gunner

seeing as Succa has brought up the Coal Mining Industry,

A passage from an educated ex-coal miner.

quote

include Wales and Scotland togther with England and say Britains's coal-fields, sadly, were not profitable. Prior to Mrs T the coal industry was subsidised by the government owning it. The major coal customers eg the power stations were also nationalised and everyone paid a subsidy to the coal industry through their electricity bill. This fed though into prices and the UK was a country with relatively high inflation.
Mining is a horrible, dangerous and dirty industry which was artificially kept going as a sort of branch of the social services. I know in the 'romance of coal' all those Welsh miners go off to the pits happily singing but in reality few would have liked their sons to follow them down there. The industry was recognised as having no significant future in the UK.
The correct thing to have done would have been to run down the industry in a controlled way as was done in Europe but Thatcher inherited an industry which was far too big because of over-dependence on coal as a prinary fuel for power generation and earlier coal strikes where the NUM (national union of mineworkers) had asserted that mines should only close when the last tonne of coal had been extracted. That led to the situation of men travelling miles underground to work seams only a few inches thick - no matter what the price of oil might be there was no way that could be profitable.
Foreign fuel was being purchased by the then CEGB (central electricity generating board) prior to the strike as an insurance policy in the event of a strike being called. The technolgy of coal transport had advanced since the war and very large bulk carriers could bring bring 50 thousand tonnes plus in a single cargo from any country in the world where steam coal was cheap because of lower cost operations which were really just like quarrying such as Autralia, South Africa and Colombia. While all this was going on gas and oil were at historically low prices and the problem is that burning coal in a clean and efficient way is always more expensive than burning other fuels. The technology for burning coal has not developed very quickly despite the recurrent talk of new technologies on the horizon and there has not really been a huge influx of steam coal into the UK for power generation and cement-making.
The other major sort of traded coal - coking coal for steel making - had for a long time been sourced from overseas such as the USA on quality grounds as there is just not enough good quality coking coal left in the UK.
My view is that the industry had to be reduced because of its cost which was holding back other areas of the economy but that a less confrontational resolution should have been found but of course you had a belligent president of the NUM (Arthur Scargill) who wanted to bring class war onto the streets and a prime minister who was determined not to be brushed aside as had been done to her Tory predecessor Edward Heath some years previously.
We have had new labour governments for some years now and to the best of my knowledge there has been no attempt to revive any of the closed mines. Sorry but coal mining in this country apart from some very specific mines dedicated to power stations is now history. quote

paul.

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