Na then Forest.....

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pommpey said:
I had the luxury - like most on here - of witnessing the unions abusing their privilege and duty to workers they represent in the 1970s. It was they who gave us the three day week, blackouts, the collapse of the Heath government, the strong-arming of the Callaghan administration into the dismal Winter of Discontent. It was they who gave us Thatcher, it was they who corrupted the Labour Party with militants and extended her reign just like Corbyn has given us Johnson and his bulletproof grip on power now.

Scargill was socialism's last death rattle and unfortunately it took a lot of unfortunate, grafting, decent individuals with it. He was a vainglorious, hypocritical, deluded bastard who failed in his duty to achieve universal consensus to strike, and as said, then went on to weaponise those people he claimed to represent in a civil war against the tory government and it's enforcement methods. The mining industry was a sucking black hole of economic doom, and had been for decades. He tried to use those people for political gain, not for their rights to keep working in an industry which was finished. And he failed ... and failed those poor fuckers whose lives he impoverished and wrecked. He also finished the union movement too. Reform was badly needed and inevitable.

So aligning our dismal failures against a far better football team is pathetic. Dragging deep-seated hatreds and misconceived opinions forward is similarly daft, especially when the outcomes of Thatcher's period in power saw the country stabilise and grow and eventually shift track from loss making manufacturing to profitable services. And before people start, we would be nowhere with regard competitive advantage if we'd continued in the manufacturing industries of the past. Coal, for example, was 25% more expensive than overseas sources and the steel industry, something very close to all our hearts, was being outstripped on every front by Scandinavian and far eastern imports.

pommpey
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Wonderfully written.
 



Bladesthorpe said:
That would be me then, thanks for writing me off. They didn't need a vote 99 percent were solidly behind the strike, Scargill said that their plan was to close all the pits that turned out to be right thanks in part to those scabby bastards .
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What I never understood was why, if it was 99%, did Scargill not have a vote? He would have won the vote and taken part of the argument about legitimacy away. The Notts miners would then not have had the argument they did. Whether that would have changed the ultimate result is a moot point though.
 
Probably the Miners that scabbed will mostly be Pensioners now , on a higher rate pension , than Solid miners , so it is still relivant today as they Benefited . From working when others sufferd.
 
COME BACK CHED said:
Probably the Miners that scabbed will mostly be Pensioners now , on a higher rate pension , than Solid miners , so it is still relivant today as they Benefited . From working when others sufferd.
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Excuse my ignorance. So because they went back to work they got a better pension rate?

Not as good as Scargills pension though. He’s done very well for himself out of it.
 
knowsnowt said:
pommpey said:
Whereas this here forum is about football, not axes to grind about an ill-informed, and ill-conceived industrial dispute nearly forty years ago, the outcome of which was a fait accompli anyway and basically weaponised working class individuals mired in a doomed industry.

Try to understand that coal mining - Scargill, Thatcher, McGregor or not - would still be over now anyway given it's horrendous footprint on the environment. What happened in 1984-85 was merely a coup de grace which should have happened a decade earlier when the unions crippled this country more than Thatcher ever would.

pommpey
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knowsnowt said:
Pains me to agree with you, but I do. Totally.
The mining industry was basically shafting the country right up the arse to the neck vertebrae, and needed a dose of reality, which it got.
Thatcher doing it was incidental, and yes I agree there may have been a huge dose of "fuck the working class" from her that's made the hatred for her reverberate down labour class generation's till this day, but it was needed.
Scargill was a fucking tool.
As for the whole scab thing, it's like Wednesday still harking on about being in Europe and having 600'000'000 fans on the kop at every game. No one under 30 experienced or can speak of it like they were there.
Sorry Fred, but I won't be investing and I'm oot. :/
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`This area still hasn’t recovered from the vengeful and deliberate destruction of it by Thatcher and her boot boys.
If you feel she destroyed the mining industry and proud mining communities as an environmentally friendly act for the country, you are more delusional than any of our friends across the city.
She chose to the destroy the industry and more importantly century old communities to teach the enemy within a lesson.
`There was no strategic plan to reinvest in those communities, and they were just left to rot and die.The only plan was to kill the area off, and make vast fortunes for her cronies out of playing the stock market, and giving them cheap shares to profit from by privatising national assets which didn’t belong to her.The rest of us could rot in our own cheap call centres..
 
