Andy Buchanan · Getty
In 1984, in the midst of her battle with Britain’s miners, Margaret Thatcher warned that her opponents wanted to turn the country into a ‘museum society’. If the UK was to renew its power and relevance, she argued, its ‘old’ and ‘uneconomic’ heavy industries had to be jettisoned, regardless of their value to the communities and cultures they sustained.
This forced-march vision of ‘modernisation’ only entrenched the Conservatives’ unpopularity in large swathes of the Midlands and North of England; and in some ways a ‘museum society’ really did emerge there, not just through efforts to conserve and commemorate industrial heritage, but also through a lingering persistence of the loyalties and beliefs forged by industry, including support for the Labour Party. When Thatcher died in 2013, at least one deindustrialised town, Goldthorpe in South Yorkshire, held a celebratory procession, replete with miners’ banners and burning effigies.
The politics of denial
Class and the politics of narrow nationalism are now entwined, writes Eddie Ford. Instead of denying its own role in helping to bring about this sorry situation, the left needs to do some serious thinking
Everyone is now trying to come to terms with the fallout from last week’s elections on ‘super Thursday’, especially the Hartlepool disaster-cum-debacle. Firstly, insofar as it is a valid exercise at all, how would the results have panned out in a general election? The polls tell us 36% for the Tories, Labour on 29%, the Liberal Democrats with 17% and others on 18% (Scottish National Party, Plaid Cymru, Greens, etc).
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Scotland’s coalfields once sprawled across the central belt, from Ayrshire and Lanarkshire on the west coast to Fife and the Lothians on the east. In 1947, 77,000 people worked in Scottish coal. By 1990, that number had slumped to just 6,000. Popular history dictates that the UK coal industry was rapidly wound down during the latter part of the 20th century by Conservative politicians hostile to organized labour. But as Ewan Gibbs explains in ‘Coal Country: The Meaning and Memory of Deindustrialization in Postwar Scotland’, the reality is more complicated.
Competition from cheaper fuels and the emergence of nuclear power pushed British coal into decline soon after the Second World War. In the 1950s and ‘60s, governments and mining unions negotiated the closure of nationalised pits and collieries. In the 1970s, there was a sharp uptick in industrial action. In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher abandoned the consensual strategy of previous decades in fa
Coming from a working-class background, you ve always got a feeling of imposter syndrome that you shouldn t be there,” he says.
“I was fully of the opinion I would only be there for one term and either the voters would get rid of me or the Labour party would get rid of me. My pledge to myself was to have a go.
“When I got in, I was a bit intimidated by the place – I only knew one of my colleagues, Elaine Smith.
Neil Findlay at a protest by parents, carers and members of the public at St John s Hospital against the continued closure of the children s ward Pic: Greg Macvean