Although I didn’t appreciate it at the time, I suppose I first encountered Margaret Thatcher when I was a primary school pupil, and she was the Education Secretary in Ted Heath’s government. Thatcher the Milk Snatcher they called her, as, in 1971, she ended free school milk for children over the age of seven. Just my luck to turn seven that year. The government in which she served was brought down by an energy crisis resulting from repeated miners’ strikes. It seems, in view of her actions towards the miners when she became Prime Minister years later, that Mrs Thatcher neither forgot nor forgave the miners’ actions.
Losing free milk was the least of my issues with Mrs Thatcher. Growing up in a once industrial town in the north east of England, dubbed the largest shipbuilding town in the world, and with coal mines aplenty (in some of which my ancestors worked), my teenage years and my twenties witnessed industrial dereliction on a spectacular scale. Proud working people were thrown on the scrapheap without a moment’s thought. In those days there was no talk of a “just transition”. Rather, Mrs Thatcher referred contemptuously to people who dared to protest at the deindustrialisation of their communities as “Moaning Minnies”. Miners who went on strike in opposition to her ruthless project of coal mine closures were “the enemy within”.
As an articled clerk interviewing deaf miners (or almost all ex-miners, since Thatcher had put them out of work) in the late 1980s, I travelled round former mining communities in Durham and Northumberland, and witnessed the devastation that she had unleashed on those communities. I know well enough that the striking miners were lions led by donkeys, but I also saw the fundamental decency of mid-ranking officials of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). One day in Ashington I saw NUM officials acting as a cross between councillors, Citizens’ Advice and the Samaritans. Local people trusted them and came to them with their daily problems. They were the community and the community was them. That’s all gone now, of course. Another infamous Thatcherism is “there’s no such thing as society”. She certainly succeeded in destroying much of the society that I knew as a child and as a young man. No wonder I joined the Labour Party. But that was then and this is now. My Labour Party card was torn up long ago, and I have no regrets about that. I look at the current Labour government and despair. I see only a less competent version of Thatcher’s government, but one that is every bit as destructive.
These thoughts have occurred to me for some time, but I was stirred into talking about them by an article in the Scotsman with the heading: “Just transition? It’s getting as brutal as 1980s mining shutdown for oil workers”. I disagree profoundly with the Scotsman’s statement that “[t]he drive to renewables is clearly a national imperative” but there is much in the article that I do agree with, such as the rest of that sentence and the next one: “…but so too is the economy and energy security. There is little to be gained and too much to be lost by securing one while sacrificing another.” And this:
There is, however, one clear and expert voice capable of cutting through the babble, a voice that has been too seldom heard in this debate: the voice of workers. So far, our drive to renewables is something that has been done to our energy workers, not with them.
The transition underway from Forth Valley to South Wales, from Grangemouth to Port Talbot, is the opposite of just. This transition, the one politicians don’t like to discuss, is brutal, a thing to be suffered not embraced, and measured in redundancies not opportunities. It is the same transition our mining communities endured in the 1980s and cannot, must not, be repeated.
Labour – once the party of the workers – is now just as much their enemy as Thatcher ever was. ‘We’ve been let down big-time by Vauxhall closure’ is the headline to a BBC website article but the workers quoted in it have their understandable wrath turned on the wrong target. It’s not their former employer – Vauxhall/Stellantis – that has let them down, but the Labour government. Without its rabid insistence on net zero and its absurd targets attempting to force on people a lifestyle they don’t want and which will cost them dear, those Vauxhall workers might still have jobs to go to.
It isn’t just jobs that are being destroyed, though. Starmer, like Thatcher, cares not a jot for communities and their love of place. Anyone seeking to protect their landscape from the industrial blight this wretched Labour government is determined to inflict upon them is treated with the same casual contempt. Where Thatcher talked of Moaning Minnies and the enemy within, Starmer talks of blockers and NIMBYs. Nothing and nobody is to be allowed to get in the way of the project, a project which is every bit as dangerous and destructive as Thatcher’s was. He plans to change the law to get what he wants and to stop the “blockers” from protecting their special places. How ironic too that Starmer spoke out in 2021 against the idea of opening a new coal mine in west Cumbria, an area of considerable poverty and unemployment, even though it would have created hundreds of well-paid jobs. Thatcher, I am sure, would have been so proud.
I am left, sad and angry, with floating before me the image from the final page of George Orwell’s Animal Farm:
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Climate Scepticism 
Deep mining was doomed when surface transport evolved to allow surface mined coal to be imported from the US and Australia at prices substantially below what was possible for deep mines. If you want to blame Thatcher for pit closures, you’ll need to explain why all the deep mines across Western Europe also closed at much the same time. Similar arguments apply to shipbuilding, where my grandfather and uncle worked (when there was work).
As for “no such thing as society”, the full quote is: “I think we’ve been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it’s the government’s job to cope with it. ‘I have a problem, I’ll get a grant.’ ‘I’m homeless, the government must house me.’ They’re casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It’s our duty to look after ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbour.”, which casts a rather different light on things.
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Chris Miller, thanks for the comment. All views welcome. That’s the beauty of Cliscep – much as our opponents would seek to portray us as monolithic big oil-funded right wing nut jobs, we’re not, and we can disagree respectfully among ourselves.
My main point is that Thatcher was contemptuous of anyone who got in her way (an assertion which even her supporters would struggle to deny, I suggest), and Starmer is absolutely no different. I don’t deny that coal mining jobs were in jeopardy during the 1980s, but I think it’s fair to say that Thatcher was gunning for the miners and accelerated the mine closure programme much faster than was necessary. She could have supported the shipyards, but made it quite clear that she had no intention of doing so (we can discuss whether or not she was right to do so).
