Wednesday 10 April 2013

Miners and Thatcher

She won't go away.. 
I know we said no more ..but..

Listening to Nicky Campbell this morning an ex-miner was arguing with an old lady from a different mining town. The debate was Baroness Thatcher's funeral and how this is an insult to the nation.

The miner was saying about the devastation in the mining towns of Wales. How nowadays the sons of miners were reduced to driving to work in a factory packing food for airlines.

The poor man didn't seem to realise the irony of it. The airliners replaced ships. The motorcar and trucks replaced the railways. Neither use coal as a fuel. 
Peak coal use in the UK {and steel} was in 1911. The height of the railways, the tail end of the Industrial revolution and the peak of the Royal Navy with its coal powered fleets and steel built warships and merchant fleets. Shipbuilding and mining were supreme. Motorcars in private ownership numbered just 477. 

Coal was the United State's first big industry. 
"By 1909, the United States had already become the world’s largest coal producer. Churning out more than 418 million tons. Their mines were 35% greater in output than Great Britain’s 268 million tons making the formerly number one UK second worldwide. Germany was a distant third at only 217 million tons." 
By 1929 it was 608 million tons in the USA. The crisis in mining and shipbuilding came in 1930 after the Wall Street crash. Coal production in the US was around half of the 1929 levels in 1932.
Docks were deserted. Orders were nil. And unemployment and hunger arrived. The UK, The British Empire, was already dependent on the United States economy for trade. And there was no trade.

The miners were hit by no demand and mechanisation. That's where the wage deflation came from. When miner's talk about pittance wages its because a once thriving industry was on its knees and it was take lower wages or lose jobs. Union membership boomed.
World War one and Two saved coal and steel and shipbuilding, heavy industry, railways in the UK and the USA. But pre and post war, oil was in and coal was out. Its amazing it lasted so long.

The miner who lamented the loss of the pits must surely ask himself if he really believes that without Thatcher his mine would still be open? When an old lady said she was glad her son worked in the factory. "Safe..clean..fixed hours..meal times..no health risks..no turmoil..no danger..I'm so glad he never went down into the dark and the danger..so glad.."

"True...But he's on a quarter of the wages!"

And there is the problem. Coal mining paid well, because it was dangerous but also because it was essential.  Once it was no longer essential, or at least available cheaper from other sources , and mechanised, those high wages could never stay. I'm always amazed that people seem to think the mines would still be open today without Thatcher. Surely, if they were economical and the whole miner's strike was an ideological event only, then the 13 years of Labour rule would have seen them all reopened.
The hard left union mine worker's say they weren't because the labour party wasn't a labour party.
But even a moment's consideration shows that glib assertion can't be substantiated by facts.
The unions bankrolled the party. 
The party , if it could, would have helped the unions. It did for other unions. It was happy to allow the creation of today's super unions from the merging of smaller ones. 

And Harold Wilson closed the mines anyway. 93 mines in the 1960s.
Margaret thatcher closed 22.  Few blame Wilson for manufacturing decline.
The last pit, the last shipbuilder, the last steel works in the north east all closed under the Blair government. The first Japanese car plants arrived under the Tories.

Not being a miner I will never understand this work/life bond to place and job.
This blaming someone for an end of an era.

My very first job was a telex operator. I worked in Carnaby street, in London's West End, for an American firm and was paid very well. I started at 10am. The overnight workload took until about midday to process. Then it was a two hour lunch until the New York office opened at 2.00pm and sent a load more stuff over.
I was 17. Allowed to wear my own lunatic 1980's fashion clothes at a time when suits and ties were mandatory in almost every job. I had an easy, undemanding, well paid job, in a fashionable area of the capitol city.
Then one day, the evil, youth hating, Thatcher deregulated the telecoms industry and someone invented the fax machine and suddenly I was out of a job.

I suppose if I had worked in a telex machine operating community, where my father and grandfather had been telex machine operators and had fought for the rights of telex operators to a living wage, I might have been even more upset. But I doubt it.

But at no time did I expect, then or since, that the work I did should always be available to me because I wanted to do it, at wages and terms that I wanted to work for, for as long as I wanted to do it and if it wasn't then the government should subsidise it so that it was.




47 comments:

Anonymous said...

World War one and Two saved coal and steel and shipbuilding, heavy industry, railways in the UK and the USA.

Well they may have saved coal, steel and shipbuilding but certainly not the railways, which were left with massive repair and investment bills and a legacy of state control.

Thornavis.

dearieme said...

All discussions about the mines tend mainly to reveal what really thick buggers most miners were.

