"Business Secretary Vince Cable has told the UK motor industry that the government will rein in financial support for the sector."
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/10465119.stm
Regardless of what the coalition is going to do for the car industry...I still can't figure out who Vince Cable reminds me of...some character actor from the 60s (played annoyed neighbours etc), probably in Carry On films...
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He looks like a chap off one of the newer "Star Trek" things.
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good
about time these manufacturers were told to put up or shut up
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I dunno, it's about the last thing we actually make here.
What are we going to do when we run out of knowledge to export and our imposed constraints on knowledge we provide to other countries no longer has any worth.
Loosing our mines wasn't a mistake i don't think, but loosing our metal working, engineering (especially heavy engineering) and ship building was probably short sighted penny pinching designed to save a few bob for individuals but ultimately costing more for the country.
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Loosing our mines wasn't a mistake i don't think
>>
#>>>>>>>>>> let me tell you it was
go round anywhere now where kids would once have gone down the mines or worked in an engineering shop and you see these kids now as feral youth
no job
no hope
nothing to do
its where the chav came from
its why you have graffiti and broken bustops
give the kids a job in the mines etc and they come home knackered
no abuse no graffiti and peace on our street corners
you might not see this if you live in a gated society in some incongruous private estate but go beyond your boundaries of i dont go there and see whats happened to our society
and i vote conservative..................
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>> let me tell you it was
Hmmm, mining in those terms wasn't so much a skill as a resource. A finite resource. We got shot of it when it was relatively (to today) cheap to do so. If we'd hung on to it and then removed the financial crutch of finite resource exploitation today or tomorrow, it would have cost so much more and been so much harder for everyone, relative to yesterday.
Metal working, shipbuilding --infinite skills rather than finite resources, would have meant apprenticeships and prospects in general for the youth today.
The rest of your post ties in with my view, just not the finite resource exploitation bit and deferring weaning ourselves off it.
We're stuffed now, we can't do the same with the north sea any more, we have to keep at it because we've binned all the other money makers in a short sighted search for a £1.
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Losing the mines was a mistake I think. It's not as if we have much in the way of natural resources, and at least it would help the balance of payments now that most of our energy is probably imported.
It would be something for cheap labour from Eastern Europe to do. Better we import the workers here than the jobs there perhaps? It doesn't seem to have done Germany any harm.
Cable, brakes - there must be a joke there somewhere.
P.S. - and I agree with Bellboy
Last edited by: Manatee on Wed 30 Jun 10 at 22:16
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>> P.S. - and I agree with Bellboy
>>
So do i,
one of my regular deliveries after the closures was to Kwik Save's in Grimethorpe, that and the Coop were almost the only employers after the very heart was ripped from the communities.
It was a ghost of it's former self as were many other areas so devastated, Thatcher and others should forever hold their heads in shame.
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I can't agree with Bellboy.
When the work goes from an area, the only sensible thing to do is to move on. I know it mirrors Norman Tebbit's much quoted view, but, wherever I've looked in my own family's background, I've found stories of migration to find work, and it's why I'm now in exile in the festering Midlands rather than enjoying the rural (but economically and technologically near dead) East Lancashire where I grew up.
Perhaps it's the existence of the welfare state that has made people forget that migration for work, or to avoid starvation, was the normal state of affairs, and that no-one owes you a living, and you have no right to a job on your doorstep.
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>> I can't agree with Bellboy.
>>
>> When the work goes from an area, the only sensible thing to do is to
>> move on.
>>>]
>>>>>>>> you surprise me nc
i had you down for more insight than your sweeping statement
do you really believe if all the ex miners in lets say grimethorpe barnsley upped sticks and went wherever they would have found work
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>> i had you down for more insight than your sweeping statement
>> do you really believe if all the ex miners in lets say grimethorpe barnsley upped
>> sticks and went wherever they would have found work
>>
Not quite - maybe not for anything like the pay they were on in the pit, maybe not doing anything skilled, but I do think that there was work available in the country as a whole.
In broadly the same way as we have the benefits fed feral youth problem AND people from Eastern Europe travelling here to work. If someone can travel from, say, Bulgaria to pick seasonal crops in, say, Norfolk, why can't people from deprived towns in the UK go there?
As an example, leaving Jarrow in the 1920s, my mother's struggling family weren't wasting their time marching to London - they made for the wool mills in Yorkshire. As they weren't skilled, their digs were more expensive than their wages for the first month - other members of the family in Jarrow supported them until their piece rates rose to cover the rent - then, money was sent back to Jarrow to enable other members of the family to move down one by one.