The fact is that the deindustrialisation of the UK under Thatcher was brutal, and there was no “just transition”. Life under Starmer’s government seems little different in that respect.
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Yes, I think it’s fair to say that Thatcher and Starmer both share a historic and current contempt and arrogant disdain for blue collar workers. But that’s where the similarities end. Thatcher was ideologically opposed to the Unions whose power was firmly entrenched in northern blue collar industries and in particular in the mining industry. So in that respect the miners themselves were a natural, if regrettable target. But Thatcher was a patriot and her attack on the mining industry was not an attack on British industrial competitiveness and the economy as a whole. Starmer loathes Great Britain and the British people, particularly the working classes and his attack on multiple heavy industries is an attack on Britain and its wider economy and an assault upon British society and our way of life. Starmer the Harmer is altogether a different kettle of fish – a rotten kettle which stinks to high heaven. He is a clear and present danger to all British citizens and his government is effectively a hostile occupying power intent on disarming the UK economy and neutering its populace. You really could not say the same about Thatcher’s government.
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I fear Chris Miller has the wrong end of the pit pony. Aus exported very little coal, either thermal or coking, to the UK. Whether open cut or underground longwall made no difference. We did import experienced miners from the UK as their own pits were closed. (I was, and to some small degree still am, a geo specialising in coal mining for over 40 years. The latter 20 years were spent consulting globally).
Thanks to Mark Hodges for his description of his early experiences with Margaret Thatcher. In the late mid 80’s I spent some time in the UK working with the then Chief Geo of the National Coal Board (which was being slowly closed down) on some surface seismic development. Thatcher had gone, Major was PM (just, as I remember). My UK colleague told me that Thatcher as PM had unreservedly attacked the coal miners in retribution for Scargill and the NUM destroying the Heath Govt. The pits that first received her full cold-blooded treatment were chosen not on any economic basis (such as economic disasters, unproductive practices or mediocre to poor quality coal seams) but on the degree of militancy they had shown during the strikes. Charged with unceremoniously closing a pit, her contractors would show up early in the morning and warn the mine manager that he had a few hours to clear the pit of men and whatever machinery he could salvage. About lunchtime, the contractor dozers would turn up, doze everything on the surface down the shafts or drifts, bury the portals in dirt, plant grass seeds or turf slabs and then leave. The surrounding villages and towns would then wither without jobs or any economic support.
From my observations at that point, some of the pits then still operating should perhaps rather have been on the receiving end, given the perpetual, deep economic losses requiring never-ending NCB capital input to stay functioning. As my UK colleague said: “When you’re nationalised, you can do anything”.
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Jaime,
We agree about much, but on this we will have to differ. I don’t think that Thatcher hated the UK, but nor do I think Starmer does – rather I think Starmer is an internationalist who puts his country second.
Thatcher was simply a luckier Prime Minister than Starmer. Thatcher came to power when North Sea oil and gas were making a massive contribution to the nation’s finances (and energy security – we were a net energy exporter for at least part of her time in power). She used that money – and the proceeds from the ideologically-driven sale of nationalised industries – to bribe the electorate into voting for her, by selling council houses dirt cheap and allowing people to buy shares in the (former) nationalised industries at a massive discount. She wasn’t the maker of an economic miracle, and she caused massive damage to British industry. Starmer, by contrast, has inherited an economy in a mess, thanks not least to the massive debt racked up during the coronavirus crisis and the aftermath of the financial crisis before that. Neither he nor any member of his Cabinet has a clue how to sort things out. On the contrary, they are every bit as dangerous and damaging as Thatcher.
Both Starmer and Thatcher are/were driven by ideological zealotry. Arrogance is writ large across the actions of both, as is contempt for their victims and utter disregard for the consequences. I see significant parallels.
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Mark, I appreciate your more measured appraisal vs. mine. but I would only say in response to your comment that Starmer “is an internationalist who puts his country second” that with Starmer, there is no second place; his focus is entirely upon his international obligations and interests. I think we will see that very clearly the longer he remains in office.
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The talk of society brings to mind this recent story of JD Vance and Rory Stewart, referred to in the Telegraph and I think elsewhere.
I don’t know what the “far-Left” referred to is, nor why it is hyphenated. But still. The parallel is writ large in a lot of climate policy – in particular, where the Freeloader Effect is not considered. It would be logical for our politicians to recognize this hierarchy, and stop criticising NIMBYs, for example. It would also mean putting “populist” national interests ahead of global grandstanding.
We hear today that David Lammy is going to engage in conversations regarding paying reparations for Britain’s history in the slave trade. The numbers referred to are so large as to be a joke.
And there are lots of tales of the spending of USAID doing the rounds – although not in some quarters where they should be being highlighted. A case of a liberal elite choosing where to spend the money that its, often poor citizens, have been forced to give it.
I would suggest that a good way to spend such funds would be to employ local workers to build machines that are then donated to poorer countries. Tractors, that sort of thing.
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Hi Mark
“… Thatcher was contemptuous of anyone who got in her way (an assertion which even her supporters would struggle to deny, I suggest), and Starmer is absolutely no different.”
Thatcher withdrew school milk; Starmer withdrew pensioners’ Winter Fuel Allowance.
However, a different view is that it’s hard to imagine Thatcher offering General Galtieri £12billion or so, to take the Malvinas off our hands.