However, you are wrong about "coal mining paid well, because it was dangerous but also because it was essential." After the Second World War coal mining paid well because the NUM extorted huge subsidies from the taxpayer and the electricity consumer. It paid well during the war because the buggers went on strike whenever it suited them.

Usually I feel sorry for people caught up in the gale of creative destruction, but not for that mob.

roym said...

I heard that too, the old dear was right in that surely we dont want our kids carrying out dirty, dangerous work. Im not sure most folk actually want the mines reopened today, its just that maggie's passing has brought all those memories back, and for many those were very dark days. you yourself said the recession of the early 80s took you down, not everyone has the same wherewithal to set themselves up again. lets face it, you dont have to be a lefty hand-wringer to see that not all can re-train/skill at the drop of a hat. plus dont think we can easily compare entrenched rural communities with slightly more modern (in adaptability?) urban types.

btw, did you claim your full £3.7K to come back from the vac?

Jan said...

Very interesting economic history. I lived in Cardiff during the miner's strike but was rather pre-occupied with 3 young children. Later when I rejoined the workforce I came to realise how much Margaret Thatcher was hated and also how much English people in general were detested by most Welsh people. I grew very wary of anyone who's father was a miner.

I kept my Tory credentials well hidden and at election time if I'd put a Tory poster in my window I would probably have had a brick through it. I don't think much has changed.

I see Margaret Thatcher as having saved the UK economically. She was the only one who had the guts to do it and I find it very hard to understand why others can't see it. As others have said we were the "sick man of Europe" in the 70s. But the hatred felt by some will take a long time to go away.

Taff said...

" NUM extorted huge subsidies from the taxpayer and the electricity consumer".

...and now if's Green Brigade. Will we never learn.

T said...

Taff you have forgotten the subsidy for nuclear since it's inception.

yahoo.com said...

OK OK, Mrs T did useful work, but she came to power just as the Baby Boomers were getting into management and voting and the social environment was ripe for someone like her.

But the hullabaloo right now - what is that all about? Could it be a push by the Right to bounce Dave into Rightist policies - "look how loved the greatest Rightist was Dave - you could be loved too". Or is there an effort by the BBC not daring to soft-pedal and so giving Mrs T the whole nine yards. Or is there nothing else to blether about? Could this all backfire on the Tories - I can't be the only one bored rigid by the endless eulogising (a cunning plot by the BBC?). Do not forget that by the end of her reign the country and her party were sick and tired of her. She was got rid of and shortly after so was her party.

Bill Quango MP said...

Anon. Railway engines and rolling stock I should have said. locomotive building was booming. I think the UK and USA shipped some 6,000 engines to the USSR, which was about a decades peacetime building.
Then there was the entire European rolling stock to be replaced from 1945. Good times, if you don't count the bad times.

Dearieme.
Well, Ok. But mining was/is very dangerous. And certainly detrimental to health. All jobs with those characteristics pay more. Medieval cesspit cleaners were on good wages.
And, if we remember inflation was running at 20%, then a 50% 2 year pay deal isn't quite the insanity it sounds today.
Its a madness policy of feeding the inflation monster and destroying wealth but to a worker, easy to sell.

Our 1970s history shows us how unionised workers could control the country.
These days, its pretty much just Bob Crow who can do and get what he likes.

Roym.
My complaint is - why can't these people move on? I've spoken to two old bloke's from mining towns today. Both say Thatcher killed industry and devastated the North.

What did they think would have happened under a second Callaghan government? Or a Foot one? We had already tried the soft options.
Without any success at all.

Glad to see you were paying attention. Memoirs coming out soon...The Bill Quango industries Mk1 was a modest success but was brought down during the Nigel Lawson boom-bust. I was paying 30% interest on bank loans. Unsustainable.
Much to my then girlfriend's {pearls and curls} annoyance I didn't vote for Maggie in 1987. her dad was a councilor. A good one too.
And I knew many people who lost their homes in the 80's boom/bust that we all recognise today.
Brown was lucky inflation was leeched out of our national body two decades earlier and he had the option of reducing interest rates to as near as zero.
Otherwise now we would be in the mother of all busts.

And of course its different in communities. my constituency is rural west country. Agriculture, fishing and the navy was all there was for centuries. Mostly, that's all gone. But there is no insular mentality of sitting around waiting for American prairies to fail so wheat can be grown profitably again. And, perhaps controversially, I expect its the welfare that did it. people can stay put, if not well off, if the basics are met.

