As so often with a political event - and Margaret Thatcher's death is nothing if not political - it's not so much the event itself that fascinates as the reaction to it amongst friends and in the media.
Of course there is a good deal of hagiography in the Torygraph (I came away from its coverage with the impression that their heroine had discovered penicillin and been the first man - sorry, woman - on the moon), but elsewhere a lot of visceral hatred. The Guardian celebrated the event by a prominent piece from its former leader writer Hugo Young, a strange thing to do when Young has been dead ten years and, whatever else you can say, events have rather tended to confirm the endurance of Thatcher's Weltanschauung rather than the reverse. Certainly Young's prediction following the 1997 election that the Tories would never govern again looks beyond daft.
As I've written elsewhere, both these reactions seem overdone. Nothing is ever as good or bad as it appears at first sight.
I've also been thinking in the days since Thatcher's death about the Miners' Strike. To repeat, I supported it financially in a modest way without ever actually thinking it was a good idea. Many people apparently regard the defeat of the Strike, even more than the Poll Tax, as either Thatcher's finest hour or the apotheosis of evil. I have come to a surprising conclusion about the Strike, which I'll come to in a moment.
It's surprisingly hard to find information about pit closures on the internet. The BBC website has a list of pits from 1984 onwards, but nothing about pre-1984 closures. This is a shame because it is widely suggested that in fact more pits closed under Harold Wilson's governments than in the Thatcher years. The BBC suggests that during the Maggie era the number was in the mid-80s; another internet source suggests that under Wilson it was 93, although that same source puts the Thatcher number at 22.
The right wing blog The Commentator should be taken with a pinch of salt, but this summary of the industry's decline sounds pretty authoratative to me and clearly shows both that the process began long before Thatcher, and that successive governments struggled to reverse it -
"264 pits closed between 1957 and 1963. 346,000 miners left the industry between 1963 and 1968. In 1967 alone there were 12,900 forced redundancies. Under Harold Wilson one pit closed every week.
1969 was the last year when coal accounted for more than half of Britain’s energy consumption. By 1970, when the Conservatives were elected, there were just 300 pits left – a fall of two thirds in 25 years.
By 1974 coal accounted for less than one third of energy consumption in Britain. Wilson’s incoming Labour government published a new Plan for Coal which predicted an increase in production from 110 million tonnes to 135 million tonnes a year by 1985. This was never achieved. Margaret Thatcher’s government inherited a coal industry which had seen productivity collapse by 6 percent in five years. Nevertheless, it made attempts to rescue it.
In 1981 a subsidy of £50million was given to industries which switched from cheap oil to expensive British coal. So decrepit had the industry become that taxpayers were paying people to buy British coal. The Thatcher government injected a further £200million into the industry. Companies who had gone abroad to buy coal, such as the Central Electricity Generating Board, were banned from bringing it in and 3 million tonnes of coal piled up at Rotterdam at a cost to the British taxpayer of £30 million per year. By now the industry was losing £1.2 million per day. Its interest payments amounted to £467 million for the year and the National Coal Board needed a grant of £875 million from the taxpayer.
The Monopolies and Mergers Commission found that 75 percent of British pits were losing money.
The reason was obvious. By 1984 it cost £44 to mine a metric ton of British coal. America, Australia, and South Africa were selling it on the world market for £32 a metric ton. Productivity increases had come in at 20 percent below the level set in the 1974 Plan for Coal. Taxpayers were subsidising the mining industry to the tune of £1.3 billion annually. This figure doesn’t include the vast cost to taxpayer-funded industries such as steel and electricity which were obliged to buy British coal.
But when Arthur Scargill appeared before a Parliamentary committee and was asked at what level of loss it was acceptable to close a pit he answered “As far as I can see, the loss is without limits.”
I think it's probably fair to say that the British coal industry was massively loss making; indeed even Thatcher's opponents seem to accept this. Their argument runs firstly, that pit closures wrecked entire communities, and this is undoubtedly true. It is a world portrayed surprisingly well in Brassed Off. Secondly, the social cost of propping up those communities was so enormous that it outstripped the cost of coal subsidies. I have never seen any figure put on this, but it seems at least possible; certainly it was an argument I heard put persuasively by a South Wales GP on the radio yesterday.
The Commentator's statement of the plight of the coal industry doesn't touch on the Miners' Strikes of 1972 and 1974. The first of these strikes occurred when the NCB rejected a demand for a pay increase of 43% (yes, that's 43%). The second strike brought down the Heath government, and after Labour was elected instead, Harold Wilson settled the dispute with a pay offer of 35% (yes, that's 35%). These figures do not lie. Another Welshman on the radio yesterday bemoaning the waste that The Valleys have become said, "And these were top dollar jobs which went". Indeed they were. And that's why the industry was uneconomic.
Which brings me to my surprising conclusion. The Miners' Strike would never have happened today. Why not? The 1970s and 80s were the high water mark of the assumption that the government was made of money. If you worked in an industry of national importance you could twist the government's arm and it would cough up. In their hearts I don't really believe the miners thought they could lose; not in the beginning anyway.
If you told miners today they were going to lose their jobs because their pits were uneconomic, they would fall over themselves to agree productivity changes; even a pay cut. Anything to keep their jobs.
That's the measure of Thatcher's victory. She didn't just beat the miners. For good or ill she made everyone see the world differently. This is why the revellers celebrating her demise misunderstand its significance. Thatcher is dead; Thatcherism lives robustly on.