FAOD >>> 😀
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Mark,
Thank you for that heartfelt and candid account. I don’t have any great expertise regarding the closure of coal mines in the UK but I do have an anecdote that I used to open an essay I wrote for WUWT some years ago:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/09/11/so-what-happened-to-integrity/
I’ve no way of confirming whether the anecdote is well-founded, but it struck a chord with me and forms one of the abiding memories I have of my late father. For those not wishing to read the whole article, I quote the relevant passages below in full:
“My father, when he was alive, used to be a wire rope salesman. In that capacity he would tour the coalmines of the North of England, trying to sell the cables by which colliers would be lowered into their abyss. One day during the early 1980s, when prime minister Margaret Thatcher was at her zenith, he returned from work to reveal a startling fact:
‘I can predict which coalmine is the next to be closed down,’ he proclaimed. We all sat back and listened obediently.
Apparently, the National Coal Board had a substantial stock of roof joists that had been purchased to shore up any new excavations. Clearly, in view of the ongoing programme of pit closures, these were soon to become entirely redundant. However, what to do with them in the meantime? The solution was as inspired as it was devious: The entire national stock was to be stored at just one of the collieries. With such a huge overhead of redundant assets to account for, the chosen mine was bound to appear financially unviable when assessed. Accordingly, the coalmine would be summarily closed down and the joists would be moved on to the next hapless pit held firmly within Thatcher’s governmental crosshairs. My father’s peripatetic job enabled him to discern a pattern of behaviour that would have escaped the attention of those whose only clue of impending doom was the unexpected delivery of lorry-loads of shiny new joists. When visiting a pit, all my father needed to observe was the re-appearance of that increasingly familiar pile of beams; then he knew which mine was next for the axe. Thus was Thatcher able to scourge the North of England, like some latter-day William the Conqueror, administering death by spreadsheet.
Nowadays, the erstwhile coalmining communities, bereft of their economic lifeblood, stand as models of the UK’s creaking welfare system. The colliers, once proud and strong men, scuttle about on mobility scooters, sustained by oxygen bottles to mitigate the worst effects of their occupational emphysema. Rusting iron statues adorn many of these villages. They depict the men in their pomp, wielding statuesque picks and shovels; a well-intended homage to the communities’ heritage. It’s just a shame such respect was not forthcoming when it was most needed. I don’t like going home anymore.”
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Joe,
I think the only thing stopping Starmer from offering the Falklands to Argentina at the moment, along with a large wad of taxpayers’ cash, is that he probably has as much contempt for Javier Milei as he does for British tax payers!
John,
Are those joists still around? We could do with a few to replace the rotten, saggy, sloping ones on our bedroom floor!
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John,
Many thanks for the anecdote. Its accuracy wouldn’t surprise me. You had to live in a coal-mining area to understand the sheer viciousness of the assault on the miners undertaken by the state at Thatcher’s behest.
I have an anecdote of my own. I was at university in the south of England during the miners’ strike. Unusually for students I had a car (old, but my pride and joy, paid for by a holiday job). At the end of summer term I made the sort of odd decision that students make, and decided to drive home through the night so as to avoid heavy daytime traffic. Driving north up the M1 through Nottinghamshire (an area of working miners targeted by flying pickets), I was pulled over by the police. Of course my car had a registration plate that identified it as coming from the north east. But the strange thing was that having flashed me to pull onto the hard shoulder, then pulled in front of me, the police made no attempt to get out of the car. After five minutes of increasing tension I was on the verge of getting out of my car and asking what was going on, when a policeman finally wandered over to my car and asked me very aggressively why I had stopped. I said it was because he had flashed me to do so. He denied having done so – a blatant lie. I asked if I was therefore free to go. He said I was. It was raw intimidation, nothing more, nothing less.
I was a bit shaken by this (I was just in my late teens and had never been in trouble with the police) so decided to stop at the next service station for a coffee and to calm down. Big mistake. It was overrun with police in riot gear. I got back into my car and drove home.
Britain then, in areas affected by the strike, was close to being a police state. Don’t forget the police on massive overtime waving £20 notes at starving miners to provoke them. Don’t forget the badges some police had specially made with the acronym ASPOM. When challenged they said it stood for Avon & Somerset Police Operation Miner, but in reality it stood for Arthur Scargill Pays Our Mortgages. Another provocation.
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Hi Jit
“We hear today that David Lammy is going to engage in conversations regarding paying reparations for Britain’s history in the slave trade.”
That might not be a bad thing for some in Britain – we might get a windfall from current Bristolians.
“What has largely been forgotten, by contrast, is Bristol’s role in a slave trade that flourished in Britain some seven centuries earlier. Towards the end of the 11th century the merchants of Bristol were among England’s foremost exporters of slaves, in this case homegrown ones. Looking back from the 1120s the chronicler William of Malmesbury remembered:
They would purchase people from all over England and sell them off to Ireland in the hope of profit; and put up for sale maidservants after toying with them in bed and making them pregnant. You would have groaned to see the files of the wretches of people roped together, young people of both sexes, whose youth and beauty would have aroused the pity of barbarians, being put up for sale every day.”
https://web.archive.org/web/20201120153902/https://www.historytoday.com/archive/normans-and-slavery-breaking-bonds
There’s a huge irony in that it was Bristolians at the forefront of wrecking the statue of Edward Colston.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-63059300
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Just a point of clarification. Thatcher closed 160 mines but Wilson and Callaghan closed 290!
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MIAB,
No argument from me regarding the figures. My issue is with the way it was done and the motivation behind it.