When the farms went it was turn off the century. If the people didn't move on, they died.
So they moved on.
There is a church not far from me that stands in a field all by itself.
There must at one time have been a village for it be there. I expect one of the famines in the 1830's or 1850's or 1870 or 90s was so devastating that the landowner gave up. Or else it was a large holding knocked out by the death duties of the liberals.
Either way, everyone for miles around has gone.
Once the work went the people had to move to where new work was.
Leaving people in backwaters hoping there will be a boom is unrealistic.
but who knows? ..Fracking might be coming...

Jan: I don't think there were many Thatcherites in Wales. I'd have pretended to be SWP.
The disappointing thing is the solutions that the Welsh parties put forward are so out of date.

Taff:
We are mad on this green energy nonsense. grow a really big Dave and tell the leaf lobby that the deal is off.

Bill Quango MP said...

Yahoo.com: "Do not forget that by the end of her reign the country and her party were sick and tired of her. She was got rid of and shortly after so was her party."

We really should have a two term leader limit like the Yanks do. Blair was totally different in 2007 from 1997. before, he'd focused group tested every gesture. Every sound. every pause of his words. he never did anything without finding out how it would be seen first. He was convinced saying he'd achieve something could be just as effective as actually doing something.

By 2007 he couldn't care less what anyone thought.

And Thatcher was like that all the time anyway.

I was glad she was gone in 1990. Parties need change. Governments get tired. And as a nation we had had enough of being lectured too and told to tighten our belts. We wanted the war to end and enjoy the peace.
By the time Brown got his hands on power he had nothing at all left he wanted to achieve.

But Yahoo...wait until the Queen dies if you want to see real fawning.

Demetrius said...

There is coal and coal and coal, it is not all the same. This is one bit missing from the debate. To the above add the Chemical industry shift to petro stuff, add the Clean Air Act and people shifting to domestic gas, oil, or electrical, add natural gas, etc. etc. All a lot more complicated but with clear results. Much less coal, many fewer pits and miners and also under serious price competition. All before Mrs. T took office.

Blue Eyes said...

No to statutory term limits, but I think sensible parties should consider it for leaders/mayors/etc.

As for Bob Crow he actually shows how much the scene has changed. He puts on a good show but he rarely actually strikes properly. And when he does not even his whole union go out. And not even all the tube drivers agree that striking is a good idea. Through a colleague I know a few tube drivers and maybe it's just their social group but they are almost Thatcherite.

dearieme said...

"Well, Ok. But mining was/is very dangerous": it was certainly dangerous but I don't know about the "very". When last I looked (back when there were enough miners for the figures to be meaningful) it seemed to be less dangerous than deep-sea fishing and quarrying. If my memory were better I could tell you how it compared with farming and construction.

Anonymous said...

yahoo.com

"She was got rid of and shortly after so was her party."

To be fair the Tories won the following election - with the largest popular vote ever recorded IIRC?

Ryan said...

We have to be really careful here about painting everybody with the same brush. Fact is that during the darkest days of the miners strikes, production was still at 40%. 40% of miners braved the pickets. Those miners were protected from the baying mob by the police. Scargill's private Marxist army threw rocks at the strike-breakers and the police. They wanted to scare the living daylights out of all of them. Many more miners wanted to work but were too frightened. Scargill refused to hold a secret ballot. It was an attempt at some sort of Cuban revolution. It failed.

Scargill tore the heart out of those communities by making it a brutal little war between two equally balanced sides in each minig town. Thatcher had nothing to do with that brutality. She simply ensured that the law was upheld in the face of violent intimidation by Scargill's petty Marxist army. What right did Scargill's army have to prevent those that didn't agree with him from drawing a fair days work for a fair days wage? How would you feel if some jumped up little Hitler at your place of work told you that you wouldn't be able to pay for your family for a year because he happened to be a follower of Karl Marx and was forcing you by violent intimidation to stay at home?

The BBC will never interview those miners that braved the picket lines. Imagine what it must have been like for them? They knew Scargill was wrong, that the mines were doomed to closure. They knew it wasn't fair to expect workers in other industries to continue to subsidise them. The game was up. They were the smart ones. But they are most likely the ones that moved on.

Our very own petty Che Guevara retired to a £1.5M apartment in Central London paid for by the NUM despite having a second luxury home in the countryside near Barnsley. So much for Marxism.

What did Thatcher do to "smash the unions"? She made them hold secret ballots before going on strike. That's really brutal isn't it?

