The BBC have given over acres of broadcasting real estate to the critics of Mrs Thatcher who claim that she destroyed the mining industry.
I can’t say that they’ve given equal prominence to the fact that, as stated many times across other media, that Labour closed more mines than Mrs Thatcher.
They do have space for this though:
Why the fuss over George Osborne’s tears?
Are they merely trying to make Osborne look in some way foolish or a cynical spinner crying crocodile tears? Why the fuss indeed.
What the BBC don’t tell us is this….an ex-miner, now a Tory minister comments on the myths being propagated and buttressed by the likes of the BBC.…and yet, so far, the BBC have ignored him.
‘“As a cabinet minister now and a miner in the 1980s, I have been listening to the debate about Baroness Thatcher with particular interest.
“Words like ‘divisive’ have been flung about. The miners’ strike has been laid at her door. Well I was there. I worked through it. And much of what is being said now just isn’t true.”
“Scargill wasn’t interested in listening to the voice of his members and he tried to get round the ballots. It was Scargill, not Margaret Thatcher, who drove the divisions that followed the miners’ strike, by ignoring the miners’ democratic rights.
“Mrs Thatcher was not willing to cede to non-balloted strikes and, as with so many occasions when she stood her ground, she was absolutely right.
“As she herself said of the matter: ‘there are those who are using violence and intimidation to impose their will on others who do not want it … the rule of law must prevail over the rule of the mob’.”
‘The BBC ignores a government minister, a miner himself at the time of the strikes who has something strikingly relevant to say about them?
Why does the BBC ignore him? If nothing else he is a prime example that social mobility isn’t dead…and that the cabinet has genuine working class men in its ranks.
Normally something that the BBC would leap at.
Half the story all the time from the BBC.
And they are up to their old subliminal tricks with the paragraph headings on the article; “Trivial”, “Shame”, and “Thatcherite”, now what was that I was supposed to think?
This is just another example of the BBC ignoring ,or rubbishing anything that does not conform to their liberal left view. On the other hand they will boost any story that does fit their view.
The BBC is a powerful political lobby group for the liberal left and has little interest in news for its own sake but rather how the news can be bent to suit its world view.
It must have been disappointing for the BBC to find out how few people were actually going to protest about Lady Thatcher and how many were full of support and mourned her passing. Good for the British people who gave the awful BBC one in the eye and how encouraging to see that after decades of BBC propaganda the people haven’t yet swallowed much of their medicine.
The Tories should take heart and learn that the BBC speak only for minority interest in the country , mainly the public sector, and that the they can safely much of what the BBC says . Come on Tories offer the British people more of what they want not what the BBC and their public sector clients want.
The BBC does not speak for us and we would not mourn its passing!
“Come on Tories offer the British people more of what they want not what the BBC and their public sector clients want.”
If they were to do just half of what the real folk of this country want, not what the colditz, dezzy n scotties of this world, then they will win the next election with a healthy majority.
If not, they loose a huge proportion of their core voters to UKIP, and by default, Labour get back in for at least 5 more years of lefty shenanigans.
“Come on Tories offer the British people more of what they want”
How about subscription for the BBC that would save us all 145 pounds a year,I’ll vote for that
Of course, that well known socialist , A.Hitler, once said the bigger the lie, repeated ad nauseum , the more people will believe it.
Another well-known (to BBC audiences) socialist, Paul Merton, repeated that lie on HIGNFY. He didn’t need to be told by management to promote the Narrative; it came to him naturally, as it does to all BBC comedians.
there were 120,000-odd miners in the UK and they wanted 56,000,000 people to pay higher power prices to keep them in a job; the subsidy paid for each miner was the salary of 15 junior nurses. Miners had fought for generations to ensure an educated future for their children that got them out of heavy work underground and a life of illness and injury that meant that the mining industry was the biggest user of false limbs in the UK. The original subscribers to the circulating libraries in the Valleys would have been disgusted at that weaselly little git Scargill trying to ensure that men remained underground to serve his own vanity. So they were broken, no thanks to the lessons learnt from deposing the democratically-elected Heath government in defence of their wages. And within two years of the strike British Coal was producing not far off pre-strike tonnages of coal, but with 1/3 of the manpower.