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The citing the number of closures under Wilson and Callaghan as an attempt to put Thatcher’s in context is not really valid. These earlier closures simply reflected the vast number of pits that had been opened during the UK’s period of maximum industrial growth. It is only to be expected that a great many of them would reach the end of their lifespan at much the same time. Thatcher’s closures did not follow the same course. Take my father-in-law’s pit, for example. At the time of the miner’s strike it was known as the most productive in the UK. It also earned the reputation of being the most loyal to the cause (nicknamed “second to none” for the numbers who stayed out on strike to the bitter end). Despite it being a prize asset for the NCB, its workforce was immediately reduced by 400 in the wake of the strike. Closure was ultimately forced upon it in 1993 despite its continued commercial viability and extensive coal resources yet to be mined.
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I find this a very interesting study in how historical memory is formed. If I were to ask which PM closed the most pits in a single term of office, I suspect that nobody would say Harold MacMillan, who closed 246 mines between 1957 and 1963. In his dotage, of course, he was paraded on TV as an amiable grandfather figure, moaning about the misdeeds of Mrs Thatcher.
Nor would many Labour supporters, I suspect, be aware of just how many pits were closed by Wilson and Callaghan in their 4? periods of office. And I bet you don’t recall that the massive Ebbw Vale steel works were closed by the local MP between 1972 and 75. His name was Michael Foot, Minister of Employment.
Here is an extract from the economic historian David Edgerton to give some context:
“From the late 1950s to the mid-1970s there was a spectacular fall in coal output. It nearly halved as coal-gas, coal-powered locomotives, coal-heated homes and coal-fired factories were eliminated. This is not to say the industry decayed; rather, it was transformed by new machinery. The National Coal Board developed a coal-cutting machine, the Anderton Shearer Loader, which equipped the mines and sold all over the world.31 New pits were dug, including the ‘Big-K’, the Kellingley colliery in North Yorkshire, the largest in Europe. A new coalfield was discovered in Selby, Yorkshire, and from the 1970s coal started being produced in a new superpit (in fact a complex of interconnected pits) which was in full production from the 1980s, with peak output of over 10 million tons in the early 1990s. Coal came to matter more in the 1970s than it had since the 1940s. The miners were in a strong position – domestic coal was now an attractive alternative to expensive imported oil following the recent quadrupling of the oil price in 1973. There was hope for an increased demand for coal in the future, and investment poured in. The 1975 plan for coal envisaged increasing output, to replace oil, for a steel industry expected to expand, and for new uses. There was thought of re-coaling the British economy – but new houses could not burn coal, they had not been built with flues. Once again scientists were paid to research the processing of coal to make smokeless fuel, chemicals and oil. Coal production never got up to expected levels, though 1980 saw the peak use of coal in power stations, now its main use by far. However, output ceased to fall as it had in the late 1950s and 1960s; its long and pronounced decline was decisively interrupted. Through the 1980s coal production fell slowly – from 125 million tonnes in 1980 to 100 million tonnes in 1990. The dramatic fall in production came under John Major and continued under New Labour.”
It seems to me that a lot of criticism of Mrs Thatcher, as indeed of Rachel Reeves, is driven by simple mysogyny. Three men closed 536 pits between them. And yet, a single woman closing 160 pits is a cause of endless bitching, moaning and wailing. And for God’s sake, when will moaning about school milk stop? In Summer, by the time break came around, it was usually curdled and, besides we didn’t need it for nutrition. Perhaps up in the north everyone was still under nourished?
On the other hand, Starmer just seems oblivious to politics. He only knows about human rights “law”. He appears to be ignorant of economics. He is proud of his ignorance of culture. He is just an empty legalist on a stick and has surrounded himself with morons to form a government.
Time alone will tell how long this bunch will survive in office
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There is a very interesting graph on this Wikipedia page, which shows the steady decline in UK coal production. It could be used to justify the claim that Thatcher was right to close the pits because they were no longer profitable/viable/able to compete with cheap imports. As MIAB argued, this was just the continuation of a trend that had long been ongoing under Labour Prime Ministers.
All that is true, so far as it goes, but what the graph also shows is the rise in coal imports at this time, which by shortly after 2000 exceeded domestic coal production. Thatcher, it seems, was no more interested in energy security than Starmer is. Thatcher oversaw an increase in coal imports while insisting we leave our own coal in the ground. Starmer oversees a rise in oil and gas imports, while insisting we mustn’t exploit our own reserves. I maintain my claim that Starmer is heir to Thatcher.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining_in_the_United_Kingdom
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MIAB,
“It seems to me that a lot of criticism of Mrs Thatcher, as indeed of Rachel Reeves, is driven by simple mysogyny.”
I’m sorry but that remark is unbecoming. We should stick to discussions of historical events and documented testimonies that provide insight into the political and economic factors of the day. Your psychological profiling of Thatcher’s critics does little to advance the debate here and I’m certain talk of “endless bitching, moaning and wailing” would not impress anyone who actually experienced the impact of her policies in the North of England in the 1980s.
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Not forgetting of course that Thatcher was initially very enthusiastic in her support of climate science and the supposed need to mitigate climate change by reducing our reliance upon fossil fuels. It’s entirely possible that she just cynically exploited this cause celebre in order to further justify shutting down the mines, because she dropped her advocacy soon after leaving office.
But I just can’t accept the notion that Starmer is the ‘heir to Thatcher’. This ignores all the positive things which came out of her two periods of government. She is still remembered by many as one of the UK’s greatest Prime Ministers, despite being despised by a significant minority. Nothing positive is ever likely to emerge soon or in retrospect from a Starmer government. He is quite likely the most hated British Prime Minister ever, if not actually now, then very soon. He will depart office in shame, having achieved nothing but wanton destruction of our once beautiful, prosperous nation – building on the legacy of Blair and several Conservative PMs, none of whom could be considered as heirs to Thatcher, in fact quite the opposite. Everything Weird Stalin touches turns to s**t. You just can’t say the same about Thatcher. She also had character, personality, tenacity, genuine ‘iron lady’ determination. Starmer is a robotic, moronic mid-level managerial technocrat who has no public persona; he’s cold, uncaring, brittle and nauseatingly bland.
