Thank you Dominic Lawson in the Sunday Times
Contrary to popular opinion of the left:
As Joseph Goebbels is said to have observed, if a lie is told often enough, it is believed. There have been quite a few of those, in the acres of commentary following the death of Margaret Thatcher. The most pervasive is that she “destroyed” Britain’s manufacturing industry, and that this was in some way related to the plan of provoking the nation’s coal miners into a doomed strike.
In fact, when my father became energy secretary in 1981, the only instruction he received from the prime minister was: “Nigel, we mustn’t have a coal strike.”
And on the eve of the 1984 strike, her next energy secretary, Peter Walker, offered the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) a deal in which miners at pits scheduled for closure would be offered the choice of a job at another pit or a voluntary redundancy package — and a further £800m would be invested in the Coal Board. In his memoirs he recalled his surprise that Thatcher had agreed to the offer being made.
Yet it was rejected by the NUM leader, Arthur Scargill, who for ideological reasons wanted to wage class war and in such a conflict was prepared to lead his own members as Cardigan had the Light Brigade. Having had three calls for strike action rejected in ballots, he still took his men into an industrial valley of death, with what the then Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, belatedly described as “suicidal vanity”. This may help to explain why, whatever you might have gathered from either newspaper last week, The Guardian and the Daily Mirror joined the right-wing press in backing the government against the strike.
Far from being part of a campaign to replace British manufacturing with an economy based entirely on estate agency and share trading, the closures of the highest-cost deep-seam mines were necessary precisely because heavy industry more than any other requires low energy prices to compete.
Not only had the bulk of British coal become significantly more expensive than that which could be imported, but we now had a much cheaper form of fuel available, from the North Sea. In that sense what happened during the 1980s was a switch from one form of native extraction industry, which sucked billions from the taxpayer, to another, which not only provided cheaper electricity to heat our homes and colossal tax revenues for the government, but also was much less hazardous to the workforce involved.
It is in this context that one should view a characteristic comment last week by a former pitman, George Shaw, who told a newspaper: “There will be loads celebrating .” The next sentence after the quote in the article reads, quite without irony (and verbatim): “He left mining in 1998 to work on the railways but had to pack in due to arthritis due to all the years spent working underground.” Arthritis was almost the least of the medical conditions caused by deep-seam mining; even now, hundreds of men a year are diagnosed with pneumoconiosis, the result of exposure to coal dust. The truth is that the switch from high-cost coal to North Sea gas did not just save British energy consumers vast sums — it also saved men from a dreadful industrial disease.
It’s not clear how many who had worked down the pits became employed as roustabouts in the North Sea — where the average wage is now £64,000 a year and rising sharply; moreover, offshore work, however well paid, does not support a local community in quite the way the pits did. But it is another myth, endlessly repeated, that the Thatcher government was content to let the coal-mining areas become an industrial wasteland.
The most rigorous examination of the actual record was made in 2005 by the Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research at Sheffield Hallam University. It reported: “As the pit closures of the 1980s got under way, assisted area status was extended to additional mining areas, notably in Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire . . . the coalfields have also been targeted by a number of specific regeneration initiatives.”
With some success, it seemed: the Hallam team reported that “between 1981 and 2004, 220,000 male jobs were lost from the coal industry in ; this was offset by an increase of 132,400 in male jobs in other industries and services in the same areas . . . There is incontrovertible evidence that the labour market in the coalfields is bouncing back from the hammer blow of coal job losses.”
This is scant consolation to those who never got back into the labour market up in the fresh air, but it is much better than what almost every article on the subject last week would have you believe. Nor did it stop Scargill’s ex-wife declaring last week that she was “really, really happy” at Thatcher’s death and that she “wasn’t a woman, she was evil”.
No one rejoiced in the same way when Harold Wilson died, even though over 200 pits closed under his leadership of the country — more than under Thatcher. Perhaps this was forgivable from a Yorkshireman but not from a woman — and a Conservative.
What of the other, bigger, claim against the Thatcher governments: that as matter of deliberate policy, manufacturing industry as a whole was “decimated”? Roger Backhouse, professor of economics at Birmingham University and no Thatcherite, produced an assessment some years ago that concluded: “The main feature of the UK’s growth performance from 1979 to 1989 was an unusually high growth rate of manufacturing productivity.”
Even Thatcher’s critics would have to admit we became more productive in the 1980s — compare Nissan’s Sunderland plant with custom and practice at British Leyland. But what about overall manufacturing output? According to the Office for National Statistics, between the second quarter of 1979 and the third quarter of 1990 (the period of her leadership) it increased — yes, increased — by 7.5%.
It is certainly true that manufacturing declined as a proportion of GDP — and went on to do so at a faster rate during the years of new Labour. Yet this has been a feature of the West as a whole, and certainly not a peculiarly British phenomenon; about 12% of our GDP is attributable to manufacturing, similar to the proportion in France and America.
Even at their overblown peak, financial services never contributed anything like as big a proportion of our GDP. Again, you would never know that from almost every account of the post-Thatcher British economy.
Where British industry would have been without the Thatcher government’s brusque injection of competitiveness — not least through privatisation — is best assessed by reading the memoirs of Bernard Donoughue, head of the Downing Street policy unit under Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan.
He describes how in 1978 the PM’s private office ordered two new cars — from British Leyland, inevitably: “They took a long time to arrive. When they finally came they were found to have 34 mechanical faults . . . When they returned the PM went for a trip in one. He decided to open the window for some fresh air . . . the result was that the window immediately fell in on his lap.”
This was the industrial culture Thatcher inherited. Its elimination was only a good thing. That is the grave we should be dancing on.
