John McDonnell's Thatcher assassination joke

[UnquietDad]

here

Acceptable or not?

I think he has had an easy ride over this. Imagine a right-of-centre politician saying they wish they'd assassinated Harold Wilson or Gordon Brown.

It is clear you don't understand EAP, as I hinted people who worship Thatcher tend to demonstrate.

The word 'destroy' is used because the unnecessary unemployment caused by her closing the pits literally destroyed communities and whole towns. These places were totally reliant ( one wage families) on the pits and once they were gone, there were legions of working age men out of work, and because the towns were generally next to another town that totally relied on mining, then even travelling to the next town for work was also difficult.

Obviously the human condition is that people will survive and continue against the odds, but what MT did was simply inhumane and unnecessary. She is certainly worthy of loathing. She showed a total lack of respect to these people. Thus deserves none herself.

well, i think you ned to take alook at things like 'geology' and indeed 'economics' fist before blaming the figure head for recognising the truth which was those jobs were going to go anyway.

I prefer Frankie Boyle's joke on Mock the Week

here

I disliked Thatcher as a teenager.
When I married into a north-east mining community, I learnt to despise her.
Ladyblablah is right. I have lived in those towns.

EnglandAllenPoe, if you want to know the real meaning of destroyed then you should try visiting a few of these places that you claim to know SO much about.
try generations of male unemployment
try appalling levels of drug usage
try awful housing and anti social behaviour

honestly, I am trying not to get angry with your dismissive tone, but your ignorance is literally breathtaking

i think if those mines were so financially viable, the last govt had 13 years to throw money at restoring them. why didn't it then?

surely not from a wish not to waste public funds?

anyway, I am glad to see that John Mcdonnell has stepped down.

seriously???
you do realise there is nothing left of those mines, don't you??
no head equipment
and underground, do you really think that you could just, you know, pop off the top and send some men down the shaft???
obviously it isn't financially viable to open up mines if they have been closed for that length of time.
no-one is seriously suggesting that there were not many mines that were still very viable. Thatcher's role in that dispute was very personal. it was revenge.
can I respectfully suggest that if you are going to start to make sweeping comments about massive areas of the country (not just a few "mining towns" but huge areas of Wales, the Midlands, Northern England) then you might think about educating yourself a little more or at least not talking about things that are not really within your knowledge. There are REALLY painful areas, very fresh in peoples' minds, and the damage is incredibly deep and serious.

one of the reasons that the wounds are still fresh about the Thatcher years - "vicious lies" against Scargill and the smear campaign

you might be interested in the work of this charity

A pretty balanced version of the history, outcome and long term consequences on Wiki
here
:
"The closure of pits also affected engineering, railways, electricity and steel production, which were all interlinked with the coal industry. Unemployment reached as high as 50% in some villages over the following decade. Suicides rose significantly, unofficial figures put the numbers into the hundreds, although it is claimed many were not recorded as suicide to spare the feelings of the families. Migration out of old mining areas left many villages full of derelict houses and earning the reputation as ghost towns. The tensions between those who had supported the strike and those who had not, lasted for many years afterwards (and sometimes continues today, having been passed down to the next generation), eroding the strong sense of unity that had previously existed in such communities. A murder in the former mining town of Annesley, Nottinghamshire in 2004 was a result of an argument between former members of the NUM and the UDM, an indication of continued tensions.[42]
The 1994 European Union enquiry into poverty classified Grimethorpe in South Yorkshire as the poorest settlement in the country and one of the poorest in the E.U.[43] The county of South Yorkshire was made into an Objective 1 development zone and every single ward in the City of Wakefield district of West Yorkshire was classified as in need of special assistance.[44] In, Merseyside, the Metropolitan Borough of Knowsley, which had contained the "Cronton" pit, has often been named amongst the most deprived areas of both Britain and Europe, as has the neighbouring Metropolitan Borough of St Helens in which Sutton Manor, Bold and Parkside collieries were situated.[citation needed]
Other areas have recovered and now boast a good standard of living. Recovery was quickest in areas where the economy was more diverse, such as in Kent or the West Midlands. Brodsworth boasted the largest mine in the country and is also enjoying relative affluence. Old colliery sites have often been turned into new industrial parks or retail parks. Xscape, an indoor ski-slope, forms part of an entertainments centre and outlet shopping complex built on the former site of Castleford's Glasshoughton colliery."

harpsichordcarrier

You conveniently ignore the fact that more mines closed under the various Labour governments than under Tory ones.