Oh how the left-wing media like to create these myths and how readily their suggestible audience will lap it up. Well, they will all die soon enough and history will be in the hands of the victors. The "Winter of Discontent" and the miners strikes will be seen for what they were - petty attempts at revolution from little Marxist demagogues.


CityUnslicker said...

lovely writing Ryan, enjoyed that comment.

Blue Eyes said...

"What did Thatcher do to "smash the unions"? She made them hold secret ballots before going on strike. That's really brutal isn't it?"

Brutal no, but bloomin' 'ell was it controversial at the time!

Stuff like this always seems inevitable once its happened, but it was in no way guaranteed.

measured said...

What is sad is the number of men who were unable to reinvent themselves.

BBCQT?

Thatcher; the woman, the principles, the legacy.

Steven_L said...

And she ended closed shops. Really cheeses me off when you see pro-closed shop trade unionist dinosaurs spouting off about 'dignity at work'.

Closed shop workplaces, ballots conducted by the raising of hands etc strike me as the total anti-thesis of it.

Nice post by the way BQ. Up here in bonny Scotland they could do with reading it.

Anonymous said...

I worked in the construction industry (office side), which is once again going through its own private little hell.

Just like cars replaced horses, passenger aircraft replaced steam ships etc things change. The key is to recognize that change and to do something about it. That is what I am currently doing.

Although I hate socialists and think Cameron and Osbourne are complete wankers, I do not blame either for my predicament.

I rethink, retrain and re-skill - oh, and move on.

That's life.

Anonymous said...

"I rethink, retrain and re-skill"

But not everyone can do that, particularly those on the left side of the Bell Curve.

andrew said...

"I rethink, retrain and re-skill"

But not everyone can do that, particularly those on the left side of the Bell Curve.

+1

The other part of the equation is that the difference in a normal persons life in the 9th and 15th centuries, or 18th, 19th centuries was not massively different (he said dodging the industrial revolution).
However the level of change from 1979 (to pick an on topic year) to 2013 has been enormous.

(a) the rate of change tails off - we are a transitional generation and 'the left of the bell curve' will adjust.

(b) the rate of change does not tail off - this is the new normal and 'the left of the bell curve' will not be able to adjust. There will be a large mass of people who are not of great economic use. This is genuinely new and v. worrying.


Blue Eyes said...

I don't buy (b) at all. There will always be stuff that needs doing. Otherwise why would we be importing so much cheap unskilled labour from abroad?

Cleaning, making coffee, changing bed sheets, answering telephones, putting stuff in boxes, driving delivery vans, the list goes on.

The way to increase "unskilled" opportunities is to have a vibrant diverse economy where those with skills and talent can thrive.

CityUnslicker said...

Agree with BE, two things come into it.

1) Lack of labour movement in a countty with strong regional ties. it sadly appears easier over the last 20 years to get people from abroad. This is a strange cultural affliction for the UK. I dont think out benefits culture helps this.

2) There are going to be plenty of jobs really, services industries require lots of jobs, but they are transitory in nature and don't pay well. I refer to earlier posts about my worries overall about the rapid divergence in pay and reward in a globalised economy.

Ryan said...

2) There are going to be plenty of jobs really, services industries require lots of jobs, but they are transitory in nature and don't pay well.


This is how capitalism morphs itself. It changes too fast for the Marxists to keep up! The Marxists are trying to put a lid on consumption and industrialisation through environmentalism, but already Western Capitalism has moved on! It has realised that there is a great deal of spare human capital out there and it can make money from it. Service industries are what has sprung up in their place, from Vodafone to Starbucks. Of course selling mobile phones "isn't mans work" so you can count the miners out! (Personally I think a real man will do whatever it takes to support his family but it seems miners think differently...)

Doesn't pay well? It certainly doesn't pay its EMPLOYEES well. According to Wikipedia, Starbucks has 149,000 employees. It has revenues of $13bn p.a. This means it makes £60,000 per year from each employee. The average UK Starbucks "barista" gets paid £13,600 per year. That's generous of them isn't it?

Starbucks really is a disgrace to capitalism.

CityUnslicker said...

Ryan that equation is spurios, on their revenues they have to account for cost of products, leases etc. Staff wages will be at most 30% of costs, so each staff member would contribute say 20k and get paid 13k... 20% return sounds about right to me...

andrew said...

To be fair to Marx, he wrote of his time and a surprising amount of what he wrote still has relevance.

In a time when the amount/value of labor needed to produce something is tending towards 0 (as a proportion of the value of the good) in some industries I see new issues.

@be and others,

Personally I think we are in a transition towards (b)

... cleaning, making coffee...