Contrary to popular opinion of the left:
As Joseph Goebbels is said to have observed, if a lie is told often enough, it is believed. There have been quite a few of those, in the acres of commentary following the death of Margaret Thatcher. The most pervasive is that she “destroyed” Britain’s manufacturing industry, and that this was in some way related to the plan of provoking the nation’s coal miners into a doomed strike.
In fact, when my father became energy secretary in 1981, the only instruction he received from the prime minister was: “Nigel, we mustn’t have a coal strike.”
And on the eve of the 1984 strike, her next energy secretary, Peter Walker, offered the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) a deal in which miners at pits scheduled for closure would be offered the choice of a job at another pit or a voluntary redundancy package — and a further £800m would be invested in the Coal Board. In his memoirs he recalled his surprise that Thatcher had agreed to the offer being made.
Yet it was rejected by the NUM leader, Arthur Scargill, who for ideological reasons wanted to wage class war and in such a conflict was prepared to lead his own members as Cardigan had the Light Brigade. Having had three calls for strike action rejected in ballots, he still took his men into an industrial valley of death, with what the then Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, belatedly described as “suicidal vanity”. This may help to explain why, whatever you might have gathered from either newspaper last week, The Guardian and the Daily Mirror joined the right-wing press in backing the government against the strike.
Far from being part of a campaign to replace British manufacturing with an economy based entirely on estate agency and share trading, the closures of the highest-cost deep-seam mines were necessary precisely because heavy industry more than any other requires low energy prices to compete.
Not only had the bulk of British coal become significantly more expensive than that which could be imported, but we now had a much cheaper form of fuel available, from the North Sea. In that sense what happened during the 1980s was a switch from one form of native extraction industry, which sucked billions from the taxpayer, to another, which not only provided cheaper electricity to heat our homes and colossal tax revenues for the government, but also was much less hazardous to the workforce involved.
It is in this context that one should view a characteristic comment last week by a former pitman, George Shaw, who told a newspaper: “There will be loads celebrating .” The next sentence after the quote in the article reads, quite without irony (and verbatim): “He left mining in 1998 to work on the railways but had to pack in due to arthritis due to all the years spent working underground.” Arthritis was almost the least of the medical conditions caused by deep-seam mining; even now, hundreds of men a year are diagnosed with pneumoconiosis, the result of exposure to coal dust. The truth is that the switch from high-cost coal to North Sea gas did not just save British energy consumers vast sums — it also saved men from a dreadful industrial disease.
It’s not clear how many who had worked down the pits became employed as roustabouts in the North Sea — where the average wage is now £64,000 a year and rising sharply; moreover, offshore work, however well paid, does not support a local community in quite the way the pits did. But it is another myth, endlessly repeated, that the Thatcher government was content to let the coal-mining areas become an industrial wasteland.
The most rigorous examination of the actual record was made in 2005 by the Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research at Sheffield Hallam University. It reported: “As the pit closures of the 1980s got under way, assisted area status was extended to additional mining areas, notably in Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire . . . the coalfields have also been targeted by a number of specific regeneration initiatives.”
With some success, it seemed: the Hallam team reported that “between 1981 and 2004, 220,000 male jobs were lost from the coal industry in ; this was offset by an increase of 132,400 in male jobs in other industries and services in the same areas . . . There is incontrovertible evidence that the labour market in the coalfields is bouncing back from the hammer blow of coal job losses.”
This is scant consolation to those who never got back into the labour market up in the fresh air, but it is much better than what almost every article on the subject last week would have you believe. Nor did it stop Scargill’s ex-wife declaring last week that she was “really, really happy” at Thatcher’s death and that she “wasn’t a woman, she was evil”.
No one rejoiced in the same way when Harold Wilson died, even though over 200 pits closed under his leadership of the country — more than under Thatcher. Perhaps this was forgivable from a Yorkshireman but not from a woman — and a Conservative.
What of the other, bigger, claim against the Thatcher governments: that as matter of deliberate policy, manufacturing industry as a whole was “decimated”? Roger Backhouse, professor of economics at Birmingham University and no Thatcherite, produced an assessment some years ago that concluded: “The main feature of the UK’s growth performance from 1979 to 1989 was an unusually high growth rate of manufacturing productivity.”
Even Thatcher’s critics would have to admit we became more productive in the 1980s — compare Nissan’s Sunderland plant with custom and practice at British Leyland. But what about overall manufacturing output? According to the Office for National Statistics, between the second quarter of 1979 and the third quarter of 1990 (the period of her leadership) it increased — yes, increased — by 7.5%.
It is certainly true that manufacturing declined as a proportion of GDP — and went on to do so at a faster rate during the years of new Labour. Yet this has been a feature of the West as a whole, and certainly not a peculiarly British phenomenon; about 12% of our GDP is attributable to manufacturing, similar to the proportion in France and America.
Even at their overblown peak, financial services never contributed anything like as big a proportion of our GDP. Again, you would never know that from almost every account of the post-Thatcher British economy.
Where British industry would have been without the Thatcher government’s brusque injection of competitiveness — not least through privatisation — is best assessed by reading the memoirs of Bernard Donoughue, head of the Downing Street policy unit under Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan.
He describes how in 1978 the PM’s private office ordered two new cars — from British Leyland, inevitably: “They took a long time to arrive. When they finally came they were found to have 34 mechanical faults . . . When they returned the PM went for a trip in one. He decided to open the window for some fresh air . . . the result was that the window immediately fell in on his lap.”
This was the industrial culture Thatcher inherited. Its elimination was only a good thing. That is the grave we should be dancing on.
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