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I am with NC rather than BB
Of my family my father moved because mecahnization was replacing the work on the farms, so we grew up on Teesside.
My brother lives in Godalming, I live in the Midlands and my sister lives in Wakefield - we woulod be unemployed if we had stayed on Teesside (steel industry gone).
Lets not be fooled, the recent profligacy with other people's money was nothing compared to the way British Steel worked as a nationalised industry - employees used to take turns to have a week off sick and BSC had to employ 2-3 people for every job just to keep the factory working, some of my mother's friends husbands worked there so we heard about it.
If steel, or coal, in the UK was competitive someone would still be maing money from it but the Emipre has killed all that, in 1980 I was working on a coal mine that was selling coal for £2.50 a tonne, 10% of the COST of producing coal from the recently opened mine in Selby (and Selby was a huge mine by UK standards but tiny on a global scale - Arnot where i worked was small by RSA standarsd but 2.5 times bigger than Selby in tonnage)
NCs point about mobility is that the miners/steelworkers expect someone to bring work to them - until their attitude changes and they reallise the problem is in their own hands the problem will remain.
BTW manufacturing is less about labour these days, we used to produce telecomms equipment in Birmingham - populated pcbs with a labour element of about 10%. Moved production abroad (Texas would you believe) because the company did not have enough volume to sustain 2 plants, not because labour was too expensive.
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>> I am with NC rather than BB
Me too and for those who say we don't manufacture anything anymore... figures from 2007 show us as number 7 in the World (ahead of France!)... so perhaps we are not as bad as some would like us to be?
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I used to visit Grimethorpe before the strike. A lot red brick pit houses. And nearly every house was a pit man's, or sometimes a pit widow's, house as well, as evidenced if you were there on the day the concessionary coal was dropped. There'd be a heap at the end of nearly every path and people barrowing the coal up to the house. The place had some life and character, and while a pithead might not be everybody's idea of a beautiful view, it had a purpose and the village looked reasonably kempt. I almost cried when I paid a nostalgic visit about 10 years ago.
There must have been the best part of 5,000 employed in the colliery before the strike., probably double the population of Grimethorpe itself. Imagine the effect of that.
I met a lot of miners in the Castleford area not long after the strike. I expected they'd blame Scargill, but none did - all their bitterness was towards Thatcher.
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what we supposed to do? mine coal thats too expensive and we dont need?
You can blame scargill. Thought he could hold a country to ransom, and all he did was steal off the miners (still doing it) and destroy the pits early.
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I don't have the answer Zero. But I do think the 'market' is better at generating wealth than sharing it out, and isn't always very good, or any good at all, at improving people's lives.
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>> balance of payments now that most of our energy
There's plenty of energy about our country, but we dont have the engineering capability to harness it in usable form. We'll need to buy that in from somewhere eventually. EDIT: and you can trace that fault directly to the fact we sold out engineering growth
The coal's not gone anywhere, if it was a viable alternative we'd start digging again.
Last edited by: CraigP on Wed 30 Jun 10 at 23:35
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If we had any sense, living on an island surrounded by permanent wind, sea, and some of the biggest tides in the world, we would be the leading exporter of alternative natural energy technology.
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>> If we had any sense
Yip. Our only saving grace from what i can see is that noone else has any either, right now.
There's external complications we can't control, i don't know if the gulf stream / north atlantic drift will stick around long term, we got a taster this past winter when it went the wrong way, but if anything substantial like that did change, i really don't think we'd adapt and i don't think any other countries would really support us (we would obviously get aid, but that's not the same, that's handcuffs in disguise).
*See all the complaints from young fit and able folks about councils not gritting their streets when they never lifted a shovel of grit themselves.
EDIT: that's like a post about snow :-) Snow's just an example, i meant bigger picture.
Last edited by: CraigP on Wed 30 Jun 10 at 23:48
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>> .......... it's about the last thing we actually make here.
Not according to this report by PricewaterhouseCoopers. www.pwc.co.uk/pdf/UKmanufacturing_300309.pdf
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>>.I still can't figure out who Vince Cable reminds me of...some character actor from the 60s
>>(played annoyed neighbours etc), probably in Carry On films..
Combination of Sid James and Alistair Sim?
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>> Combination of Sid James and Alistair Sim?
Not quite who I was thinking of. Probably from the 60s/70s but maybe much more recent, maybe on a sitcom, I can picture him quite clearly. Now just trying to picture him in a scene.
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"Not quite who I was thinking of. Probably from the 60s/70s but maybe much more recent, maybe on a sitcom, I can picture him quite clearly. Now just trying to picture him in a scene."