When I started work in the late 80's there was a typing pool of about 10 in an office of 120 or so.
None now.

5 years ago tesco said they would open up a new checkout if the queue was 3 long
Now they install another self scan till.

Right now the us is experimenting with driverless cars.

As CU says, The problem / opportunity is also that of labor movement. I agree but think of it in a wider sense.
If you are lucky, you can move the job to you (the chinese and manufacturing and freelance programmers etc and the digital economy)
Otherwise you have to move to the job, either physically or by re-training and I can see we (nationally) are not too great at either.

@ryan 13bn / 149000 = 87000 USD per person -> ~60000 UKP. This is turnover - not profit. Profits forecast to be ~1.2bn USD -> ~5300 UKP per person, which is a little less egregiously capitalist.

Ryan said...

No it is not spurious.

Google "Starbucks jobs" if you want to find the rate - it is £6.25 per hour, so 40 hr/wk and 52 weeks paid per year and you get the equivalent annual salary.

The cost of the lease of a shop (typically 1000sqft) will be about £30,000 - £50,000 p.a. but they will get three shifts a week out of that shop because they open 7 days and typically 8am to 8pm, so the cost of the lease is pretty small. In fact Wikipedia figures show they are making £400,000 per shop per annum (they have 20,000 outlets world-wide) so the lease is about 10% of their costs.

Starbucks famously don't like paying tax so we can forget that as a cost. The cost of coffee is negligible.

Basically Starbucks probably has an operating margin of at least 50% which explains why Starbucks, Costa and Caffé Nero are expanding like crazy right now. They have to keep re-investing all that cash to avoid the owners paying tax on it.

I wouldn't mind but they are screwing the employees in the process and getting away with it.



Bill Quango MP said...

Ryan: you seem to have left off rates, which are roughly the same as rents, utilities, employer N.I? Tax and VAT.
And I'm almost certain that there is a bonus scheme foe employees at Starbucks and most other coffee shops.
And seven days 8to8 is one and a half shifts, not three.
There is a big cost in having the extra shifts because of the overlap, but I'm sure they get the maximum work from everyone.

AND you have missed CUs point. These are transitory jobs. No one sets out to be a cafe worker for life. Cafe manager perhaps.
The workers are part time because they have part time uni, college, school, parents, caring work to do.
If you work out pub rates it will be the same. Tesco will be the same.
It's wrong to think its just Starbucks.

Oh,
The markup on coffee and foods is huge. 500% is normal.

AND the real capitalist imperialist killer product is tea.
Our nation once drug addicted China at gunpoint so we could drink a hot beverage with our biscuits.
And if you put sugar in it, you were aiding the slave trade too.!,!!

Blue Eyes said...

My point about unskilled labour is not that the SAME jobs will always be available but that there will always be SOME thing which needs doing. Yes of course a new chambermaid machine will put many hotel workers out of business but there will usually be something else which still needs doing. Mowing the lawn or whatever it might be. In the 60s the consensus was that with mechanisation there would be millions who had lots of permanent "leisure time".

Ryan said...

"Ryan: you seem to have left off rates, which are roughly the same as rents"

True, but they are usually 45% of rents.

"No one sets out to be a cafe worker for life."

Circular argument. Nobody sets out to be a café worker for life because they can't afford to! But Starbucks can certainly afford to pay more. If they did the people that work for Starbucks might actually be able to afford to buy a small flat after working 40hours a week. Why exactly shouldn't they BQ? Why should Starbucks be free to exploit them? Because they are just kids perhaps? Sorry, I don't buy it.

Somebody that contributes 40hours a week to society deserves to afford a flat. Why should they be handed to girls that get up the duff while still at school? We cannot confront the worst excesses of Socialism if we are not prepared to confront the worst excesses of capitalism.




Bill Quango MP said...

I still disagree. I don't know the numbers for Starbucks, but McDonalds employs about 1 full time for every 5 part time workers.
This isn't a 40 hour week job.Its a part-time job and needs to be seen as that. Not everyone wants a Pt job but many do.

Women in particular. With young children they can't work 40 hours.
And if they did the costs of childcare would mean they need a £25k minimum salary. Probably nearer £30k.

Mrs Q, 4 years ago, went back to her £28k job and gave it up for a part-time minimum wage soon after.
With childcare, tax credits and tax breaks and NI contributions and transport there was only a few quid difference in monthly take home.
With the one child it was just manageable for her to stay in the higher paid job. With 2 it was impossible.


