In 1983 Tony Blair entered Parliament. He had been selected to fight the Constituency of Sedgefield, a constellation of mining communities which had been hit by one pit closure after another. The miners made a powerful impression on this young man, and sent him to Westminster in a state of shock. His fine maiden speech vividly reflects that shock. In accordance with custom, he ranged over the geographical area he had been elected to represent and made some pertinent observations about its Parliamentary history. He recalled the heart cry of John Lesley in the 1930s, against dead end jobs and youth unemployment, and reported that all those troubles of the great depression had revisited the coalfield, with unemployment having passed forty per cent, and very many young people finding that "the dole queue is their first experience of adult life".
"Without work, they do not merely suffer the indignity of enforced idleness -- they wonder how they can afford to get married, to start a family, and to have access to all the benefits of society that they should be able to take for granted. Leisure is not something that they enjoy, but something that imprisons them."
In the middle of England, I live today among people who are in the same conditions which were then denounced by Tony Blair. One of the pits in my area closed in 1978, five years before the first election of our present Prime Minister. Almost twenty years later, that colliery village haunts us all. Whaley Thorns has endured consistent mass unemployment. Its isolation and difficulty of access, have pushed a large proportion of its young inhabitants to leave in search of work. Their houses have been vandalised, often by children, sometimes by dossers, and then boarded up against the young invaders by the local Council. Most of the shopkeepers have also fled. No-one has any money to spend. A local wit has inscribed a message on the wall, by the entrance to the village. "The Bronx", it says. But really this village is nearer the Third World than the First. Brave efforts have been made by local people, to find ways of regenerating the area. The old colliery tip has been sculpted and is populated by a great variety of birds and little animals, but the principal economic activity open to a small number of the villagers is the staffing of the new homes for elderly people. Cheap labour is the name of this trade.
A significant part of the old coalfield has been allowed to rot in this way, for a decade and more. But misery has become very much more widespread since the great purge of the coal industry after 1992. Now there are a whole rash of villages with idyllic names like Warsop Vale, or Pleasley, where many of the houses begin to disintegrate and surround people with a sense of physical decline which joins their personal sense of moral deprivation. Unemployment goes on and on and on. The consequent, and intended, effect of this is that low wages become lower, and nudge down towards the levels of parsimony which govern the benefit system.
The pitiless contraction of the coal industry between 1981 and 1994 has been the most ferocious upheaval in the world of employment since the end of the Second World War, with the demobilisation of the armed forces and the redeployment of millions of workers from the munitions industry. Yet those vast changes were cushioned by massive governmental intervention and planning.
The coal industry was, in large parts of Britain, a monopoly employer. This did not happen because of the workings of the market. Colliery communities were trapped by government planners, who persistently and rigorously steered local councils away from allowing permission for any kind of diversification. Miners wanted alternative jobs so that their lads would not have to go down the pit. Whitehall knew better, and insisted that the supply of labour for the mining industry was an absolute national priority. So the mining communities were planned into their dependence; and are now told that their present misery is nothing to do with the Government, and can only be cured by the action of the market.
Unemployment begets poverty, and poverty seeds debt. The Mansfield Citizens' Advice Bureau tells us that forty per cent of the enquiries it dealt with last year were debt related. Behind the statistics, can we measure the worry and the self-reproach suffered by so many people, as they sink from enjoying a more or less guaranteed income, through an increasingly insecure period of redundancy, down to the rock bottom of this acquisitive society? The descent has been inexorable. Ashfield and Mansfield are now joint 413th in the ranking of 438 British districts for average disposable household income. Some districts are apparently better off, but only because their statistics are distorted by islands of affluence among the general misery. Enterprising publishers devised a publication called the Unemployment Warehouse, to enable companies to avoid wasting their money on trying to sell products to people without resources. Charities, too, could avoid the costs of mail shots to people who could not afford to contribute. But this publication recently hit the news, because it had been found very useful by the loan sharks, who home in to prey on those who are in desperate financial need.
But unemployment also aggravates ill health, increases stress, and feeds all the health risks of deprivation. As we were told by the British Medical Journal:
"The poor pay for their poverty with their lives".
