Coalfield Communities

Lord Beamish Excerpts

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.”

--- Later in debate ---

[Matthew Hancock]

I could not have put it better myself. As a Minister in this Government I am incredibly proud of the fact that youth unemployment is falling sharply. It is happening throughout the country, whether in the coalfields or in areas where there was no coal mining, and that is because we have a long-term economic plan. The biggest risk to those young people who have jobs now, but did not have them four years ago, would be a Labour Government.

[Mr Kevan Jones]

My figures are on page 23 of the Minister’s file, if he would like to look. He quotes figures, but does he realise that the jobs being created in coalfield communities—in County Durham, for example—are low paid, part time and insecure? The scandalous thing that I came across in my constituency last week is that some young people are not in any figures at all. They have opted out of the system. They are working in the black economy, which is clearly having an effect on the EU rebate. That is what is happening on the ground. The Minister can quote as many figures as he likes, but—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. In fairness, we have a lot of speakers, including, in fact, the hon. Gentleman, and I hope to get everyone in. We will not have long interventions.