As a regional manager the number of young women coming back to management jobs from maternity was 1 in 50? Might even have been worse than that. I can only recall 2. And I must have had a thousand management posts over the period. And in context of those 1000 management posts, 450 would have been women.

Plenty of part time came back to part time though.

Now, if Starbucks was paying the rate for a worker to be full time and able to pay childcare they'd be around £30k each.
That's not possible.

You believe Starbucks are rich and can pay more. They could certainly pay some bloody tax! They distorted the market in the first place with their pay anything rents, funded from dodging corporation tax.

But they pay what the rate is. Unskilled, flexible worker rates.

This Living wage nonsense will make a few better off but will make many out of work altogether.

Now, Starbucks may be able to pay more. They are a very rich corporation.
But you have not included, probably not realised, so many costs in your comment.
The good stores have to fund the poor. The thrivers still need to pay for the losers. Starbucks are premium-A1 sites. your rents look too low for the sort of position they take. They never ,ever take a poor pitch. They did, when Schultz left, but when he returned in 2010 or so, he shut 1,000 starbucks in the USA for poor pitch. When he was CEO Starbucks prided itself on never opening a loser. Very very thorough with their pitches.
They have a head office and a distribution centre, and HR and all the red tape crap that government insists companies must have. Especially where food is concerned.
every store must be insured. Insured for every conceivable threat. They have cleaning and window cleaning and advertising and containers, equipment, maintenance, trucks, storage,lighting, heating, repairs.

Just think what the cost of bog roll must be for all the stores in the uk?

And they pay royalties to the Seattle coffee company, the parent company which is in the big millions.
That might be a tax dodge, but all their overseas countries pay it.So it has to be paid.

But, to go back to basics.
Starbucks makes a profit. It employs some 10,000 people in Uk?
So another 3-4,000 indirectly.

Woolworths didn't make a profit.
Not for years. And now they're gone and 45,000 people lost their jobs.



Bill Quango MP said...

And why are you making me defend starbucks? I don't ever use their shops except for a pee. I don't drink coffee. Mcds or burger king is where I might be found if on a hunt for a wifi meet place.

I had a poor interview with them years ago because I couldn't tell the coffee apart!

"Doncha like the coffee buddy?"
"Erm..I don't much care for coffee. I'm more of a tea person."

Might as well have said I was an anarchist.

Budgie said...

"Not being a miner I will never understand this work/life bond to place and job."

No one does, BQ, it's pure guilt-trip middle class romantic statist bovine excrement. Mines weren't worked just by "miners", there were engineers, managers and office staff like any other manufacturing process. They were like everyone else - varied. Some even hated some of their neighbours - just like everyone else.

The statists don't seem to bother romanticising textile workers - another UK industry hit as badly as coal mining.

Electro-Kevin said...

By 1979 - Mrs Thatcher's election - 460,000 miners had lost their jobs already.

It wasn't as though they hadn't accepted change up to a point. Many other industries had gone the same way and losses had been taken for years.

(Was coal not useful in the generation of power ?)

I understand the need for industrial reform but he rise of Marxism in unions was understandable. The devastation to jobs and communities had already been huge and inflation was out of control by the time it happened - hence the pay claims.

Thatcherism aside (and she did what she had to do) let's look at what happened later. I am dismayed at the the amount of 'innocent' non-unionised industries - the products of which were in obvious global demand because they were sold off to foreign ownership and their factories moved abroad despite the adoption of efficient working practices and the acceptance of automation in the image of the Thatcher reforms.

Rewinding back to the 50s/60s. At a time that our country was shedding industry and jobs in their thousands, workers were imported from the Commonwealth to do jobs that our own workforce 'didn't want to do' (apparently.)

Grammar schools were cut under the Tories (as well as Labour) and the advancement of the working class has gone down hill since.

The Tories signed Maastricht which - not only undermined the British worker - but set British people on course to compete domestically with the rest of the world for their jobs, their housing, their welfare and their NHS.

I hear much about the liberation of working people being able to buy houses but the housing market has helped in large part to enslave women in low paid work (dual incomes needed to buy rabbit hutches) - lower the birth rate among the striving classes (too poor/knackered to do it)an to bankrupt our country through people coping with hidden inflation by borrowing against that notional quantity which is their house equity.

Ships are still being built. Coal is still being dug - elsewhere. There is still global demand for these things.

It is not right to say that they went the same way as office equipment.

I do detect a disdain between the classes in the UK. It's always been our weakness.



Electro-Kevin said...

Incidentally - Labour would not be able to pursue its Greenist agenda had half of its union base remained in the coal industry.

