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Johnson might come to regret his joke about pit closures – politicalbetting.com
Johnson might come to regret his joke about pit closures – politicalbetting.com
If BoJo’s aim when he made his joke about pit closures was to get coverage for his Scottish trip then he has succeeded but he appears to have touched a raw nerve about one of the most difficult periods during the UK’s recent history.
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For a moment I did worry that that key Scottish segment of ex miner Scottish Tories, otherwise known as Tom who lives outside Kirkcaldy, might be offended but then I remembered that Tom had a sense of humour.
But how silly of the Mirror and Record to sacrifice the This is no joke moral high ground for the sake of an incredibly weak joke.
He was factually inaccurate, because one has to remember *why* Thatcher closed the coal industry. She was no environmentalist. She did it out of pure spite. Johnson thinks ordinary people are mugs.
The truth is that after intentionally and gleefully destroying the coal communities she then greatly expanded the oil & gas sector, and, as you point out, simply imported coal to replace the lost production in Wales, Scotland and England. She didn’t give a shit for the environment.
Leaving aside the Mirror’s feeble attempt at a pun, how’s this for brutal sarcasm about the failures of SAGE?
http://labour-uncut.co.uk/2021/07/09/jack-lesgrins-week-put-seven-year-olds-not-experts-in-charge-of-covid-response-seriously/
https://metro.co.uk/2018/08/06/someone-left-purple-dildo-jacob-rees-moggs-range-rover-7802323/
More of this sort of thing.
And I doubt many people would want the housing estates and country parks to be turned back into slag heaps.
That said, Boris really shouldn't babble about things he knows little about.
Given that he's not going to stop babbling then he needs to do some proper preparation.
Plenty of them around here with "nothing to do".
And in 2021, nearly four decades later, the environment is a bigger issue than the closure of the pits.
Although no doubt it would strike a nerve with Corbynistas on Twitter, I'm not sure who else would be offended.
PS as a child of the eighties myself, the thing that makes me feel really old now is to realise that the gap between now and the miners strike is about the same as the gap between the miners strike and World War Two. World War Two has always been history for me.
Also, while I think the dildo is harmless pranking spray-painting abuse isn't acceptable imo.
https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1473046/boris-johnson-fishing-news-brexit-scotland-eu-news-north-sea-exodus/amp
I must admit, when I was a teenager in the eighties, the environmental crisis I remember was the hole in the Ozone Layer (which ISTR featured heavily in a Grange Hill plotline), rather than climate change. Tackling the Ozone Hole has been a rather brilliant international success over the last thirty years.
On Thatcher: in November 1989, she made a speech on CFCs and the climate to the UN's General Assembly, being the first major politician to do so:
https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/107817
For instance, it contained the following:
"We are seeing a vast increase in the amount of carbon dioxide reaching the atmosphere. The annual increase is three billion tonnes: and half the carbon emitted since the Industrial Revolution still remains in the atmosphere.
At the same time as this is happening, we are seeing the destruction on a vast scale of tropical forests which are uniquely able to remove carbon dioxide from the air."
In April 1989, she held a cabinet meeting on climate change, with scientists invited to give talks.
For legislation: in 1986 the legislation for the privatisation of the electricity sector included a commitment for the reduction in the use of fossil fuels - though this was seen as being for economics, rather than environmental, reasons. A 1989 act designed to help nuclear power was altered to include renewables.
As ever with politicians, and especially PMs, the truth is a lot more complex than just a one-sided story. She was not a climate heroine; she was not a climate villain - especially as the climate was nowhere near as much on the agenda as it is nowadays. But she deserves a heck of a lot more credit than the people who were cravenly calling for uneconomic pits to be kept open.
Well I never!
More seriously: has anyone on PB or elsewhere noted that it's not just a matter of 1980s history. Mr Johnson has just given a rather brilliant impression of enunciating the equation:
climate change policy = brilliant excuse for the Tories to screw the working classes and their communities, what japes!
Which is the last thing we all need at the moment, especially with him fronting COP26 - in Scotland, too.
Farage: this is rubbing salt in the wounds of red wall voters.
A question is how much did the closure of the pits, and the consequent import of coal, often of lesser quality, lead enable the 'dash for gas' that started in the 1990s?
