Mining didn’t have to die because of threat posed by Scargill

I AGREE with W Snowden (Yorkshire Post, April 16) that Arthur Scargill was a disaster for coal miners, the whole coal industry and the many thousands of miners who suffered from his bloated ego, his very abrasive manner, his finger stabbing to highlight a point he was making, his intransigence and his apparent desire, above all other aims, to bring down the democratically-elected government of the time.

He appeared to relish confrontation and his actions could never convince many others to accept his views. It was absolutely essential for the future of democracy that his aims could never be achieved, that he was “put in his place”, but the question I have to ask is, was the destruction of our coal industry and coal mining communities the best solution to defeating a Marxist megalomaniac?

Surely, our higher educated, world statesmen/women should have the skills to overcome such an obstacle without inflicting such damage on the country. Miners could not reasonably expect that when Arthur Scargill was elected president of the NUM he would only lead them to the unemployment offices.

I had a milk round in the period 1974-1989 in Knottingley, West Yorkshire. Many of my customers were coal miners who worked at the nearby Kellingley colliery, one of the now few remaining operational coal mines.

In my experience, coal miners were very decent, hard working, “salt of the earth” people whom I was pleased to know, and they were good customers. The miners’ strike of 1984 was not the result of a ballot of members of the NUM; they were called out on strike without any say in the matter.

The year-long strike cost a small business like mine around £10,000, from cancelled orders during this long period, plus the numbers of customers who did not return when the strike ended as they had now got into the habit of buying elsewhere.

However, my losses were far less than those faced by many of my customers. Their cars were being repossessed; electrical equipment surrendered; holiday deposits wasted and a multitude of other assets forfeited as they could not afford to pay the credit instalments. Unfortunately, I saw very good, previously secure, family men lose many years of their purchases through no fault of their own. Then, after all of this suffering, in only a few very short years they were to find themselves thrown on the scrap heap as their jobs were taken from them.

Mr Snowden says that ICI shelved its plans to install coal-fired boilers because the National Coal Board could not guarantee continuity of supply. Wouldn’t it have been sensible to find out how such a guarantee could be achieved? This must be the far better option than what happened. Isn’t this a reason why we have governments as coal mining was a nationalised industry?

However, does Mr Snowden really believe that our companies now have guarantees of energy supplies, say electricity from France; gas from Russia; oil from Middle Eastern countries, and is the supplies of foreign coal guaranteed? Of course they aren’t – yet Mr Snowden chooses to omit this – why does he do this? Our energy supplies are now far less secure. How can this be an advantage?

Although Britain has placed herself at the mercy of other countries for energy supplies, we are leading the world in clean-coal technology; technology which can extract 90 per cent of CO2 emissions from the burning of coal. Doesn’t this situation highlight the folly of abandoning billions of tonnes of our rich coal reserves?