Please dont put words into my mouth when all I did say was that if the Co-op goes bust then Labour will not get anymore cheap loans!
You have got to see the Matt cartoon today from the Telegraph. Irrespective of your views on this thread, it is a classic.
Hold on a minute fella. Scargill might not be the most likeable character and his tactics might be open to question but, to be fair, what he told his members and got them to strike for was perfectly correct. He told them that Thatcher wanted to shut down the mining industry completely, which she denied, said at the time that she just wanted to trim it and then blamed Scargill for the extent of the closures. The subsequent papers released show that all along Scargill was telling the truth and Thatcher was lying. She also secretly ordered the mines to be flooded so that they can never be reopened - vindictive bitch!! Here we are facing an energy crisis and thanks to her 100 years of energy underground cannot be used. I visited an old mining village a couple of years ago - it is now dead and soulless but they still won't talk to any scab or Policeman. Old miners with long bitter memories!!!
This is a pretty good thread with some real passion coming through, makes a real change from the footy. I would say that the truth lies somewhere between the two points of view. Come on 1950, Scargill was not doing what he did out based on some philanthropic gesture, he was out for himself and his London house which he is still contesting and demanding he keeps all these years later is proof of that self-interest. Of course Thatcher shafted the NDA which was completely unforgivable as well and her motives like Scargill's were based blindly on political ideologies. All quite odious and neither is particularly better or worse than the other.
Quite correct about Scargill, Thurnby, - I haven't got any time for him either but he is blamed for many things that were not his fault and Thatcher got away with a lot both in life and death. Bob Crow wipes the floor with the pair of them.
The Wilson and Callaghan governments shut down far more pits than the Thatcher government! Scargill was just spoiling for a fight but he didn't reckon on the iron will and resolve of Mrs T
Bob Crow did sod all for the country apart from bringing chaos on a regular basis to people going about their daily business! He won't be remembered for long!
Personally I feel Bob Crow was an anachronism, preventing the modernisation of the tube. The age of militant unionism has passed, largely because worker rights are far better protected for example the introduction of the minimum wage in 1998. Bob Crow took advantage of a weakness time and time again, there was no “principle” in his action it wasn’t based on the belief that tube drivers are down trodden and selfless, he just knew that with 10 million people living in London the ability to shut the tube network gave him a chance to ransom the working of the city and the country, Tube strikes have a noticeable effect on our economy. He threatened strikes in the Olympics unless his workers got a bonus just for doing what then would anyway. People’s defence of Bob crow was that he was protecting the people he worked for, he wasn’t their protector, he was their fixer, getting his hands dirty for a salary higher than that of a government minister. There is no moral argument that tube drivers should be paid more, they earn twice what a nurse does despite having to do a 3 day course to learn how to press the button to move to the next station. Soon the tube will run without drivers and I won’t shed a tear that the most overpaid workers in the country are force to leave the gravy train. I should add that I am in no way pleased that he as a person is dead and feel for his family. Any celebration would be as bad as the people who celebrated Mrs Thatcher’s death with I found utterly abhorrent
He wasn't paid by the country was he. He was paid by his members to improve/maintain their jobs, pay and conditions and he did that to the best of his ability. The fact that Cameron and Bonkers, who are paid by the Country, couldn't get the better of him was their problem.
Agree 100%.I was putting forward what their assessment of him would be.I may be the only one on here who has voted for him.
The Wilson and Callaghan governments were only carrying on the work of previous post war Governments - closing pits exhausted by the needs of war and opening new ones. For ' iron will and resolve ' substitute ' vindictiveness and stupidity ' - are you really happy that with an approaching energy crisis we have 100 years worth underground that we now can't use?
How many more times. He was not paid by his members to modernise the system - that is the job of management. If, as you concede, he always won because of weakness of management that is not his problem or remit. Protector or fixer - that is what his members paid him to do.
Its the shale gas under northumbria that we should be focusing on, Coal is a horrible dirty fuel and expensive to mine. Opening coal mines and building more Coal powered power stations, which we're not legally allowed to do, would vastly increase the cost of power in this country. Coal power is now only 30% of the UK total. the "Energy crisis" will be solved with CCGT and Nuclear power stations.
He prevented the system advancing by shutting it down if he didn't get his way, the management of TFL had little they could do to run the tube, his plan was to cause major disruption until he got his way. It was economic terrorism.
Agree with you there fella. No problem as long as the Government tells the nimby's to piss off, stop listening to the green idiots telling us that inefficient ineffective windmills and glass panels are the answer and gets the public to accept the bleedin' obvious - you won't get a tsunami on our coast unless they build one in the Thames estuary near that sunken ammunition ship. That's right - where Bonkers wants to build a new airport!!! You couldn't make it up. It would be nice to have coal as a back up though - anything is better than an energy shortage.
Isn't that always the situation with a worker v management struggle? Bob Crow got away with it because he was better than the rest and the management were piss poor.