I am not "conveniently ignoring" anything.
we are not talking about how many mines, and when.
We are talking about the reasons why Thatcher is still so loathed and reviled in particular areas of the country, in particular the areas of the country where much of the population used to be employed in the mines.
The miners strike 1984-5 and its aftermath is one very real explanation. that's the issue that we were discussing.
If you want to make a point, yuo are free to do so.
Which Labour government do you refer to?
what timescale are you talking about?

BBC story about the mine closures

Harpsi's right - my family's from the mining valleys of South Wales. In my lifetime they've gone from being thriving, cohesive communities to hollowed-out, largely hopeless places.

a) It's personal because Thatcher made it personal; she didn't just want to rationalise industrial production. She wanted to destroy the unions and the socialist base of the Labour party.
b) It's not just that the mines were closed. It's that they were closed in a way that completely disregarded the wellbeing of every person in every mining community. A humane government would have made proper provision for retraining and community support. Thatcher simply delighted in the destruction she had caused.

Labour were closing pits when they were in power before 1979. Many pits also closed after 1997.

And many mines would have been able to stay open if Scargill hadn't been in charge of the NUM. If someone sensible was in charge, then we would still have much more coal mining today.

Isn't it convenient that the BBC story starts in 1984?

The socialists at the Beeb clearly don't want the public to know about all the mine closures before 1979...

Oh this 'socialists at the Beeb' stuff is embarrassing.

Evan Davis - Friedmanite economics correspondent anchoring flagship news show
World at One - stuffed with right-leaning journos
Nick Robinson - um, hello??

Scargill made it uneconomic to mine coal in the UK.

If unprofitable mines had closed but others were improved instead, the coal industry could have been much more viable.

Scargill's insistence that no mine could be shut was utter economic stupidity. If it is cheaper to import coal than to mine it, you have to ask yourself why.

This was at a time when North Sea gas and oil were heating homes anyway. Hardly any homes used coal for heating. And Maggie had the great foresight and strategic sense to get the power stations to stockpile coal so the strike had almost no impact outside its own area.

I'm not arguing with the decisions to close the mines. I'm arguing with the way it was done.

policywonk

Explain the very clear Facebook data showing members of the group "BBC" are far more "liberal" than the Facebook population at large. And that is amongst tens of thousands of people.

www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23418400-facebook-reveals-the-bbc-as-a-liberal-hotbed.do

The only out and out senior Tories at the BBC are Andrew Neil and James Landale.

Nick Robinson converted to New Labour a long time ago (and was a wet even in his student Tory days).

To be fair there were quiet a few few high profile conservatives like Keith Joseph who wanted to destroy the Miners as they had not forgiven their part in bringing down Ted Heaths Govt around 1970's. They were happy to be quoted and Thatcher was happy for conflict to occur regardless of Scargill. FWIW Scargill was right, the coal mines were wiped out. (Short sighted if you ask me now we are going to be dependant on gas from Russia and Putin etc)
I also though the labour MP was out of order for his comments, unneccesary.

Whilst I think Thatcher handled the strike itself brilliantly, I agree that she should have been much more compassionate after her victory, and provided more support to communities where the mines closed down.

However it is easy to say that in hindsight. At the time, Scargill had ripped apart the fabric of northern life, innocent taxi drivers had been killed driving strike-breaking miners to work, etc. The public detested the strikers, and rightly so.

Brilliant or not we now have 300 years of coal reserves that we do not have access to. Like I said with the gas coming from Russia we have a real strategic security issue regarding our energy supplies in this country coming up in the future soon.
As for the strike I think the popularity was split, why else were policemen donating their overtime earned to the families of the striking miners. It is not as simplistic as you indicate LFN.
Lastly do not underestimate the power of the press in these suituation which is invariably biased towards the right in these situations.

LFN, that's a Facebook group for people who 'like' the BBC, right? Not staff members.

The 'public' I know didn't loathe the miners, they loathed the policemen who were inflicting such violence on them.

I agree we have an energy security problem but I am far from convinced that "clean coal" is clean.

I support using more renewables if it is done in a cost-efficient way.

Of course, Labour utterly failed on energy security. They didn't start to rebuild nuclear power plants. They didn't think about our strategic gas reserves - we only have a couple of days worth of emergency gas storage!

There is no reason why Britain couldn't be 80-90% self-sufficient in a decade or two when it comes to energy, even with the North Sea oil/gas running out. After all France produces around 70% of its power from nuclear energy.