Miners and Mining Communities

Emma Lewell-Buck Excerpts

Thursday 9th May 2024 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Emma Lewell-Buck (South Shields) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Easington (Grahame Morris) and the hon. Member for Leigh (James Grundy), who is no longer in his place, for securing today’s debate. It is always a real pleasure to follow our miner, my hon. Friend the Member for Wansbeck (Ian Lavery).

Coalmining was a mainstay of the economy for almost a century. In South Shields, we had St Hilda’s, Whitburn, Harton and Westoe collieries. It is therefore no surprise that people in my constituency would be hard-pressed not to know or be related to a miner. Generations of families worked down our pits. Our former pitmen will testify that it was not a glamorous job; it was dirty, hard and dangerous graft, but those negatives were well worth it for the steady income, the camaraderie, the friendship and the community that they built around our pits. That way of life and the social bonds are the thing that all former pitmen and their families say they miss the most.

Thatcherism has many ugly legacies, but the miners’ strike of 1984 to 1985 was one of the most visceral, personal and defining moments of the 20th century. It was the moment of the strongest resistance against her industrial vandalism and the hollowing out of our mining communities. Not content with closing our docks and shipyards, the pits suddenly became uneconomical, she said. Those who tried to resist this blatant destruction of our communities were arrested and convicted. This weaponisation of the state against ordinary men and women fighting for their livelihoods during the strikes draws worrying parallels with today’s anti-strike legislation. It is why we need a public inquiry into Orgreave, and it is why this Government should introduce similar legislation to that introduced in the Scottish Parliament pardoning those convicted of matters relating to the strike. All they were trying to do was save their jobs.

I know all too well what unemployment—or the constant threat of it—can do both mentally and physically: it is utterly soul-destroying. There is one heartbreaking story that all of us in South Shields are sadly familiar with: that of a lovely family man and colliery engineer made redundant who, after dropping his children off at school, put a chain across the front door, wrote a goodbye letter to his family, climbed up the stairs, went into his bathroom, poured petrol over his clothes and, with a match, set himself alight. In 1993, his pit—Westoe pit—closed, signalling the end of not just coalmining in South Tyneside but a tradition and a way of life.

Our memories of the solidarity of the trade union movement and the rejection of the trickle-down economics that have proven such a driver of inequalities in our region have endured, because the challenges facing former coalfield communities are not consigned to the history books; they have deepened alongside regional inequalities. The economic gap between coalfield areas and the rest of the UK has been widening considerably over the last decade. Average earnings for workers in former coalfield areas are 7% below the national average. That is the legacy of de-industrialisation.

South Shields, as a post-industrial and coastal constituency, has faced and continues to face several challenges. Those are challenges that we have proven time and again that we will always overcome. In South Shields, we do not wait for Government help that never comes—we get on with stuff. Our port of Tyne is now the base of the biggest offshore wind farm in the world. We are home to hundreds of small businesses, and we have been instrumental in the fight against poverty, paving the way for holiday clubs and setting up a mobile community supermarket.

The Government’s levelling-up rhetoric rings hollow in my constituency, which has been rejected for towns fund and freeport bids and two rounds of levelling-up funding. The level of child poverty in South Shields remains stubbornly high at 40% and unemployment across South Tyneside is 6.7%, which is higher than the north-east average, yet in the Chancellor’s recent Budget he allocated London’s Canary Wharf double the amount of funding that our entire region will get.

The privatisation of once-nationalised industries that followed our pit closures has done nothing but deepen inequality, delivering profits for shareholders and decimating services that we all rely on. That is happening at the same time that the Government are pocketing the miners’ pension surplus. More than £4 billion has been given to the Government, with £420 million of that in the last three years alone. The Government keep saying that we need to strike a fair balance, but there is nothing fair about it when miners and their widows are left destitute on as little as £18 a week. We should not be surprised, because as the WASPI women know all too well, this Government have form when it comes to pension grabbing. Our miners were prosecuted and made redundant, and saw the heart ripped out of their communities, and now they are being robbed of their pensions, their retirement and the dignity that they all deserve.

We know all too well in South Shields that if you close a pit, you kill a community. Our proud mining heritage will always remain because of people like Gary Wilkinson, a local film maker, Bob Olley, our local artist, and Alan Mardghum and Stephen Guy from the Durham Miners’ Association, and places like South Shields Museum. Thanks to them, the generations who follow will know that underneath the South Shields streets, housing estates and fields they walk on, there were once thousands of pitmen gathering coal to power our country. We are proud of the past that we have inherited in South Shields, and it is one that we will continue to use to build our future—one that we will build with the next Labour Government.