Or in hot industry for that matter. (I do not regard the sex industry as an 'industry' btw)

Bill Quango MP said...

Ships are still being built. Coal is still being dug - elsewhere. There is still global demand for these things.

If we hadn't had revolutionary unions we could have retained some market share, much like we do in car manufacturing. We aren't world leaders, but we are productive. Who'd have thought Japan would ever invest in the UK after Leyland?
But at a price that we cannot match.

But strikes crippled our nation. It stopped functioning. The Germans went a different, less adversarial path and advanced.

Our coal is deep mining, small fields as we ran out of the easy stuff. USA has huge reserves still and lots of open cast which is safer , easier and cheaper to extract.

1,094.3 million tons dug up by the USA each year. They have increased their coal production from the peak days. Ours costs a lot more than theirs to extract and MOST of their coal is for domestic consumption.

We could have carried on digging but the miners would have had to accept pay cuts and no strike deals.
Never going to happen with the NUM which was a revolutionary, political union. Scargill wanted to end the government. Any other leader would have compromised early and won some deals. He had no intention of doing anything but cause intense pressure on the government, leading to collapse.

Miners followed him to their own doom.

Electro-Kevin said...

You know my feelings on Starbucks. It being a keen on imported labour to front its outlets means that it is being subsidised to a very high tune by the UK taxpayer.

- The entitlements of those workers whilst in the UK. (What they might be entitled to claim longer term too)

- The cost of a displaced worker on the dole

- The fact that the product itself couldn't be provided by small, local start-up outfits if they internationals weren't hogging them. I know plenty of unskilled uneducated people who have run excellent coffee shops.

It doesn't take big business to be able to do this.

Yet more opportunities denied workers who might like to diversify and adapt to life without work in industry.

Can't run a pub, butchers, cafe ...

All the big multi-nationals, chains have got their first and things aren't what they used to be.

Electro-Kevin said...

BQ - I didn't like Scargill. And I'm well aware that it was a Marxist takeover but I can understand why it happened.

I agree with Margaret Thatcher's treatment of the issue but have reservations and the whole point of my comment (which I think I muddled up) was this:

Why have we been losing industry ever since those reforms ? Many of those industries still being in demand and having accepted efficiencies.

As it happens the miners HAD accepted huge job losses before the Marxists moved in.

What was different about the UK car industry after the Japanese investment ? The British workers they employed ? The British middle management they employed ?

Or the British senior executives they DIDN'T employ ?

I agree about deep cast coal but ships are still being built elswhere.

It would be interesting to see what the *subsidised* welfare costs are in the NE and how they would compare to a subsidised ship building industry and its spin offs.

Either way we seem to be going bust.



Bill Quango MP said...

It would be interesting to see what the *subsidised* welfare costs are in the NE and how they would compare to a subsidised ship building industry and its spin offs.

Remember until very recently we did still build ships in this country.
Its just that our shipbuilding industry was huge. And then shipbuilding declined very rapidly.

And the USA was the pre eminent shipbuilder. Far more modern. Bigger docks. Modern working practices and modern equipment.
We were still using our 1900 methods. Labour intensive.

And with it went the dock workers.
But there was a rise in the haulage industry that took over.

I think you might well be right on the wider argument. Why didn';t we try and do something more in our declined heavy industry/textile/manufacturing areas?
The Germans managed to continue making things. The state susidised French did.
And we do of course. Just on a small scale. They're always engineers turning up on this blog telling us how they make super-widget-piffles that are essential for the production of Higgs-Bosun cantilevered hydraulic polymessurised container pumps that do something to make something erm..do something..that ..we need?

{though Polly Toynbee making that point on question time rather ignored France's much higher unemployment and anemic growth since 1979.French telecoms completely missed the boom.
They soldiered on, I suppose, through higher taxes? }

Ryan said...

"Why have we been losing industry ever since those reforms ?"

Because the Chinese will work in industry for just £1 per hour (I know this, because that is what I pay them!). AVERAGE salaray in UK is £10 per hour. How are you going to get that to work? The Marxists wanted tax to be taken from succesful private sector companies and pop-stars like Elton John to subsidise these industries. By now they would be subsidised to the tune of £9 per hour per employee - was that really a recipe for long-term success, or do you think it was a recipe for total economic collapse? Either way, as the Marxists saw it, they would win...


I work for an engineering consultancy (i.e. service sector, although most people don't think of "engineering" as being a service). It's very profitable. I get paid £25 per hour. Half of that is taken away by tax (income and VAT + stealth taxes). I get the Chinese to do all the mucky work. Do you know the Chinese will make you a complete top-quality lead-acid battery at a lower price than you can buy the lead itself on the spot market?