It’s not just how many mines were closed. Why don’t the bBBC ask Blair, Brown, Balls, Miliband etc why, if coal-mines were so good, they didn’t open any mines when they were in power 1997-2010?
And indeed, if Thatcher’s policies were so bad, why they didn’t reverse any of them?
The BBC won’t tell the truth on this any more than they will show younger generations what life was really like under union rule in the 70s.
What a pity coal mining and its militaristic unions didn’t survive to see the the Left’s militant opposition to fossil fuels in general, and coal-fired power stations in particular. No doubt in the Left’s hierarchy of causes the environment would have come out top trump, so it would have been the most sublime spectator sport for the common sense majority to see the two sides kicking seven shades of crap out of each other.
Is it not the case that UK trade union behavior has brought UK industry to closure – stop dead. Its not quite that simple, but they certainly brought themselves to prime attention, almost as if they were a new master? Eventually their claims and actions culminate in the failure of industry (the people) they are paid to represent as we have seen. At the time the skills and industrial environment remained in tact. It was all there, steel, coal, shipyards and cars. What I cannot understand is that they who sought to claim more from these industries never at any point attempted to take them on (manage). So if you pay monthly to a union shouldn’t you ask that union the ‘what if’ question ?
One of the most discraceful elements of Radio 5Live’s coverage yesterday was at the time Baroness Thatcher’s cortege was en route between St Clement Danes and St Paul’s was they went over to a report from Easington for the comments of former Easing colliery workers seeking to peddle their bile.
When the Queen comes to be buried – will the BBC give airtime to republicans repudiating the monarchy as the cortege approaches Westminster Abbey?
My memory may be suspect, but wasn’t the Easing pit closed in 1998? Who was in power then?
Wiki says it was April 1993.
However it doesn’t appear in 1993 in the list here by the bbc.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3500979.stm
“When the Queen comes to be buried – will the BBC give airtime to republicans repudiating the monarchy as the cortege approaches Westminster Abbey?”
Try not to give them ideas!
The BBC and Murdoch have both spent a lot of energy in painting Prince Charles as someone who is not fit to be King. If he is the next Monarch then expect a huge Republican push to end the Monarchy there and then.
I was amused by the failed attempt to bring in a reference to ‘The Bedroom Tax’ on Wednesday’s “The World Tonight” on (Radio 4 [18:00]) when discussing Margaret Thatcher’s funeral service..
Roger Hearing asked what the reading “In my Father’s house are many mansions: ” [John 14:2] was about. His interviewee dismissed this without further comment, probably because he was too polite to say that Mr. Hearing was remarkable ignorant of this bible verse which could be considered a ‘standard’ at a Christian funeral.
Please remember that the bible is not on the BBC staff reading list. Of course some other sacred texts are on the list , in the interests of community cohesion, but the bible is regarded by the BBC as being of interest only to a minority of their audience.
Although Beeboids seem to have certain passages in Deuteronomy, etc., bookmarked to wave in Geert Wilders’ and others’ faces when attempting to demonstrate that (Judeo-)Christian doctrine demands violence just as much as the Koran, as if that dismisses the charge that followers of Mohammed are somehow inspired to violence by their religious texts.
I find that, as you listen to the BBC; you are never far away from the voices and opinions of NuLabors wrecking crew 1997-2010.
For that Malloch Brown is to be giving us a programme about Henry Kissinger soon-Malloch Brown was one of Gordons Morons who thought that wearing a “Make Poverty History” made him a foreign envoy.
To be fair, under Labours nepotistic necrotic regime, it was as good a CV as any other.
And on the World Tonight-the views of “Baroness” Valerie Amos..she`s black you know, so is some UN bleeding heart for Syria…well she gets the internal house magazine treatment from the BBC. A lady from here-who`s stopping the traffic rather well over there these days! Bravo Valerie.
I need to make an I Spy list..
