Quote:
Originally Posted by Cowboy89
Serious question for all the Thatcher detractors on here about the miners strike in Britain:
Why did the government own the coal mining industry? By today's North American terms, national ownership of natural resources like that seems rather antiquated (Maybe precisely because of people like Thatcher).
When a mine or any other business, plant, etc. for that matter turns unprofitable, is it really prudent for the public to subsidize it's continued existance beyond it's commercial life for the sake of union jobs?
Gold rushes and busts, oil booms and busts, fishing booms and busts, all create and destroy communities all the world over. No one is going to shed a tear for the oil sands of Fort McMurray when it's viability and profitability inevitably ebbs. What's so special about UK coal miners and the UK situation at that time that makes Thatcher so evil for bringing about an end to it?
|
It took me a long time to really come up with an answer for this as it is a perfectly reasonable position, I think why Thatcher brings such viscoral hatred in many in the UK is how she and her party dealt with not just the miners but their communities.
Like many small mill towns in BC mining towns in Northern UK were generally company towns and when the mines closed the whole community was screwed, not only did Thatcher enthusiastically persue closing the mines but there was no support for the communities or even really a sense of sorrow, she and her party really did appear to everyone to not give a **** about vast swathes of the country, they were solely concerned with the South East of the country and couldn't care less what the people did after, Norman Tebbit, famously told the unemployed to 'just get on your bike' if you needed a job, it wasn't so much that he was wrong it was the callousness of the attitude that it revealed.
On top of that alot of what they did was damage almost for no reason, mines that were actually profitable were closed along with ones that needed to be shut just because they were more pro union, in the same way she sold off the railways, which overnight became more expensive and less reliable.
In the end even if you supported Thatcher there was a real sense she and her party were punishing the lower classes, which tended to bring to mind a very common foible of the lower middle class in the UK, where Thatcher came from, they dislike the working class more than the upper classes really, in many ways the lower middle class in the UK don't really fit in, they are a generation or so out of the working poor so social position becomes hopelessly important to them for fear they will fall back into working class, and yet they are looked down on by the upper middle class.
Every Brit understood Thatcher, she was looked down on by most in the Tories and was always an outsider in her party, but it was also clear that she had been brought up to pretty well dispise those below her.