If coal had continued being mined in the UK at the levels it was in 1980, would it have been politically possible to move over to gas, which is much better for the environment?
As ever, politician's actions can have unexpected consequences. Occasionally they are even positive.
Can any lawyers help out? What criminal charge are the bookies leaving themselves open to being accused of?
https://twitter.com/tnewtondunn/status/1422945875186311170?s=21
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/1912-article-global-warming/
Genuine 1912 newspaper article
I'd be very sympathetic to a minimum staking law being brought in here, but there isn't one at the moment.
"COP26 President Alok Sharma’s camp want to say as little as possible before the summit in the hope of building a late consensus and declaring whatever can be agreed in Glasgow a success. "
Not exactly MBO, is it?
But your comment leads to a question: what alternative was there back then? Even with the climate crisis, was the energy expended to get the world where it is today, worth the damage to the environment? The pace of technological change in the last hundred years has been phenomenal, and life has never been better for billions.
If we had banned steam power in 1920, where would we be today? We did not have the technology to go green back then, and without plentiful electricity we would not have been able to eventually develop it.
The difference is that nowadays we have much better information on the damage was are doing, and the ability to do things about it: both directly and though mitigation.
Not good for the Tory appeal in the Red Wall seats.
In other news, in the interview just before, I noticed Nick Robinson sounding bizarrely desperate to get two farmers to agree that labour shortages weren't primarily due to Brexit, proposing all sorts of other problems which they, one after the other, rejected ; no, they said, it was the bureaucratic obstacles of Brexit. Extremely odd reporting.
I don't see how the world's burning of fossil fuels during the last century was entirely caused by 'Tory greed'.
I think sometimes journalists decide they have an opinion and go hunting for evidence and witnesses to support it, rather than gathering information and presenting it.
What’s the point in getting people on the bbc who have absolutely nothing interesting or insightful to add to the story? And then for the interviewer to make no effort to ask the miner if he would prefer things to go back to what they were like or mention Labour’s role in pit closures before Thatcher....
And your comprehension of the interview with the farmers is odd - firstly the second tomato grower never got to make any points really or answer Re pandemic effects as his line was shit so they dropped him and the first flower grower actually volunteered that actually the pandemic had caused staffing problems as potential staff didn’t know what would happen with quarantine and travel etc and said it was the major problem this season. He wasn’t being pushed by Robinson away from Brexit at all.....
Here are two surprising facts which between them help explain why the UK steel industry seems to be in what looks like a perma-slump.
The first is that in the past two years (to be precise, the past 22 months) China has manufactured more steel than Britain has since the height of the Industrial Revolution in 1870.
Try, if you can, to get your head round that.
In the months since the last general election China has produced more steel than Britain - the country where modern steel manufacturing was invented - has produced. Ever.
https://news.sky.com/story/the-surprising-facts-behind-the-declining-steel-industry-11725482
And Chinese steel production has continued to rise:
https://tradingeconomics.com/china/steel-production
The perpetually offended will scream about their offence and everyone else will roll their eyes and get on with life.
This isn't shifting any votes.
Boris putting his foot in it is hardly news but it was crass and he just does not seem to learn to measure his comments
Cop26 is heading for an enormous fudge and like so many of these overhyped events lots will be promised but little happens
Starmer demands the Cambo oil field is cancelled losing 1,000 plus Scots jobs, while Boris maintains he cannot intervene as HMG would be sued by the Company, and Sturgeon hides in a closet as she is scared to make any comment
I would be interested to hear from our SNP posters why Sturgeon is scared to comment
I think that Johnson could have got away with factually observing that the decline of the coal industry had fortuitously enabled Britain to reduce its emissions drastically (I don't believe that was a deliberate intention by policy-makers). What's damaging is having a jolly chuckle about it, since lots of people remember how it affected relatives in previous generations. The equivalent would be if Starmer cracked a joke about soldiers in the Falklands - it's not that anyone talks or even cares much about the Falklands now, but the next generation wouldn't feel it decent.
Anyway. Pah! As a child of the 1960s, my birthday is as close to Victoria's reign as it is to today!
It doesn't matter that what he said was cobblers, because the dash for gas didn't start until years after Thatcher's closure of the pits.
It doesn't matter that it directly contradicts the government's desire to open a new coal mine in Cumbria.
