Cost in coal imports of Thatcher’s smashing of the miners

I READ with growing disbelief the tirade of sheer nonsense in the letter from William Snowden (Yorkshire Post, January 17), claiming that our mining industry was destroyed by militant mineworkers.

The reality was that the then government was hell bent on a pit closure policy believing that if they could destroy the National Union of Mineworkers then they could smash the whole trades union movement.

Today we have only four deep mines in the country yet we are burning as much coal as we did in the 1980s. The vast majority of this is imported from all over the world at frighteningly high prices. We still have many hundreds of years of known coal reserves. Reopening our mines would save billions of pounds now spent on the coal industries of Australia, Central America and eastern Europe. I’m afraid Mr Snowden has stuck the “bone headed bigotry” label on the wrong people.

From: David McKenna, Hall Gardens, Rawcliffe, Goole.

ONCE again, I have to take issue with William Snowden’s one-sided argument explaining the destruction of the coal industry. He is correct to a degree when he writes about “militant miners” but that disguises the rest of the problems that were instrumental in causing such unrest and ruination of communities.

There had been problems with the miners before as Edward Heath had found and these foundations were at the root of the conflict. Never again would a Conservative government be treated in such a way and they ditched what had become known in Tory circles as the “Macmillan doctrine”.

Macmillan was often presented as the arch appeaser of the miners because of his remark that the National Union of Mineworkers was, along with the Vatican and the Brigade of Guards, one of the “great powers” that no British Prime Minister could afford to annoy.

Indeed, when the government yielded to the miners in 1981, John Hoskyns, one of Thatcher’s advisers, wrote that the Prime Minister herself had accepted the “Macmillan doctrine”. However, this policy did not last.

There was friction between those who wanted nuclear energy to be developed faster and when Sir Walter Marshall, ex-head of the Atomic Energy Authority, was appointed head of the Central Electricity Generating Board, a picture was developing that indicated that the mining industry was about to be threatened by a wider array of opponents.

When Nicholas Ridley, who had produced a report on the nationalised industries way back in 1977 and which contained a “confidential annexe” on “countering the political threat” to the government’s plan to make these industries more efficient and financially accountable, was appointed Secretary of State for Transport in 1983, thereby making him responsible for getting the coal from the pits to the power stations, the lines of conflict were becoming clearer.

From: Richard Billups, East Avenue, Rawmarsh, Rotherham.

READING the letters praising Maggie Thatcher to the high heavens makes one wonder if the contributors have ever considered whether she ever got any little thing wrong.

I should imagine it won’t be long before letter writers aren’t calling for her beatification as Saint Maggie, the saint for milk snatching and council house sellers.

Her hard work to give press barons TV stations and deregulation to bankers are now bearing fruit.

The cuts now being made to the benefits of the disabled to pay for the greedy bankers’ mistakes shows how influential Maggie’s ideas have turned out.

Saint Maggie’s disciples’ blindness to her faults seems to be incurable.

The opinions of these disciples makes it hard for people with common sense to understand.