They also pay in every other part of their lives. Unemployed miners are less likely to have a current partner, less likely to have social support, and more likely to suffer low levels of self-esteem than their working companions. The Samaritans in Worksop called for help to open 24 hours a day, and to maintain a greatly enlarged staff of volunteers. They had experienced a significant increase in suicide calls, and could not provide a proper service by operating for only 8 hours a day. In Mansfield, the Samaritans received 1373 suicide calls in twelve months up to November 1995. 291 came from people who were assessed as being at "active risk". Not all of these cases involved unemployed miners, but a growing number did. The moral crisis for these young men is that they have not only lost their jobs, but their role in life. They can no longer see themselves as bread-winners, and indeed, as the jobs which are available to some of them pay less and less, it is difficult enough for them to win their own bread. Mass unemployment therefore moves towards social breakdown, multiplies the numbers of lone parents, and promotes the insidious rise of the drug culture.
The martyrdom of the British coalfields is a single handed triumph for the politics of Mrs Thatcher. She has broken the enemy within, and ruined thousands of lives in the process.
Could pit closures have been handled rationally? We must recall that mass redundancies have not always been like this. When the Swedish Government was faced with the prospect of a rapid and significant reduction in their national shipbuilding industry, they took very considerable measures to prepare the workers who would lose their jobs for new employment, not only by retraining programmes, but by investment in new enterprise. The Government ensured that the closures took place over a period of several years, that unemployment pay was maintained at a high level, that free training was available for those wishing to change or develop their skills, that subsidies in the form of interest-free loans were available to new firms coming into the area, and that all employers knew of the resources available for converting production out of shipbuilding.
But plans are out of fashion. Today we read of repeated approaches to the new Government to come to the rescue of the little that is left of the British coal industry. Deep mined coal is now mined in twenty pits, and the number has been declining since privatisation. All twenty are under threat, because of the decline in coal burning in power stations. Their destruction would be one final humiliation for the coalfield communities, the last unbearable turn of the screw. Intervention to stop this could take many forms, and need not necessarily follow the prescriptions of the main entrepreneur who is presently engaged, Richard Budge. There have been important advances in the derivation of liquid fuels from coal, and there is a powerful case for exploring whether it may be worthwhile to rescue the industry for this purpose. Richard Courtney and his colleagues at the British Coal Corporation were working on this problem, but, following privatisation, projects to test its possibilities have been abandoned.
There was once an argument which said that public enterprise was valid in cases such as this. That argument is apparently forgotten by all those with power or influence. At question time on the 29th October 1997, the Prime Minister was asked whether he would "go out on a limb to help the coal industry". "Of course we understand the problem" said Mr Blair. "But we have to ensure that the prices that are being offered are properly competitive."
The price of the destruction of the coal industry has surely been competitive enough. It has broken more homes at less cost than a middle sized war. It has ruined thousands of people and destroyed the hopes of a generation. It has engendered hopelessness on a scale not seen for many decades. It has turned some gentle, honest people into criminals or addicts, or vagrants. It has helped to make a Britain of full employment, high levels of welfare and mutual compassion, into a coast to coast car boot sale.
Before he began his non-stop ascent into the seats of power, the young Tony Blair was well enough aware of this problem. The recovery of the British coalfields needs powerful investment, strong governmental encouragement and intervention, and, as a minimal first step, the rescue of the vestiges of the old coal industry. But before that, it needs our present leaders to return to their roots, and listen to the voices of their youth.
This they are unlikely to do. We are therefore left with a large political problem. The present Labour Party is not the one I joined. Indeed, it is not the one that Tony Blair joined, still less the one that was the nursery for all the best people in his cabinet. But more to the point, it is not the Party that my coalfield constituents have voted for, supported through every kind of adversity, and given all their trust.
"What I think ought to be the case is that we ought not to hesitate to take some of these back into the public sector if their activities are not consistent with national energy policy, or if there's a doubt about the safety of the operation, or they don't have the confidence of the workforce."
Yorkshire Post, 11 February 1994
"The position remains the same as John Smith outlined. We will have to examine very carefully the state of the industry and how it accords with the public interest, because we have not had a proper energy policy in this country, and that has been an absolute tragedy."
Yorkshire Post, 27 January 1995
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