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Jaime,
I am well aware that plenty of Clisceppers are admirers of Margaret Thatcher, but I am most certainly not one of them. I suppose I am scarred by more formative years being spent watching my part of the world being turned into an industrial wasteland by a Prime Minister who shamelessly bribed the electorate with public money as she sold public assets at an undervalue.
I would concede that the trade unions had become far too powerful, with strikes at the drop of a hat over trivial issues paralysing UK industry. Something had to be done about that, and Thatcher did it. But that’s it, so far as I’m concerned.
I confess to being more than a little tongue in cheek in describing Starmer as Thatcher’s heir, as there are many differences between them – but in the areas I touched upon I think the similarities are profound.
FWIW I share your opinion of Starmer!
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“Nimbys. Naysayers. Traitors. Children take note, why learn oracy when insults will do?”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/09/nimbys-naysayers-traitors-children-take-note-why-learn-oracy-when-insults-will-do
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My biggest worry of Starmers ‘ or Labours’ poor performance it will allow SNP to pull back some lost support. Will it be enough , I don’t know ! I agree with Starmer seeing himself as an Internationalist, that carries no weight up here, Sturgeon believed she could make Scotland a world leader in Dual Fuel Ferry manufacture ,when the Glen Rosa is commissioned Clyde ship building will be zero. Don’t forget the QE.2 was built on the Clyde. She also believed she could make Scotland the Saudi Arabia of green energy, in real terms what does that mean ? During the Covid lock downs and Sturgeons daily reports on the benefits of her iron grip of the country and people led to people in England believing her to be so much more effective than Boris. What went on behind closed doors ? Starmer seems to believe in the World Leader mantra is it a reality we can afford ?
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I have found stories on this thread to be fascinating. I left for Canada during the Miners Strike so missed the whole of Thatcher’s reign. I also was a southern lad (East London) so had no experience of (nor to be perfectly honest interest) of the northern coal lands. Instead matters Québécois took over. Your stories show just how much I missed.
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Ben Pile has a new piece that suggests his thinking and mine overlap to an extent:
How MPs from the Labour Party — the erstwhile party of the working class — are now mobilising against jobs, against industries, and against prosperity.
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“MP’s anger at government over Grangemouth closure”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn8yqe585y0o
A Scottish Labour MP has criticised his party for not doing enough to save the Grangemouth oil refinery.
Earlier this week, some workers at the site were sent redundancy letters by their employer, Petroineos. The site is Scotland’s only oil refinery, and is expected to close by the summer.
Brian Leishman, Labour MP for Alloa and Grangemouth, said he was angry at the UK government, as well as other parties involved.
But Labour said it had offered a £100m support package to the community.
The prime minister has previously said he took the issue of the refinery closure very seriously.
Sir Keir Starmer added: “We’ll do everything we can to make sure that viable long-term future is there for the workers, for their communities and all that rely on it.“
Leishman told BBC Scotland’s The Sunday Show he had anger at a multitude of actors “but primarily at my own government at the moment“.
He said the current UK government, which came into power last summer, had inherited the problem from the previous Conservative administration, who he accused of turning their back on the refinery workers.
He also criticised the inaction of the SNP government at Holyrood.
Leishman added: “There’s a lot of people who have got to carry the can for this but we really, in government now, should be doing an awful lot more.”
He said he had taken the issue to the top of the UK government and the answers he had received back had been “incredibly underwhelming and not good enough”.
Leishman added: “This is the biggest industrial issue to hit Scotland in 40 years – more must be done.”....
Unfortunately his answer seems to be a “green transition” at the site, rather than realising that net zero is causing massive damage to the economy and is costing jobs. We’ll get somewhere in the next 4.5 years (i.e. while we’re saddled with this wretched Labour government) only if net zero zealots on the Labour back-benchers wake up and accept that the policies they fervently support are actually extraordinarily damaging.
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Today is the 50th anniversary of Thatcher’s becoming leader of the Conservative Party so I thought it would be a suitable day on which to advise Mark that I reject his criticism of her. On 11 February 1975 I was Commercial Director of a medium-sized subsidiary of a major UK engineering group. In many ways it was a remarkable business: developing and selling inter alia electronic engine control equipment for warships and for helicopters, systems for the remote control of mining equipment for the National Coal Board, industrial robots and – get this – early wind turbines. It was not an easy job: inflation was extraordinarily high and in particular we were under major pressure from the unions. But I must have done a reasonable job because in 1976 I was made Managing Director of another company in the same group – developing and selling throughout the world marine navigation (gyro compasses and associated equipment and, as an agent, early satellite navigation systems) and steering control systems. It was another medium-sized company employing about 300 skilled production, R&D and service staff. And, from the outset, I had to deal with obstructive unions – insisting on higher wages and improved conditions (although the shop steward of the engineering union told me that, although that his members were not doing too badly, he was under instruction from union HQ to act in solidarity with engineering workers elsewhere). We had several strikes when I had to cross (a largely amiable) picket line to get to my office. Operating in a highly competitive international marketplace, this threatened to undermine the business’s viability (and credibility in the eyes of overseas customers) – although I’m pleased to say that I was able to keep it going and even make a modest profit.
