr
Read Trainspotting instead of this low rent knock off
The imbibing of rave music to any group of youngsters anywhere, almost always leads to zombification..booze&drugs finishes the job..
Thanks, Tom. Well written & thought-provoking. It hadn’t occurred to me how the internet could be such a boon to people in small places like Fallin.
“community initiatives which multiplied as uselessly as weeds”. What a fine line.