It doesn't matter that he's consistently opposed most of the government green policies over the last two decades that have helped us to make what progress has been made.
None of this matters because we're basically just talking about a joke, and so we're not talking about all the ways in which the government is incompetent, mendacious or corrupt.
Sure, those already hostile to Johnson have another reason to be riled up, but it's not going to convince anyone to switch support. Maybe you'll have a couple of people who will be unhappy about the callousness, but when it comes to voting this distraction means they don't have to think about all the worse things that are being done, or not done.
And, fundamentally, it's not like the opposition would be so insane to advocate for reopening coal mines. Not since Corbyn anyway. Sigh.
Its bad enough forty years later moaning that uneconomic mines were closed forty years ago - but if there's no new industries there forty years later, over a decade of which Labour were in charge - then is that due to the closing of the mines?
Would you have kept uneconomic coal mines going not just forty years ago but right through to today? Don't be ridiculous. 🙄
Not much electricity, and not very efficiently, but enough to make a start with.
I'm not saying it would have been a good idea, but I think humans are ingenious on the whole, and a way would have been found.
He can't help himself.
The core message- even by the standards of fossil fuels, coal is horrible stuff and the UK got it right to transition away from it- is pretty sound. The greeny Thatch line is more true than not true.
The reason this has blown up isn't that, though. It's the chuckle and the "thought that would wind you up". Both of which feel like ad libs, of the sort BoJo has done throughout his career. Many of them work in his favour, contributing to his"not one of them" persona. But some blow up and cause him a world of trouble.
And because the current Prime Minister has the judgement and self-control of a Jack Russell puppy, he can't filter the bad ad libs from the good ones.
However, while Boris may have been correct that coal had to go as a primary energy source due to its impact on the climate (the fact the Scottish Greens, now in coalition with the SNP, are fiercely anti coal further shows the irrelevance of his remarks in Scotland) he needed to reflect on the damage his remarks might do in the Red Wall.
In fact of the 100 top Labour target seats for the next general election over a third of them have some heritage of coal mining.
So clearly Boris' remarks are a boost to Starmer.
To rectify the damage Boris could point out his government is opening the first newdeep coalmine in 30 years in Cumbria
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/oct/02/first-new-deep-coalmine-in-uk-for-30-years-gets-green-light
https://www.renewableenergylawinsider.com/2011/07/28/origins-of-wind-power-mr-brushs-windmill-dynamo/
Wiki says that by 1908 there 72 wind driven generators in Denmark so leading the way even then.
It is emblematic of the decline in manufacturing industry and the employment stability of the communities around it, whether coal, steel, textiles* or shipbuilding. That transition to a post industrial society left a lot of lovers, even if we were winners as consumers. That is the globalisation that drove Brexit.
It is no coincidence that the old coalfields are amongst the most Brexity places in the country.
It was 'just close the pits. On yer bike'.
We had, I thought, moved on from that. Some at least fishermen on the East Coast are now servicing wind farms and oil platforms.
It would have destroyed industry. That would have been good for the environment, but rather poor for the people.
Sir John Houghton, who gave the talk on climate change to the cabinet you refer to liked to say that it was the first time an overhead projector had been used in a cabinet meeting - but that's a reference that won't mean much to the younger ones on here.
We really wasted a lot of time over the last few decades because right-wingers, instead of following Thatcher's lead and advocating for right-wing policies to tackle the problem, generally preferred the path of denial and decided climate change was a communist plot.
At least in rhetorical terms that has mostly ended now, but it remains to be seen if the policies will follow.
But by the early 1980s, closures and amalgamations of mines meant that there might be only a handful left in any area. A pit closed, and the nearest was ten miles away. With the closure of that last pit in an area, the area lost massively, directly and indirectly to support industries. This was accompanied by the death of many heavy industries.
I love the way some people ignore all the mine closures that occurred before and after Thatcher. Simplistic people looking for simplistic, one-word answers to the problems in the world. 'Thatcha!'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining_in_the_United_Kingdom#/media/File:UK_Coal_Mining_Jobs.png
As I said, I agree that it probably wasn't a "good idea".
But in your comment you were suggesting that it would have been literally impossible. I'd argue it would have been more difficult, quite likely seriously sub-optimal, but it would have been possible.