ugh why did she shut down the coal mines bros?
 It's All Fucked Shirt $22.14 |
 Thalidomide Vintage Ad Shirt $22.14 |
It's All Fucked Shirt $22.14 |
ugh why did she shut down the coal mines bros?
ugh why did she shut down the coal mines bros?
It's All Fucked Shirt $22.14 |
Thalidomide Vintage Ad Shirt $22.14 |
It's All Fucked Shirt $22.14 |
a better question is where is me fooking milk
Literally saved the British economy. The UK was actually poorer than Italy during the 70s.
>was actually
You say this as if Italy was filled with poverty in the 70s, when in 1974 it accounted for 5.18% of the world's economy, and had a GDP growth rate of 5.55%.
British coal is mostly Bituminous coal, and on the lower end at that, with some being lignite (the worst kind). However that's not really the problem. Mining British coal post-WWII was uncompetative in an increasingly globalised world. Additionally, cheaper (and cleaner, though this became a factor a little later) sources of energy began to be exploited more and more from the 60s onwards. You mention China, which yes, ~60% of their energy does come from coal, the lion's share originates from their domestic mines, and they only import other nation's coal if its higher quality and to bolster their reserves. Back to Britain, their coal isn't cheap enough to warrant a mass purchase, nor high enough quality for their to be a demand for it.
Because?
inefficient nationalized industry and labour economic policy
This is political buzzword salad. It doesn't say anything on how coal mines are so bad that they are economically hurting and shutting them down makes everyone richer, point A --> G.
I've heard it a million times but I've never seen a plausible explanation. Since when is raw resource extraction ever unprofitable? How? The world still uses coal today, let alone in the 70s.
It seems like a mindless truism that got taking as an article of faith by Thatcher supporters. I can imagine how it was an at least vaguely rational if propagandize and over exaggerated/emotional argument in its own day about how unionism out of control, or the mines weren't as efficient as an imagined private alternative, or they were seen as a politically dangerous lodestone of British labour sentiment. Then over time that mutated by the game of telephone from they lead to bad things to they are inherently bad and getting rid of them was a heroic savior move. Let's keep in mind these are the same people that said privatizing British rail would lead to great things and unfettered immigration is a net benefit for society (which apparently doesn't even exist).
>I've never seen a plausible explanation. Since when is raw resource extraction ever unprofitable?
4/10, made me comment
>Since when is raw resource extraction ever unprofitable?
Cists if extraction are too high. So either you wait until prices are high enough to extract resources or you use labour with Rick bottom wages and workers rights to do it. Example of the former is Canadian oil sands, the latter is South African mining in Apartheid and Cobalt mining in Congo.
look this
>inb4 but i'm using taxes how the frick it becomes unprofitable
If you're consumed 10 barrels of oil to drain a resource worth of 5 barrels of oil you just wasted taxpayer's money for useless activities, your economy won't gain shit.
You know what, since I'm going to schizo post an answer my own question to my own satisfaction since I got curious after writing my posts.
How can producing a raw in use resource ever be truly non-valuable? The only way I could imagine it is an example of if the the world needs only 10 units of coal a year, and the UK is producing 100, expending resources on creating a worthless growing glut. Clearly that did not seem to be the historical case. The answer, according to the Internet, is that UK coal is subterranean and thus more work intensive to mine. Another Internet comment claims at the time German coal was cheaper as it was closer to the surface and could be mechanically strip mined. This makes sense, it was mechanically more efficient/cheaper elsewhere but not necessarily totally non-valuable to mine locally.
Here is a graph showing a sharp total decline of British coal combined with a temporary increase of imports to alleviate local produce. History has clearly vindicated Thatcher to a degree, but imports were needed so the coal also clearly wasn't objectively useless.
This is both a good and bad thing. Good because more efficient - but we also start to see what I suspected which is the neoliberal/capitalist trend of ever increasing wealth inequality and downward pressure on the life quality of workers when unfettered. This is often called profitable/wealth producing in neoliberal dogma.
I'm reminded how in US here I can step outside and see a bunch of migrant laborers constructing buildings led by a couple white grey hair foremen. One day the Mexican laborers will replace the whites near completely and I wonder what the effect will be if they can truly operate the same without the old guard. The establishment tell us IQ is not real despite all evidence to the contrary so there should be no negative effect. Well that's a different issue.
