Thread 3 Burnham: Receso para reorganizarse

[BIossomtoes]

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New PM, new thread title, the discussion continues from https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/_chat/5557787-thread-2-burnham-coragem-e-esperanca?page=1

South Wales miners were historically committed to education which would have mitigated against Reform. They also had connections with the LGBT community via Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners and marched at the first London Pride.
Those communities were destroyed by Thatcher and left behind and have subsequently come rather Brexity/Reformy.

🤣

Yeah, they have strong links with pride and told the reform council where to get off the moment they tried to muscle in but you're right, it's complicated and not everyone's scene. And, as posters here have observed with their families and friends, there is a huge element of turkeys voting for Christmas.

FIL and a lot of others in the area detested Scargill for what the strike put them and their families through.

Scargill (currently deputy leader of the Socialist Labour Party) is still alive - you can ask him 😁

Not sure when this Statement On socialist labour site is from. Maybe September last year but Scargill really doesn’t like any idea of rejoining the EU because it is capitalist and introduced VAT so against Burnham (and Starmer).
Not sure what he thinks now

Amazed Scargill is still alive and only 88 yrs old

As @PickAChew pointed out above ex-miners are a dwindling bunch - the youngest are mid to late 70s and many have already died even in this younger cohort

Yeah, he looked so much older in the 80s than he was. Bit like footballers from the 60s and 70s look old.

Not round here. Our last pit closed early 90s. There's a good few late 50s and 60s. Which is prime Reform voting age. We are a Reform town. 😕

Tower was the last in Wales and that ran until 2008. I know a few my age (63) who worked underground.

It was early to mid 90s in Durham, too. For FIL, that was Easington in 1992. DH was doing his A-levels that year and he did them and got into computing as a result of targeting of schools and colleges in his area because the traditional jobs had disappeared and this would be the new thing.

The irony that AI can now do much of the coding grunt work that would have been given to newbies, a few years ago, isn't lost on him.

My late mum didn’t like the Queen mum either ( my mum was born in 1925)
She had ideas above her station and wanting to be know as ‘ the Queen mum ‘ was one of those ideas apparently. Not sure why that generation wasn’t keen , but they didn’t like her much.
Plus my mum lived through the blitz. She said the Royals would have been gone overnight if Hitler had invaded which is probably true I suppose .

I got into computing in the 80s due to a civil service mass recruitment of trainee programmers and a couple of my fellow trainees were miners or pit workers who were on strike at the time of the recruitment drive. In fact I was asked about the Miners’ strike during my interview.

Apologies for my misleading statement - should have specified which coalfield I meant

In its final years it was owned by the miners wasn’t it? Did that change anything?

They took it over in 1993 I think after the NCB closed it.

I remember the news reports. Excellent bit of community action.

Sadly, digging coal out of the ground - quite aside from the ecological aspects - is expensive. And as we discovered in the 70s, put the countries collective testicles in the gentle embrace of the NUM.

When I were a lass, we were told there were 300 years of coal under our feet.

Speaking of Scargill .... back in 1985, at he height of the miners strike, he was on QT, and he gave a piece about how the strike was so that miners sons (to be fair I may be imposing a misogyny with hindsight that wasn't there at the time) would be able to follow their fathers "down t'mine".

When the audience were asked for comments, an American young woman asked him directly why the children of miners were expected to follow their fathers instead of being teachers, doctors, lawyers, bankers, insurance salesmen, architects or indeed any other profession.

It was a teachable moment for those who learn.

That was a very good question. I’d be very interested in knowing how he answered the question, if you remember? (I didn’t watch QT in those days, at 15.)

Which is all well and good for the children of miners who were academically inclined. In my school year only around 10% of students achieved the O level grades required to do A levels, never mind go to university to study for a profession.
While we shouldn't be writing off the potential of working class children, I don't think perpetuating the idea that they can educate themselves into professions so they don't need to be working class anymore is helpful either.
Blue collar work is essential and a perfectly valuable and respectable route to 'follow your father down' if your skill set leans towards the technical and practical rather than the academic.
If an industry has to close, there needs to be other appropriate opportunities for people who would have been employed in that industry.

Beat me to it @5128gap, exactly that.

I'd hope he'd have at least challenged the myth that working in the local industry was restrictive of potential and talent, as seems to be implied by the questioner. Working down the pit didn't always have to mean unskilled manual work mauling coal out of the ground. My great grandfather was an engineer and my cousin a skilled electrician.

Which is all well and good for the children of miners who were academically inclined.

I think if there was a point, it was missed here.

Seems we are being attracted to that binary thinking again.

If it happens it happens, but I won't go down without a fight.

"Working in mining" <> "Not an academic career"
"Non academic career" <> "Working down a mine".

My chemistry department shared a building with the Mining Engineering department, back in the day. FIL was very much a labourer, though. Left school at 14.

I would be amazed if the global demand for mining expertise was not an order of magnitude more than it was in the 1980s. IF just for ferreting out those "rare" earth metals. But more importantly for starting to consider how to mine an asteroid. Or a (the) moon.