Coalfield Communities

Debate between Lord Beamish and Michael Dugher

Tuesday 28th October 2014 Commons Chamber

[Michael Dugher]

What is desperate is the hon. Gentleman’s intervention. Look at the wording of the motion. Around 5.5 million people live in the former coalfields. The anger about what happened in the 1980s still exists today. It just shows how completely out of touch the Government are.

[Mr Kevan Jones (North Durham) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend will also know that, in the 1960s, the Labour Government had a plan which included not only moving people to bigger pits but bringing industry into the coalfields of North Durham. That did not happen. That was vindictive; it closed down communities, and communities such as mine are still suffering today.

[Michael Dugher]

As always, my hon. Friend brings to this place insight from his own constituency. Fundamentally, the Cabinet papers also show the true scale of the dishonesty in maintaining that the strike was about an industrial dispute based on economics, and it puts paid to the nonsense assertion at the time that Ministers were somehow neutral bystanders. The fact is that the Government of the day saw the strike in political terms. Far from Ministers being non-interventionist, they were in fact the micro-managers of this dispute.

One paper from a Downing street meeting shows that Mrs Thatcher told Ferdinand Mount, a senior policy adviser, that her Government should

“neglect no opportunity to erode trade union membership.”

In a paper prepared for Mrs Thatcher by the Downing street head of policy, the now right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood), it was said that miners had a “revolutionary” strategy, and it urged the Prime Minister to return to her original plan of

“encouraging a war of attrition”

against the miners. That completely reinforces the view at the time that the Government of the day regarded the striking miners as—to use that most infamous of phrases—“the enemy within.”