The point is the US solution is to import the third world to produce neoliberal wealth inequalities (lower worker wage for the same produce), but elsewhere there is outsourcing to China to do the same. Does hiring the third world to replace white house builders truly make more wealth? I don't know but it definitely produces local wealth inequalities that benefit local business elite in the micro. Financial elites in London benefit because they are connected to transnational corporations that go through the process of what I'll call third-worldification. That is the coal/raw resources still needed is produced outside the UK in the third world. The wealth benefit from this is possible even greater than local production, but the wealth circulates unequally. Beneficial for, at the time, urban elites that make up Tory voters but not Northerners.
The problem here I think is a lack of concept of objective wealth in orthodox economics, which everyone secretly believe in and I have no problem as someone with Socialist sympathies, but the mainstream willfully has no concept of. Producing a needed resource for industry is rarely truly non-valuable objectively, but it can be inefficient. "Wasted" money on over paid British coal miners does not disappear, it gets used in local northern economies from higher pay and circulates the economy all the same - merely in a different way. Notably however, it circulates away from financial elite centers in London.
So in fairness there's more than a grain of truth to closing British coal. It seems like it was going to happen. One can imagine a scenario where Unions fought against the historical trend of coal falloff in a unnecessarily painful weaning process. Imports are a lot easier to throttle as needed.
Though there's other things to be said about how Nuclear alternatives at the time also needed state subsidies (always has) or the element of political vengeance. Objectively also, it was not wealth beneficial to the North.
3rd world illegal immigrants wasn't a voluntary thing and it wasn't "created" by anybody, it has existed for hundreds of years due to our massive border. It's a problem that's ignored because it benefits a few powerful people politically.
Knowing british autism and Wales history there was probably a hint of vindictive hamstringing on southerner's part to weaken a regional rival.
>it circulates away from financial elite centers in London.
Thirty years of mismanagement of the state-owned industries, which represented a large chunk of the economy.
A huge amount of Britain's industry had been brought under state control during WW2, and then even more was nationalized by the post-war Labour government. And then the state-owned industries failed for the reasons state-owned industries usually fail: management who were concerned more with protecting their own little fiefdoms and increasing their budgets than making best use of the resources they had, who were in turn coordinated by civil servants who'd got their jobs because they'd done classics at Oxford, who were all responsible to Ministers who were far more worried about securing workers' votes than raising their productivity.
And should anyone get it into their heads to do somethings about a problem, the unions would come crashing down on them. The unions had real power in the UK from the '40s to the '80s, and they brought down several governments. And it wasn't just the state-owned industries, the culture of shop-floor socialists calling wildcat strikes because their tea was late was common everywhere.
Everyone knew that workers were lazy as frick and the quality of British-made products was terrible. Manufacturers like British Leyland were a running joke. Everyone knew that something needed to be done, Thatcher was just the first one with the required backbone.
This and the above are connected. There's a story about a car plant in the UK in the 70s that was completely automated by robots. But the workers went on strike because the robots were being brought in to do their jobs and put them out of work.
That was a time when it was possible for a man with no qualifications or training whatsoever to get a job as a welder at a car factory, and he could earn a decent wage and live a comfortable life. And the unions fought to keep it that way.
And that's one reason why Thatcher's legacy is mixed. On the one hand, she destroyed the power of the unions and put the country on the path to economic prosperity, but on the other hand, she destroyed the power of the unions and put the country on the path to economic prosperity.
I think that it's a good thing that she did what she did, but I also think that it's a shame that she did what she did.
>I think that it's a good thing that she did what she did, but I also think that it's a shame that she did what she did.
But as long you're the one in charge, something must be done.
You can choose to employ people in useless jobs forever, producing no wealth and draining resources just because you want them to easily be employed, or you can accept the fact that you must increase in strenght your country to not die out in the long-term.
The people that says thank you today are going to suffer tomorrow, because they're too weak.
saint maggie didn't. elizabeth r. did.
Because they hadn't been profitable for decades and had been surviving off of massive government subsidies because they were completely uncompetitive.
It's the same reason like 75% of the workforce is about to be terminated in Industrie 4.0.
She did what had to be done to allow the continued advancement and progression of the human race.
Why do leftists pretend to care that she shut down coal, while also screaming the planet is going extinct partly because of it?
>leftists
Rent free
>rightists
Rent not free
Prolly 'cause Coal is evil Historically
Why was coal unprofitable?
