I remember a government minister at the time (I can't remember his name now) saying on Radio 4 that "We have to reduce our coal production to increase our capacity for imported coal.". I never did understand the logic of that!

:thumbdown:

Okay I admit it, It was me who closed all the coal mines! 😞
I'm sorry!

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Very conspiratorial, but unfortunately true; cutting through the conspiracies and conspiracy theories was the largest part of the work so we could get to the true facts.

Here it needs people to do their own research and they will form the same conclusions, or very similar conclusions to ours, the documentation was released in 2003 so people can look it up for themselves.

"We" "ours"

So who exactly is "we" and "us"
I asked this before.
Cat got your tongue on this question?
😉

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I'm still seething from the closure of the Sussex flint mines and iron-works. I never have found anyone to blame. :lol:

As far as the flint mines go, I suspect those half-breeds from Grimes Graves, but they never released any papers to prove it!

Simon, your thread about shaft-filling was really interesting and very much worth posting. This thread however... :thumbdown:

Is "Simon M" possibly a journalist on a fishing trip?

No,he`s most likely to be a PR man for them Udm`s,

He`ll be standing up for that Greatrex next.

without getting too political,
who closed the coal mines, British Coal, RJB/Richard Budge and lately UK Coal. who benefited by it, ultimatly oil producers as there was a market for local coal up until power stations nationally were converted to burn oil, north sea oil and gas was fostered by Thatcher. who brought british coal mines down, Scargill and the striking miners (apologies I realise this is contentious, I am all for keeping men in work but what you can sell your product for is what the market will pay for it, this basically determines miners wages at the end of the day, fighting for better wages in that climate is like p*ssing in the wind.
who lost out by the closure of the mines well the whole country really, mining communities, particularly as we have clean coal/carbon capture tech now, we have no energy security, we even import coal for the coal using industries remaining here.
those are the facts, I guess we dont split hairs in metal mining country!

Somersetminer,
The Strike Was`nt for better wages,it was against pit closures.

Somersetminer,
The Strike Was`nt for better wages,it was against pit closures.

fair point. however supporting unprofitable pits (the full truth as to which were and which wernt will never be known as the people doing the assesing could be thought of as biased, it gets very murky here)
would have the same impact. I think we can agree though keeping the miners in work had a market for the coal been there, would have been more cost effective than landing them on the dole

Somersetminer,
The Strike Was`nt for better wages,it was against pit closures.

Scargill said it was to bring down the tory government and install a socialist one

Somersetminer,
The Strike Was`nt for better wages,it was against pit closures.

Scargill said it was to bring down the tory government and install a socialist one

There are a lot of people out there who would like to bring down this Tory Government as well,lol.

Scargill was a loud mouth,but Miner`s would not have come out on strike for a call to bring down the Tories,it was for pit closures.

Thought it time that gently placed this thought amongst you all, which is this on another forum this subject has been brought up as you can imagine. It is not difficult to research the name of the pits in one area and see when they closed. From this info one could cross reference the closure dates against which party were in power. For south wales the results are quite interesting and not what I thought... Inspite of what you might think more pits closed since 1947 under labour than Tory governments if the data is to believed.

So it is easy one might say to say who closed our mines ... Or perhaps who should have done more to keep them open !

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I live right in the heart of where the main mine closer and indeed scargill was at, the problem was it became a personal battle between Scargill & Thatcher and NOTHING else mattered to either of them, especially the working man.

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Thought it time that gently placed this thought amongst you all, which is this on another forum this subject has been brought up as you can imagine. It is not difficult to research the name of the pits in one area and see when they closed. From this info one could cross reference the closure dates against which party were in power. For south wales the results are quite interesting and not what I thought... Inspite of what you might think more pits closed since 1947 under labour than Tory governments if the data is to believed.

So it is easy one might say to say who closed our mines ... Or perhaps who should have done more to keep them open !

The problem with this is....... Labour closed more mines than the Tories. But labour in the 60's suffered from man power issues so they closed some old mines to supply man power to new mines, therefor the number of mines went down but the man power didn't. It might be a better question to ask how many mines opened under labour and the Tories.

There is one thing for sure there wont be many opening or closing now under any government

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main the problem was it became a personal battle between Scargill & Thatcher and NOTHING else mattered to either of them, especially the working man.

Scargill and Thatcher were made for each other
:lol:

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Whoever it was they did us a favour really.
Nasty, dirty places those coal mines......

We is a team of us working for nearly 20 years to cut through the B/S usually in a biased media (to both sides politically) the conspiracy theories of many and the misinformation from both sides.

We is the collective.

A combination of many things, I suspect.

- a decline in the use of coal, leading to reduced demand (and thus comparatively lower prices)
- increasingly cheaper imports
- the development of larger, more mechanised pits making smaller ones unviable
- increasing costs of extraction in the UK further increasing the squeeze caused by the above
- possibly some effects of the 'easier' reserves being exhausted, pushing up prices
- the effects of the miners' strike (regardless of the causes)

The picture is skewed by the closures in the 1980s - I'd suggest that it's slightly misleading to look at that in isolation as even if the closures were concentrated at certain times, the reasons for those closures would have been gathering for many years beforehand.

It's wrong to be looking for a simple single answer as there isn't one - the same could be said about the slate mining industry 80 years earlier and very similar factors will have been involved then.

It's all part and parcel of globalisation of supply and de-industrialistion within our own borders.

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One of the major factors must have been the relative difficulty of UK coal extraction compared to foreign shallow thick seam opencast and reducing, (at the time) bulk transport costs?

UK coal consumption is currently around 70 million tonnes a year, just after the strike the UK produced 100 million tonnes a year. The market has got smaller but could still support a large UK coal industry.

A lot of people seem to think that opencast coal is cheaper than deep mined coal. The truth is it isn't. Columbia has exported opencast coal to us at a loss just to get hard currency into their country. The price of coal is the price of coal, opencast or deep mined has no bearing on the price.