Just outta interest like................... Been 20+ years since I were in that industry (where does time go?)
36 years for me. I was at the Mining Research & Development Establishment at Bretby near Burton on Trent. I developed software for MINOS which ran conveyor belts and bunkers etc and then did some monitoring software for MIDAS which was the shearing machine drum steering system. Ironically I now work at the same place, in the same building as I was for a couple of years in the 80s. It's now Bretby Business Park.
And Arthur Scargill. And Labour. And the EU. They did seem to have a good cameraderie, although their language was appalling, my miner Grandad never effed and jeffed like that.
Wilson closed more mines than any other PM. Scargill was a terrible leader, and more concerned with trying to bring a democratically elected government down than doing the best for his members. EU emissions targets have closed the last deep mines. Maybe we need a Trump, he's pulling out of environmental treaties to keep their mines open.
That would be the EU emissions targets that were introduced in 2008, when there was only a handful of uneconomic pits left (compared to low cost imports).
Thais argument is oft peddled. The difference between the closures instigated by Wilson in the 60's and those instigated by her in the 80's was that the pits to be closed were almost universally agreed to be uneconomic and exhausted and in many cases men were redeployed to other pits. It wasn't a concerted effort to destroy a union an industry and the associated communities as her closure programme was. Another nail in your argument is that in the 70's and 80's, the NCB was a world leader in clean coal technology development. This was all sold off on the cheap by her. Clean coal technology could have allowed pits to stay open.
I've no wish to enter into any political arguments here, or anywhere else for that matter, but wasn't the "problem" with coal towards the end of the 20th century that domestic users didn't want it any more? I remember growing up in a town with a polluted atmosphere which just disappeared as soon as thousands of houses had gas central heating installed. As I've said, often enough, I left the town in 1970 to join the RAF and it wasn't until I had gone months without a visit home that I realised just how bad it was. When you live with something you don't really notice the smell and the grime created by coal fires. I remember our house at Wilthorpe being freezing during the winter except for the one room with a fire blazing away. I used to sleep in all kinds of strange stuff to try to keep warm! I'm sure that most people, when given the choice, welcomed the arrival of room by room central heating, powered by gas. So, surely then, the market for coal was severely depleted. I understand that there was still an industrial use for coal, but would that have been enough to keep the industry going? As I said above, I'm not trying to generate any kind of argument here but surely if a product isn't needed any more, or an industry isn't viable, then there's only one result isn't there? I'm not sure that laying the blame entirely at a government's door is really the right thing to do. You only have to look at the history books going back to pre-Industrial Revolution times to see how often whole generations of workers had their livelihoods taken away by new technology. Hand loom weaving was a skilled job, maybe for life, but that disappeared as soon as the massive new machines got installed in the factories. The loss of any kind of skill - industry, farming, fishing etc etc - is to be deplored, but I don't really see any way of stopping it happening. Market forces always win in the end.