MagnifiqueShorehamStreet said:
`This area still hasn’t recovered from the vengeful and deliberate destruction of it by Thatcher and her boot boys.
If you feel she destroyed the mining industry and proud mining communities as an environmentally friendly act for the country, you are more delusional than any of our friends across the city.
She chose to the destroy the industry and more importantly century old communities to teach the enemy within a lesson.
`There was no strategic plan to reinvest in those communities, and they were just left to rot and die.The only plan was to kill the area off, and make vast fortunes for her cronies out of playing the stock market, and giving them cheap shares to profit from by privatising national assets which didn’t belong to her.The rest of us could rot in our own cheap call centres..
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Jesus christ. And people say my posts are stupid!
 
MagnifiqueShorehamStreet said:
`This area still hasn’t recovered from the vengeful and deliberate destruction of it by Thatcher and her boot boys.
If you feel she destroyed the mining industry and proud mining communities as an environmentally friendly act for the country, you are more delusional than any of our friends across the city.
She chose to the destroy the industry and more importantly century old communities to teach the enemy within a lesson.
`There was no strategic plan to reinvest in those communities, and they were just left to rot and die.The only plan was to kill the area off, and make vast fortunes for her cronies out of playing the stock market, and giving them cheap shares to profit from by privatising national assets which didn’t belong to her.The rest of us could rot in our own cheap call centres..
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Not intending to be antagonistic here, but I go through the former mining communities of Chesterfield regularly and through some of them in Sheffield, Doncaster and Rotherham and they all look like they’ve had money spent on reclaiming the land with huge amounts of cash spent on outdoor spaces such as the trans pennine way, lakes, woodlands etc. Plus with affordable housing in those areas it’s a very different landscape and community now

There are clearly examples where they still haven’t recovered, but that can also be said about traditional fishing communities like Grimsby
 
I'm too young to remember the miners strike but Forest will always be scabs in the same way as the pigs are the pigs or we get called blunts. It's just become our derogatory name for their fans and it shouldn't necessarily provoke historic debate on the strike
 



As someone who watched my parents struggle when the smithy wood coking plant went on strike and lost everything and the money problems, then I'm sorry , but in my view it's in the past, supporters of that club in 99.99% of cases had zero to do with this.

And as a parent I can see why some did take the decision to break the picket lines, first rule of parent hood is your kids health and future, if that's what they thought was best, then so be it.


Get a grip and move on eh, nothing worse than hearing some 20 odd years olds shouting it to boot .. Jesus wept.
 
Jon Bon II said:
IMO Thatcher was the greatest leader that this country has had in my lifetime but the entitled twats from the Shitty Ground will always be scabs to me.
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Im not a fan. Though she did bring some much needed realities to the country, polarizing the working classes hatred for her.
I'd rather have a pint with her than a pig that's for sure.
 
SwissBlade said:
Not intending to be antagonistic here, but I go through the former mining communities of Chesterfield regularly and through some of them in Sheffield, Doncaster and Rotherham and they all look like they’ve had money spent on reclaiming the land with huge amounts of cash spent on outdoor spaces such as the trans pennine way, lakes, woodlands etc. Plus with affordable housing in those areas it’s a very different landscape and community now

There are clearly examples where they still haven’t recovered, but that can also be said about traditional fishing communities like Grimsby
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They’ve had money spent reclaiming the land, but not really on replacing the jobs that were lost in the coal industry. In Germany they invested heavily in their coal areas by creating a renewables industry in these areas. Be too much to expect our governments to think long term though.
 
Scargill always reminded me of Punch of Punch and Judy fame
words he never used in negotiation were reason or compromise
he was just full on confrontational
I was brought up like a lot in Sheffield as Labour but I think men like Scargill took away the integrity
and ran the NUM as a dictatorship
I dont think unions in general have recovered from the damage he did
He put me off seeing Labour as credible by using socialist idealogy for his own self promotion
 
pommpey said:
Whereas this here forum is about football, not axes to grind about an ill-informed, and ill-conceived industrial dispute nearly forty years ago, the outcome of which was a fait accompli anyway and basically weaponised working class individuals mired in a doomed industry.

Try to understand that coal mining - Scargill, Thatcher, McGregor or not - would still be over now anyway given it's horrendous footprint on the environment. What happened in 1984-85 was merely a coup de grace which should have happened a decade earlier when the unions crippled this country more than Thatcher ever would.

pommpey
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I'm not going to get drawn into this, but in the interest of fairness let's remember the wider context.