Then in 1979 Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister. And, tired of all the problems and misery of the Callaghan government, I – a long-time Labour voter – had voted Tory. And I have no doubt it was the right decision: Thatcher’s election brought about the defeat of militant trade unionism and thus far better and more co-operative industrial relations, contributing to the recovery of prosperity. Businesses like mine were able to focus on product development and growth – making it possible to expand and employ more people.
I’m sorry Mark, but I have no doubt you’re wrong about this remarkable lady.
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Robin,
“I’m sorry Mark, but I have no doubt you’re wrong about this remarkable lady.”
I don’t think this is a subject that lends itself to categoric statements regarding who is right and who is wrong. By any objective measure, Thatcher was a divisive figure, and where one stands very much depends upon the order of importance one places in the foundational morals that bind society. For example, here is one expert who takes a very different position to your own:
“Margaret Thatcher – a strong leader, but a resolute failure by any other measure”
https://www.theguardian.com/business/economics-blog/2013/apr/18/margaret-thatcher-leader-failure-strong
Note how many times the author references morality. That’s not to say that Thatcher was immoral – it’s just that the foundations of her morality were not universally shared, and they definitely created a society of winners and losers.
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John: I realise of course that Thatcher was a divisive figure – some of my closest and most respective friends dislike her to this day. But, when I said that Mark was wrong, I was referring to his comment that Starmer’s project ‘is every bit as dangerous and destructive as Thatcher’s‘. When I recall the enormous benefits she made possible for the UK economy (sadly now lost) the phrase ‘dangerous and destructive’ makes no sense.
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Of course Maggie Thatcher was a ‘divisive figure’. To do what she did, defeat the unions and their loosen their stranglehold on British industry and productivity, she had to make a lot of enemies in the process. A lot of people hated her, some quite justifiably, as Mark points out, but many others because they hated that she was interfering with the comfortable status quo and unceremoniously raining on their parade in the process. In that respect, Trump is a ‘divisive figure’ and Elon Musk is incredibly divisive too. But you’ve got to look at the people in high places who Thatcher made enemies of in order to gauge whether her actions were, on the whole, morally justified or repugnant in the extreme – like Starmer’s actions. Howe and Heseltine (both staunch Europhiles and the latter a German Shepherd Dog – ‘it growled at me’ – strangler going by the nickname of Tarzan) were instrumental in her downfall. With Thatcher gone, the Tory Party took us into the EU and look how that turned out, so I for one am persuaded that Thatcher was overall a hugely positive ‘divisive figure’ who made enemies of all the right people!
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Robin,
I take your point. Irrespective of the damages caused to certain elements of society, one cannot rightly say that Thatcher caused the Nation’s ruination as a whole, since there were many positives. Starmer and his team, on the other hand, look like they are going to be a pure and unmitigated disaster.
Jaime,
Shortly after graduating I was made redundant twice in one year, no thanks to Thatcher’s policies. Only my obvious talents, compelling charisma and endearing humility got me through. None of my wife’s friends from teacher training college managed to get a job in teaching, and she only did so by first teaching for free for a year. Times were tough oop North, and not everyone had cause to thank her. We could not all be dismissed as ‘enemies within’.
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Robin and Jaime,
I am happy that we can respectfully disagree. We all do agree that Thatcher was a divisive figure, and we are simply on the opposite sides of the divide.
I have already conceded Robin’s point regarding the absurd behaviour of the trade unions (bad behaviour which probably started in the 1960s and got much worse through the 1970s) and Thatcher’s solving of that problem. It was a problem, and I concede that she restored, if not UK competitiveness, then at least the conditions under which management stood a better chance of restoring it.
But as John says, it was grim up north, and people there suffered in ways that I am sure southerners can’t understand (through no fault of their own). It was grim, and Thatcher made it much grimmer. I remember at the age of 18, on my way to university in the south (the south was largely an unknown land to me) my parents rented a self-catering property in rural Oxfordshire and helped me move in to College while they had a holiday. For the first couple of days I stayed with them and I was left in a bemused state – such affluence. Such casual comfort. Such ease. I had never witnessed anything like it. These people enjoyed lives that I had not imagined existed. We were poor, and so was everyone I knew. And our prospects seemed to be going relentlessly downhill. This was late summer 1982, the north was going to hell in a handcart, and Thatcher was just getting started.
The Jarrow marchers in the 1930s didn’t want state support – they wanted jobs. They were proud men who wanted to support their families. That mindset still largely existed in the north in which I grew up, but I fear there’s not much of it left now, and I blame Thatcher, in part at least. She threw people onto the scrapheap, gave them no hope of work and created a society where not working and depending on state handouts instead has come to seem normal and acceptable. That has caused at least as much harm to the UK’s competitiveness as any good that might have come of trade union reform.
I had the misfortune to hear a Thatcher interview on the radio this morning. Her horrible voice sent shivers down my spine (I can’t stand to listen to Starmer either – another point of similarity between them).
She was no economic genius – she got lucky with North Sea oil and gas revenues and had the added bonus of the funds she realised by selling off state assets at an undervalue to her cronies in the city and to an electorate who were all too happy to be bribed into voting for her.
And don’t get me started on the Falklands War….
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Mark,
“I had the misfortune to hear a Thatcher interview on the radio this morning”.
The very first time I became aware of Thatcher’s existence was when I was listening to her on the radio, during the days when she was just starting out as Education Secretary. She was part of a panel who, by way of light entertainment, had been asked what their pet hates were regarding modern affectations in speech. When it came to her turn she said, in a very plummy voice, “I hate people who say ‘er’ or ‘you know’ all the time when they are speaking.”