Coal is still one of the most widely used fuels to this day, a majority of China's electricity is provided by coal and every year they consume gargantuan quantities of it. What were Brits doing wrong that they couldn't make money selling coal?
Unions probably
There are different quality levels of coal. In the US, our coal industry died because what coal is left is hardly worth digging out of the ground. I suspect they were entering a similar situation in Britain.
>I suspect they were entering a similar situation in Britain.
To a far more extreme degree. Tiny island, first to industrialize and begin mining coal. Go figure, the mines were exhausted and already ridiculously deep and complex and elaborate.
Compare it to vast fields in Russia and China and elsewhere where you can basically scoop high quality rich coal out of the shallow ground and it's obvious to anyone with half a brain why Britain's coalmines were DOA.
Same with shipbuilding too, once the rest of the world industrialized they had deeper ports, more raw materials, more manpower and so on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment
No matter if there's petroleum under your house, if extraction is going to cost you more than what you get after the reservoir is empty, than there's no reason why you should do it.
i love you Maggie!
Margaret Thatcher didn't shut them down. Market forces did.
Because they were owned by the government and unprofitable.
The issue isn't really that she shut off the mines, as that she did so without ensuring it wouldn't destroy the economic prospects of millions of brits.
It's all fun and dandy to say frick those leeches, until you realize the first thing done by her successors was put them all on the dole to avoid getting lynched.
All in all, understandable idea but bad execution.
To put them all on the dole is the same thing as to keep the mines open. A waste of budget. The idea is that they simply find work elsewhere by pulling themselves up by their bootstraps.
>by pulling themselves up by their bootstraps.
Have you ever thought about this figure of speech for two seconds?
>gets stabbed in the pancreas
>n-not m-muh p-p-ACK
pancreas?
>To put them all on the dole is the same thing as to keep the mines open.
Pretty different actually, but arguably even more damaging to british society.
>The idea is that they simply find work elsewhere by pulling themselves up by their bootstraps.
That's what I meant by bad execution. Out of touch morons thinking shit like this is why half of Europe is getting facefricked by Putin's gas blackmail today, you can't just do what's immediately economically convenient without considering the long term social implications of what you're doing, no matter how real the problem you're facing is.
How would you relocate coal miners?
I'd imagine the best way to go about it would have been pensioning the oldest guys, stopping all hirings, and keeping all the mines not in the red going until they've all reached retirement age.
Or alternatively, do a sudden shutdown, start no dole whatsoever, accept the unrest and deflation and keep the impoverished underclass down with violence until the situation regains its equilibrium. Only of course you can't do that because in a democracy the opposition is gonna nail you to a cross and laugh at your political suicide while they reverse everything you've tried to do.
It sounds good.
Unions wouldn't accept it.
Hard to have bootstraps when you can't even afford boots
>he idea is that they simply find work elsewhere by pulling themselves up by their bootstraps.
didn't exactly work, that
>increasingly unproductive economic sector
>unions make the sector more and more entitled, despite the fact that the sector is failing
>gets so bad that they have the ability to cripple the nation when on strike, despite the fact that they were increasingly irrelevant economically
She saw a tumour and decided the best course of action was surgery
>shuts down the mines that were in the red mostly because of benefit payments to retirees
>still has to pay out the benefits but also has to pay extra to import coal
the mine shutdown was purely about fighting the unions
>keep mining under the sea increasing costs
>frequent miners strikes to get higher wages
>frequent blackouts due to strikes
Also if oogabooga land is much better in extracting coal, than nobody gives a frick about imports.
You can phase out mines on schedule
She didn't. Coal mines were closing both before and after her tenure. The collieries, which were the backbone of many villages, had become loss-making and uncompetitive in a world that was becoming ever more globalised.
In 1950 there were 693,000 people employed in the British coal mining industry. By 1980 it was 237,000, and by 1990 49,000.
Thatcher did not destroy the coal industry. Prevailing world conditions did, out of her or any other one Prime Minister's control.
>been out of power for almost 30 years, and still lives rent free in the heads of the British left, a great deal weren't even alive when she was PM.
How did she do it?
she tore the heart out of this community
she's impossible to explain for Leftists
on the one hand, she's a heartless uber-Capitalist whose policies only benefitted the top 1 percent of society, and who the entire working class hated with a passion
on the other hand, she won two of the biggest electoral landslides of the last 100 years
statistically, a lot of traditional Labour voters must have switched for Thatcher specifically, voting Labour before and after. it's the only way she could have achieved her 1983 and 1987 numbers
but apparently everyone even on the Centre-Left detested her with a burning passion
they can't logically explain this, so they double down on vitriol
She believed in Britain. Same reason why the working class English rose up and voted en masse for ‘are Boris.