Thatcher was in the process of dismantling the post war settlement that was the reward for the British working people for the sacrifices they made in WW2.

Public housing was being sold off, nationalised industries were going in the name of "rationalisation" and the free market, regulations were being binned, which eventually led to the crash in the financial sector, the gap between rich and poor was widening at an accelerating rate, and the Unions were being hammered for standing up for their members.

Remember Thrybergh was the third most efficient rolling mill in the world when Thatcher had it closed to break the steel workers Union.

Thatcher was on an ideological crusade to break the workers and didn't care one jot about the sacrifice they had made for those rights and privileges.

The only justification I can find for her (but not her supporters) came from Ken Clarke who claims Thatcher was incapable of any degree of empathy towards those she harmed. In short that may have been the onset of her dementia, or may have been that she was somewhat along the autism spectrum all along.
 
Garibaldi said:
They’ve had money spent reclaiming the land, but not really on replacing the jobs that were lost in the coal industry. In Germany they invested heavily in their coal areas by creating a renewables industry in these areas. Be too much to expect our governments to think long term though.
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The pits were losing money and weren't sustainable. It saved the country money by closing them down.
 
SwissBlade said:
Not intending to be antagonistic here, but I go through the former mining communities of Chesterfield regularly and through some of them in Sheffield, Doncaster and Rotherham and they all look like they’ve had money spent on reclaiming the land with huge amounts of cash spent on outdoor spaces such as the trans pennine way, lakes, woodlands etc. Plus with affordable housing in those areas it’s a very different landscape and community now

There are clearly examples where they still haven’t recovered, but that can also be said about traditional fishing communities like Grimsby
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Ironically, most of that money was EU funds as S Yorks, N Derbys and N Notts (along with Merseyside and Cornwall) were recognised as being amongst the most deprived areas in Europe - alongside places like the "Black Triangle" in southern Poland.

Thatcher's Tories were never going to invest meaningfully in (what were then) Labour heartlands.
 
Garibaldi said:
They’ve had money spent reclaiming the land, but not really on replacing the jobs that were lost in the coal industry. In Germany they invested heavily in their coal areas by creating a renewables industry in these areas. Be too much to expect our governments to think long term though.
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Not sure on Germany, but you're right and MagnifiqueShorehamStreet also made a similar point that there was no strategic plan for bringing jobs to those areas. However, this isn't just isolated to Coal industry communities.

The UK's renewables industry is huge, again i don't know what level of ex miners have moved into other industries like renewables, but since i work in Oil and Gas, i know that there are huge number of ex steel workers who've moved into this industry as well as the offshore Windfarms as they had transferable skills that made it a simple transition with a small amount of training.
 
SheepdipBlade said:
Ironically, most of that money was EU funds as S Yorks, N Derbys and N Notts (along with Merseyside and Cornwall) were recognised as being amongst the most deprived areas in Europe - alongside places like the "Black Triangle" in southern Poland.

Thatcher's Tories were never going to invest meaningfully in (what were then) Labour heartlands.
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I intentionally didn't refer to where the money came from, but the point was that they have been undeniably been transformed from what they were.
 
SwissBlade said:
I intentionally didn't refer to where the money came from, but the point was that they have been undeniably been transformed from what they were.
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Transformed certainly - but at a great social cost. I vividly remember the Wath Valley filling with telesales warehouses full of ex miners trying to sell conservatories and double glazing because some boffin had identified the S Yorkshire accent as being the most trustworthy, plain speaking and intelligible in Britain.

So from being part of communities and an industry with a long a proud history, these men found themselves cold calling people like desperate second hand car salesmen.

Transformed - yes. But improved??
 



SheepdipBlade said:
Transformed certainly - but at a great social cost. I vividly remember the Wath Valley filling with telesales warehouses full of ex miners trying to sell conservatories and double glazing because some boffin had identified the S Yorkshire accent as being the most trustworthy, plain speaking and intelligible in Britain.

So from being part of communities and an industry with a long a proud history, these men found themselves cold calling people like desperate second hand car salesmen.

Transformed - yes. But improved??
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I can't speak on that side, as i said. My point was that the areas are much transformed and improved.
 
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