Now now boys......
Sadly Scargill and his cohorts did nothing to stop our Maggie from destroying the pits or the rest of the heavy engineering in Britain.
Now we are buying thousands of tons of expensive coal from Poland, Africa and even Australia.
Soon we will be crying out for coal to feed the new carbon-capture-and-storage power-stations.
Axe-man Beeching also destroyed our rail system in favour of roadbuilding and you know how badly we miss those thousands of miles of railtrack.
An extract from Wikipedia:
In tune with the mood of the early 1960s, the transport minister in Harold Macmillan's Conservative government was Ernest Marples, director of a road-construction company (his two-thirds shareholding was divested to his wife while he was a minister to avoid potential conflict of interests).[7][8] Marples believed the future of transport lay with roads, that railways were a relic of the Victorian past.
An advisory group known as the Stedeford Committee after its chairman, Sir Ivan Stedeford, was set up to report on the state of British transport and provide recommendations. Also on the committee was Richard Beeching, at the time technical director of ICI. He was later, in 1961, appointed chairman of the new British Railways Board. Stedeford and Beeching clashed on matters related to the latter's proposals to prune the rail infrastructure. In spite of questions in Parliament, Sir Ivan's report was published only much later, and the proposals for the future of the railways that came to be known as the Beeching Plan were adopted by the government, resulting in the closure of a third of the rail network and the scrapping of a third of a million freight wagons.
How wrong they were !