I don't know if it's the same for you but Vince C reminds me of that fine character actor Richard Vernon - tended to play rather clueless upper-class types. I can think of the thick bank chairman Sir Desmond Glazebrook in 'Yes, Prime Minister', who thought Milton Keynes was an economist.
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British mined coal was not, and is not, on the whole, economic.
The mines had to go. The clue being that no-one has privately sunk new shafts.
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>> British mined coal was not, and is not, on the whole, economic.
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>> The mines had to go. The clue being that no-one has privately sunk new shafts.
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>> theres more to a country than making a profit
the mines provided cheap fuel in relation to men doing nothing
not all their kids can yoin the army or navy
america is now moving into shale and oil removal,when you are dead Zero this country will go back to coal
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It will be nuclear. You cant just throw kids down the mine "to keep them off the streets"
YOu forget, mining is not healthy. The workers dont live long.
Last edited by: Zero on Wed 30 Jun 10 at 22:56
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>> It will be nuclear.
>>
no it wont and you know it
i for one do seriously believe this country should never ever have moved away from cheap nuclear power
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I worked for the National Coal Board from 74 to about 87 (office wallah) and saw the numbers of pits (and miners) fall dramatically. It was cheaper to import coal from opencast mines in Australia than it was to send miners miles out under the sea to dig it out. The militancy of the unions also had a lot to do with it, with ever increasing demands, and their apparent stranglehold over the rest of the economy whenever they saw fit. with travel time to the coal face sometimes approaching two hours (then back again) they resisted calls for longer shifts over a shorter working week, which would have increased productivity and therefore made it cheaper. But many of the Yorkshire and Welsh mines were pretty close to exhaustion, under the technology of that day.
It may well have devastated whole communities, but it couldn't carry on as is was.
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I watched a very good film on TV about the country buying cheap overseas coal at the expense of our miners-however it was totally ruined for me at the end when the shop steward got into a French car and the national official into a Japanese one.Yes,I worked in the British motor industry.
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>> send miners miles out under the sea to dig it out.
Under the sea?! Did some pits really go under the sea? I guess it is not actually that surprising, I just never realised. I always just pictured these pits as being inland and dug straight down.
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Most of the Northumberland pits went under the sea, by some miles. Makes sense, coal is just part of geological journey with oil, and there is shedloads of oil under the north sea.
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...Under the sea?! Did some pits really go under the sea?...
Some of the seams in the East Durham coalfied were being dug three or four miles out to sea prior to the closure of the pits in the 1980s.
This year's Durham Miners' Gala is on July 10, when the surviving lodge banners are paraded with bands through Durham City.
The Gala culminates with a rally, speeches, and a fair on the racecourse field.
Speeches are a rare chance to hear some old-fashioned political oratory with the likes of Dennis Skinner and Tony Benn always giving good value.
The gala is a unique spectacle and well worth a look
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durham_Miners%27_Gala
Coverage of last year's event:
www.sunderlandecho.com/news/Durham-Miners39-Gala-2009-.5452914.jp
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>> Speeches are a rare chance to hear some old-fashioned political oratory with the likes of
>> Dennis Skinner and Tony Benn always giving good value.
Ah, the Beast of Bolsover and 2nd Viscount Stansgate, what a great pairing.
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And in the Kent coalfields too;not a lot of people know that-not a lot of people know there were coalmines in Kent either.Tilmanstone,Betteshanger,Snowdon & Chislet were the mines and they were connected to the railline from canterbury to Dover.
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Presumably a Vince Cable is the same as a Bowdon Cable, used for operating the brakes on old cars?
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You pipped me CP. Every time my eye has fallen on this thread title I have frowned and muttered: 'Cable brakes.... cable brakes...'
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...Ah, the Beast of Bolsover and 2nd Viscount Stansgate, what a great pairing...
This year's star turn is Ken Livingstone, who I am sure will be entertaining.
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He is, I had lunch with him once. Quite a wit is our old Red Ken, and not quite so left wing as you think.
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>> He is, I had lunch with him once. Quite a wit is our old Red
>> Ken, and not quite so left wing as you think.
>>
>>>>>>>> im sure theres quite a few people would like to go to lynch with him if it was he on the rope
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North Staffs where I live is full of Scots miners who left Scotland when the pits closed and came South to work.
When you see a Scottish ex mining town, what you are looking at is the remnants of a community: all those with get up and go .. have gone.
Ditto English ones..
It is emminentlly sensible not to move if you are paid for doing nothing.. Why take the risk?
Last edited by: madf on Thu 1 Jul 10 at 19:48
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Cable puts brakes on UK car industry - FotheringtonTomas