Not only did I think this was a stupid answer, given that it failed to address the question, but I wondered what was missing in her brain for her to be so judgemental towards someone merely because they were an unconfident speaker. It’s as if she thought that lack of eloquence was a personal choice akin to taste in clothing. It was clear to me that empathy was not her strong suit and I didn’t think she was cut out for her current governmental role. Shortly after that she was stopping school milk and the rest is history.
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A footnote to my first comment about Thatcher. As I said, 50 years ago I was the Commercial Director of a medium-sized engineering company. As I also said, I was a Labour supporter. I kept quiet about that as most (all?) of my fellow directors were Tories. When Thatcher’s appointment was announced they could hardly believe it – a woman (a woman!) leading their party! Of course, soon after 1979, they were all worshipping her.
Re the Falklands War, as I said I was MD of a company selling naval equipment worldwide. As a result, I had products on both sides – sorry Mark!
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To summarise my understanding of the contributions so far: (i) various prime ministers over at least 6 decades have overseen the decline (or forced decline) of the UK coal industry and (ii) very little has been done to help those communities which have been blighted by the loss of this their major wealth generator and source of social cohesion.
If we look back over a longer period of time do we not commonly see, outside periods of acute stress such as World Wars, a very casual attitude by UK governments towards the industry which has provided the primary source, indeed until recently the only major source of domestic and industrial power since the start of the Industrial Revolution some 300 years ago? Until about the late 1960s all governments (and the media/chattering classes) had taken it for granted that abundant energy would be available to the economy at a reasonable price and that, therefore, political business-as-usual could continue undisturbed by such fundamentals for ordinary people as energy security [Note 1].
I suspect that government weakness in energy matters is, in fact, just one aspect of a more general UK weakness in industrial policy in general …
At a personal level, when in the late 1960s I chose to enter the engineering profession I was comforted in my choice by the thought that the UK, as the instigator of the Industrial Revolution, would always need and nurture its engineers and their profession. How wrong can a teenager be? It was not long, however, before I began to be disabused. Indeed, engineering seemed and seems to have a poorer social standing in the UK than other Western countries that developed later; I have long pondered why that should be so, given the importance of technology in society at large and for the Ruling Classes too …
Is it in part that technical subjects are considered difficult and that for the generalist (many of whom seem to populate the various arms of the UK Establishment’s upper echelons) science and engineering are beyond their ken? Or is something deeper, namely that in British culture there is a deep-seated snobbery against those who work (or who are perceived to work) with their hands? Gentlemen – and ladies too, these days – are above that sort of thing, are they not?
I have a penchant for this latter explanation, although I have not been able to prove it to my satisfaction … but a couple of anecdotes going back over the decades seem to lend support. Firstly, I have a memory (or is it just a feeling?) that the late Nicholas Ridley, AKA Baron Ridley of Liddesdale (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Ridley,_Baron_Ridley_of_Liddesdale) when he was briefly (1989 to 1990) Secretary of State for Trade and Industry wondered aloud what the purpose of his job was. I ask myself, do their Lordships usually take on jobs that are, apparently, so ill-defined but so very much in the public eye?
The second anecdote comes from literature. In 1895 Oscar Wilde’s wonderful play “The Importance of Being Earnest” opened in London. In the first act the formidable Lady Bracknell interrogates Jack as a prospective suitor for her daughter Gwendolen. Having established Jack’s education (“I know nothing, Lady Bracknell”), politics and sources of income, Lady Bracknell enquires about Jack’ father:-
“… Who was your father? He was evidently a man of some wealth. Was he born in what the Radical papers call the purple of commerce, or did he rise from the ranks of the aristocracy?”
In summary, my hypothesis is that our political elites care (and have cared) little for industry and, banking aside, little for commerce too. They have barely sought to maintain industry, let alone cherish and nurture it, except for the misnamed “renewables” industries … which, for the most part, are not British and so little of the wealth squandered on “renewables” circulates through the British economy; it is, as I see it, very largely a wealth extraction operation conducted by our elites for the betterment of foreigners. And the people that proportionately pay the most for this service are the poorest in British society. It stinks – or have I misunderstood something fundamental?
Note
Regards, John C.
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John C, not only do I not think you’ve missed something, I think you’ve nailed it.
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John C,
You are quite right regarding the way in which British culture undervalues engineering. The situation in France, for example, is very different since engineering is held in high esteem by society. This is reflected in the derivation of the word. In Britain, ‘engineer’ stems from ‘engine’. Hence the engineer is seen as a glorified spanner monkey. In France, the word for engineer is ‘ingénieur‘, which stems from ‘ingéniosité‘, meaning ‘ingenuity’.
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John C – spot on. I went into engineering straight from school (1973 – aged 16) thinking get my apprenticeship + night school & get a good job for life with Ferranti Edinburgh.
Well, it was not to be, but transitioned into aerospace engineering/design, working in the Isle Of Man for subsidiary of Shorts Belfast so can’t complain.
But – In hindsight, should have opted for another career path, as the pay is cr*p in engineering, compared to sitting in bed on zoom calls.
ps – god I miss the shop floor, watching machinists turn your design into reality (and you have’nt screwed up)
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Interesting that this should appear shortly after I penned my criticism of Thatcher selling off the nation’s assets cheap in order to bribe people to vote for her. The middle paragraph of the three below brings strands of my critique together:
“Call it Thatcher’s timebomb: the great council housing selloff of 2024, a crisis hidden in plain sight”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/13/margaret-thatcher-council-housing-selloff-2024
…Call it Thatcher’s hangover: the good times, if that’s what they were, wore off long ago and now all that’s left is a dusty thudding in the head and costs that never stop rising. Her most famous policy, right to buy, shows how the hangover never stops. Public money was spent on building those homes; public money was lost through giving them away cheap; and public money is now funnelled in housing benefit to the landlords who let them out.