She was right to shut down the coal industry and inefficient manufacturing, but she should have offered more help to ease the transition. The South which became a financial superpower ran wild while the midlands and North withered away. There’s no fricking way the mayor of London should be able to boss around the Prime Minister. Decentralization went too far to the point London isn’t even seen as an English city anymore.
to own le libs
Why did she hand over Hong Kong to the PR Chinese?
Don't say she didn't, because the deal was made in the 1980s.
She's a chemist by trade
so is Angele Merkel
really makes you think
would you let her peg you?
answer: you don't get a choice
she wanted more gems
epic sharty reference
We are conserving our coal for when china runs out.
Australia, Canada, Africa and crap ton exist lmao.
That’s what CANZUK is for.
Other Anglo states have other better options to sell to.
DO IT AGAIN MRS THATCHER
>Still able to send a fleet and army on our own to the other side of the planet and rout an enemy which had months to dig in.
Gods, we were strong…
>extraction based economies with socialized spending collapse when the market corrects itself
I don't know shit about UK history, but the better question to be asked is who was the moronic homosexual that started exploiting Wales for coal during the industrial era, there's your culprit
Wales has some of the highest quality coal in the world tough.
The Imperial high seas fleet had serious issues switching to lower grade german coals.
Lower power output meant lower operational range, lower speeds, overworking the stokers, foiling up the works, ect. ect.
Welhs coal was also relativly cheap because it was mined relativly close to the sea so it didn't cost much to transport to the major metal works like the metalworks and shipyards in N.Ireland that had some of the biggest dry docks in the world that build ships like the Titanic.
Something about it was crooked though, probably due to government back room deals, because it wasn't profitable at all. That's the difference between communists and regualr people. They let their industries become increasingly corrupt un unprofitable as more and more people skim off the top and is the intrinsic reason was government meddling in the economy usually ends in disaster
>communists
you what mate?
when has there been communists in power in the UK?
China today M8, look at their coal industry. They lie to their superiors about output and how much coal is left until they run out. "Oops we're out of coal, I know I told you we had 1000 years left lol". Then the entire area collapses and people flee meanwhile china has Australia on the phone begging for more black rocks. It's the perfect example of government bureaucracy taken to its conclusion and Wales stinks of it. Wales is the US's West Virginia
how am I to guess you are referring to Chine in a post about the reasons for mining coal in Wales?
And no people knew that the mines where becoming very inefficient and a drain. The same as say with the mines in wallonia belgium.
It is just that mines risking their lives and all that form very, very strong unions and ties with local politics. So the moment you so much as hint that you want to touch their mines you have opened a storm in a can.
As national level politicians kick the storm in a can down the road because they do not want to get blasted those regions lose their chance to realign to other industries. Because frankly those regions had jack shit in them before coal. So now they are economic open wounds still oozing out the public's finances in the form of social welfare. And politicians also knew that would happen as well.
Maggie just had the balls to open up that can and take the storm from it.
Yes, unions are a problem, especially when they get fused to the government bureaucracy that they were created to fight against
in this case it isn't so much the unions as the communities them selves.
in belgium we have several union blocks but the socialist have special metal workers union and those guys will just walk into a ministers office and wreck it because they proposed changing the laws on shift systems.
It wasn't the union that wanted them to do that, not even the specialist metal workers union, just the guys from the factory tearing shit up.
because they all live in the same area, their kids go to the same schools, they go to the same bars ect. those guys are just tick as thieves and very disposed to much like their work physical action. Like beating up white collar workers that want to get into their office when the blue collars are striking.
>being this moronic
If you lost yourself the breadline is down the road.
Aa Red as I am her closing down the mines was needed. They really didn't work out that well in competing and The UK could not prop up such and industry for so long.
Apparently she didn’t even cry when Bobby Sands died. I’m not even Irish, but when I heard about what happened to him, I was literally bawling for days.
to increase the prices of crude oil and natural gas so that the poor would become homeless, and together with the new unemployed coal miners also losing their homes, they could sleep on the streets of london and other major cities making them bigger shitholes than they were.
God i hate her with all my being.
Fantastic, we attracted the communist schizos.
would you work in a coal mine?
can i be the foreman?