Honda in swindon has a no strike policy. That's is why it is succesful. The local management is British. Car design is British. Many of the parts come from local British suppliers. The Japanese that are in the factory are primarily concerned with quality. They take quality very seriously indeed - they don't leave that to the British workers, even though most of the work is done by robots. Their quality managers actually stand right behind the workers looking over their shoulders!

Fact is we are making more cars than ever. But where we are really scoring is in the service sector - banking, insurance, airlines, engineering consultancy, mobile phone services etc etc etc. If we want to protect our big fat western salaries we need to keep moving to the higher ground.

But make no mistake. The reason the nation smells of "poor" has nothing to do with the decline of industry, or the rich or anything like that. It is due to the failed political consensus since 1945. The entire country needs to be re-built. This means taking blocks of clay, baking them and stacking them on top of each other using dried limestone - not hard is it? Been doing that for a long time without the help of the Americans or the Chinese. We have 3million or more people sitting idle that could be getting on with this and it wouldn't realy cost UK PLC anything because we are already giving these idle people food and shelter and getting nothing in return.

Post-war policies are a sick joke leading to mass idleness when the nation is crying out for work to be done. We have simple arrived at the point where the failed policies of Marxist socialism and wet Conservatism are so clearly failed that the voters are throwing up their arms in disgust.


Bill Quango MP said...

There are always engineers turning up on this blog telling us how they make super-widget-piffles that are essential for the production of Higgs-Bosun cantilevered hydraulic polymessurised container pumps that do something to make something erm..do something..that ..we need?

See..there's one turned up just now.

Good comment Ryan.

dearieme said...

"What was different about the UK car industry after the Japanese investment ? The British workers they employed ? The British middle management they employed ?

Or the British senior executives they DIDN'T employ ?"

Famously they all set up where no car industry had been before, so avoiding British car labour was evidently a large part of it.

Budgie said...

EK, whilst I agree with much of what you say, I do not think that the "rise of Marxism in unions was [due to the] devastation to jobs and communities". Marxism was popularised and made "respectable" largely by middle class "intellectuals" both before WW2 and especially by the "new left" in the 1950s.

Our establishment failed to do its job of illuminating the faults, and frankly the evil, inherent in state monopoly utopianism like socialism and Marxism. That was probably because Marxism offered them an opportunity for a lazy accumulation of power.

Pogo said...

@E-K... Or the British senior executives they DIDN'T employ ?

More likely not having "Red Robbo" and his fellow-travellers actually calling the shots.

Electro-Kevin said...

Thanks all for your comments.

I wish to talk about Ryan's £10 per hour (short of time)

We wouldn't NEED £10 per hour were it not for housing costs boosted by mass immigration and welfare landlording. And the silly greenist policies re energy.

The Chinese may well be working for £1 per hour but we are distorting the market - subsidising the manufacturers who employ them to produce their goods - by means of welfare and in-work benefits at home. Without this there would be neither the disparity in pay nor the market for these goods.

This explains our terrifying debt levels somewhat.

I heard that B&Q pay £1 for hollow-core doors. The customer is charged in the region of £25 per door (figures may be out of date) One heck of a mark-up. The full benefits of outsourcing not passed on to the taxpaying customer obviously.

This is what Peter Hitchens has said about Margaret Thatcher today. I could have written it myself I'm sure you'll agree.

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2013/04/lets-remember-maggie-for-what-she-really-was-a-tragic-failure-1.html

Thanks for all your comments. They're great.


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Je ne crois pas que dame de fer a fait une fausse mine vis-à-vis cette affaires des miniers,mais la manière dont elle a suivi était un peu frustrante.Dés lors, les ouvriers n'ont aucuns droits ni un abri pour se réfugiés à l'encontre de ce grand colosse.

Agence communication said...

wow ..... really this is so interesting """ Coal was the United State's first big industry.
"By 1909, the United States had already become the world’s largest coal producer. Churning out more than 418 million tons. Their mines were 35% greater in output than Great Britain’s 268 million tons making the formerly number one UK second worldwide. Germany was a distant third at only 217 million tons."
By 1929 it was 608 million tons in the USA. The crisis in mining and shipbuilding came in 1930 after the Wall Street crash. Coal production in the US was around half of the 1929 levels in 1932.
Docks were deserted. Orders were nil. And unemployment and hunger arrived. The UK, The British Empire, was already dependent on the United States economy for trade. And there was no trade. ""