Last November’s gold rush exposes how cynical those homilies about a property-owning democracy always were. Property owning? For some, but for others try: property flipping, property renting, property accumulating – done on the cheap with taxpayers’ cash. While the private sector keeps raking it in, the public sector is deprived of rental income and forced into ever more desperate measures to house tenants. In my own London borough of Enfield, families with nowhere else to live are now shipped off to ex-mining villages in County Durham.
At Southwark, they reckon they’ve lost 16,000 homes over the decades through right to buy. About half of those are now rented out privately to tenants who might otherwise have got them from the council, with cheaper rents and more secure contracts. “By depriving councils of homes, right to buy takes away the security that allows kids to finish school or their parents to keep their jobs,” says Southwark council’s leader, Kieron Williams. “The rise in homelessness is more or less a direct result of right to buy.”…
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My mum wanted to buy our council house, but she couldn’t raise enough money to do so. Had she done so, it would have remained our family home and Lewisham Council would not have kicked my nan out after my mum died in order to house immigrants. Had right to buy been the policy when my grandad died, Lewisham Council would not have kicked my dad out of the family home years earlier because my dad would have bought it. Either way, I would have been thanking Thatcher for saving our family home, allowing my nan to live out her last remaining years in familiar surroundings. There’s definitely a shortage of high quality social housing in London now, but I don’t think you can blame Thatcher for it.
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Jaime,
You make a good point. The housing shortage is a complex issue, caused by many different factors. To blame Thatcher alone is simplistic, but her policy is definitely a significant contributory factor. Thatcher’s policy forced Councils to take massive write-downs on the value of Council housing, and she compounded the problem by refusing to allow them to spend the (low) receipts from Council house sales on building new housing stock. I never understood that.
Where I grew up housing was then cheap, Council housing was often regarded as low value, and by the time massive discounts were given, people were buying houses for considerably less than the price of a new car. Often the purchase price was funded on behalf of elderly residents by their adult children who had an eye on the main chance, and when their elderly parents died, they sold the houses at a significant profit, often to buy-to-let landlords.
In my part of the world, the other side of that coin is that whole estates of Council houses in former pit villages went unsold because the residents were now unemployed and their communities devastated. Hence Councils in London are now sending people to places like Easington in Co. Durham. It’s all a mess.
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My Mum & Dad bought our Scottish Special Housing Association semi detatched 3 bed house in Broxburn, West Lothian under the “right to buy” scheme (no idea for how much).
What I remember most is, shortly after they had bought it, my Mum fuming because all the other council houses around us got upgraded with double glazing/central heating, paid for by the taxpayer (if my memory serves me right).
To this day, it has some double glazing but no central heating.
I own the house now after Mum passed away a few years ago. I know she was happy & felt secure in her own home for her last years.
My Brother stayed with her until the end & still lives in the house now, heating 1 room with fan heater. He fell on hard times financially, so helped him out, as you do.
Bottom line – not sure that it was a great buy for my parents, as they missed out on council upgrades/maintenance, but owning your own home was something they aspired to.
ps – found this pic, our house is on the far left –
https://www.rightmove.co.uk/house-prices/details/scotland-68721812-486324?s=49759df069275b19de2d6caeff1da0b3a4e2e6d9cb5f8cdfc5e188fa8cfee2d3&v=media&id=media0&ref=photoCollage
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dfhunter, right to buy worked for some people as it was intended to do (or, more precisely, as per the spin put out by Thatcher’s government). It was a postcode lottery, however. If you lived in a poor quality house in a rough area where crime was rife, why would you want to buy your home (at any price)? Those people were just begging to be relocated. On the other hand, if you lived in a very small council estate on the edge of a leafy village in the south of England, buying your council house at a discount was akin to winning the lottery.
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“Scotland’s Last Oil Refinery to Close – Giving the Lie to Miliband’s Net Zero Jobs Claim”
https://dailysceptic.org/2025/03/06/scotlands-last-oil-refinery-to-close-giving-the-lie-to-milibands-net-zero-jobs-claim/
...The episode has raised troubling questions about the Government’s repeated promises of a “just transition”, where no workers in the oil and gas industry will be left behind as Britain phases out fossil fuels in favour of green energy.
Sir Keir has repeatedly vowed that Labour will not repeat the Thatcher government’s “callous” decision to shut down Britain’s remaining coal mines in the 1980s without ensuring workers had alternative jobs to go to.
“The effects of that are still felt in communities across the country and never, ever again must we make that mistake,” the Prime Minister said in a 2023 speech.
Yet if Grangemouth is the first big test of this policy, local people say the Government is failing badly....
...What particularly angers his members, he says, is that the closure will not even dent overall global carbon emissions, of which the UK makes up less than 1%.
Now, Ineos and its partner PetroChina have said the site will become an import terminal for bringing in refined fuels from abroad.…
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For a bunch who love to deploy the paywall, quoting the Telegraph at such length seems a little hypocritical.
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Jit, I don’t disagree, but at least linking to the Daily Sceptic website does allow readers to get past the paywall to an extent, and to see what is being said at the Telegraph. In the past I was a Guardian reader and wouldn’t touch the Telegraph with a bargepole. Now, although it still produces some silly stuff, I think the Telegraph is our best hope in exposing the dangers of and damage caused by Net Zero.
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