Coal, however, is not a problem for anybody but environmental religionists who believe all fossil fuels to be evil. To promote development of cleaner ways to use coal while working on making other forms of energy more viable would be a worthy goal. To shut down our most plentiful and cheapest form of energy to chase a hypothetical future that is yet unproven and not viable is not justifiable.
That is not what Thatcher did. She cut out a malignancy in the U.K. that was threatening to bring the entire nation down. That would have hurt everybody, including the coal miners. All she did was sell off the mines that her predecessors had imprudently and destructively nationalized to create the unsustainable situation that existed. Had the unions been willing to work out a compromise to have made that unnecessary, I have every reason to believe Thatcher would have chosen that better situation. It was the unions who refused to compromise that created the draconian soluton that was all that was left to her.
I don't know that I would call environmentalists in favor of shutting down fossil fuels religionists. Some countries have really worked to cut out fossil fuel power stations. That's not extremist, just not everyone is going to agree with it.
I would have been more impressed by a Leader that could have taken on the Unions without shutting down all the mines. She picked the lesser of two evils. But there were other options.
Whether the mines should have been closed when they were or this be done in a more careful and slower manner is of course a reasonable subject for debate. Had the unions been willing to mechanize and consolidate to make them more profitable, as Thatcher requested, she probably would have chosen that route. But the unions were not willing to mechanize and the mines were wholly unprofitable and were a tremendous drag on the U.K.'s economy.
It all goes back to the conundrum that the government should keep things going no matter how much they cost because to fix the problem will hurt some. But for the government to continue to sustain the unprofitable draws critical money out of the economy that would create jobs for and/or improve the lives of countless others.
So your initial post was right. Thatcher absolutely did choose to hurt some people in order to put the U.K. economy back on solid footing and her policies did do that. And in the process she helped many others who had been hurting. But had the unions been willing to work with her at all, the outcome might have been less painful for some. We will never know now.
The glory day of British mining were clearly over at the end of National Union of Mineworkers' (NUM) year-long strike in March 1985.
Not only did the NUM's power-struggle with then prime minister Margaret Thatcher show that miners lacked the massed industrial muscle of the past.
Ironically, it also revealed coal mining was no longer vital to the UK economy.
Since then, Britain's biggest mining firm has struggled to reinvent itself to cope with more competitive global coal markets.
BBC NEWS | Business | Q&A: What happened to coal mining?
You say that it is okay to shut down the fossil fuels in favor of other energy--do you know how many people that would hurt here?
Yet our government subsidizes the coal industry not at all and instead receives a good deal of revenues from our private coal mining industries. Why screw up that in favor of something that has not yet proved to be viable as an substitute source of energy? Thatcher closed down coal mnes that were bleeding her country dry. Obama wants to shut down profitable coal mines and instead subsidize unproven energy sources that currently are bleeding our country dry. I think I prefer Thatcher's logic there.