Uddins, Boatengs, Ahmeds and (of course Scotlands)-count them in , count them out and how long between each individual puff up for these “Peoples Peers”…and all owing their prominence(such as it is) to the fact that they are of colour and gave that ethnic chic gloss to the Plastique Proclaimers that we allowed to run up a tab down here in England for 13 years.
When mrs Thatcher took over, inflation was 18%. When she left office, it was 7.5%. Why doesn’t the BBC mention this when the reduction in inflation helps all and more importantly the poorest of society? Now let me guess?
I am a queer animal.I am a capitalist born and bread. I got a job at 16 down the mines in 1979.I had a front seat view of what happened . During the early 80s our mine(bold) lost money every year.The joke at the time was that Tony Ben held the record for pit closures.
Tony Benn lost his seat in Bristol South in the 1983 General Election but got the nomination for Chesterfield not so long after, when MP Eric Varley stepped down. I remember the joy on his face as he told us it was “a mining constituency”. Then in 2001, when Benn left parliament “to devote more time to politics”, Labour parachuted in a London Loony Left candidate “Red Reg” Race … and lost the seat to the LibDems. Race clearly was an issue in that election.
Sorry for last, but I saw at how much money was lost. I have posted before about the money lost .
Scargill had made his intentions perfectly clear during the 1970s by telegraphing that should voters dare to elect a Conservative Government he would use the Miners as the Shock Troops of the Revolution to bring that Government down and continue with that behaviour until he had forced the people to install one which was to his liking. He had considered he had succeeded in using the Miners, and Flying Pickets, to oust the Heath Government and made clear he would make the same attempt again.
Those small details were quietly ignored by the Left and their propagandists and replaced by the claim that Maggie was too blame by forcing poor Arthur to call the strike.
The truth is that Scargill’s total arrogance and oversized ego were so great that he considered himself infallible and started the strike at the worst possible time and under the worst possible conditions and, as a result, came completely unstuck, something the Left have swept completely under the carpet. What sticks in the Lefts craw even more is that their belief that they could force politicians and the public to cave in to violence and mob rule was not only countered but shown to be massively overrated.
The miners were the Praetorian Guard of the Labour Party in the 1970s, helping them get back into power in 1974 by making the country ungovernable. Mick McGahey actually told Edward Heath that what he wanted was to bring down the government, during negotiations. This was bad enough, then Arthur Scargill had another go in 1984-85, a political strike which cost £5bn and led to more pit closures than originally planned by the Coal Board. I think the greatest single achievement of the Thatcher era was the destruction of Scargill, his communist friends and their bullying tactics.
Now that the NUM is largely an unpleasant memory, which other organizations known by three initials have taken on the Praetorian Guard role? BBC? NUJ?
NUT?
NUT? Yes, very much so. Below is a commen I made at another site, but it is relevant.
“His version of history that he’d been taught, was the polar opposite to what the real history was.”
And such teaching is still going on – one of the programmes about Thatcher showed a Finchley consitituency 6th Form (I think) History class where the smug girl’s answer about Thatcher’s polices was that, paraphrasing, ‘they destroyed working peoples communities’.
Having experienced the joys of the Wilson, Heath and Callaghan governments I can definitely state that without Thatcher the UK was dead, poisoned by the excesses of Socialism.
Some industries and their communities were being kept artificially alive by incredibly huge bungs of taxpayers’ money – if that wasn’t the case then when those industries were closed the militant unions could have kept the industry going themselves, couldn’t they?
That meant those industries, unions and their interdependent communities were draining the life from other viable industries and communities. Thatcher saved what could be saved, yet on the news we frequently see the zombie braindead complaining that she didn’t save everything… when before her everything was being destroyed and nothing saved.
The militant unions, who for years had been throwing their weight around and grinding Britain into the dirt, picked a fight with a PM who had their measure, and the unions lost, and like all bullies who get a drubbing they wail “it’s not fair, she fought back!”, and naturally such vile inadequate people fester in their resentment.
Teachers are just not very good at education nowadays, preferring to specialise in Unions’ propaganda instead.
/rant
Agreed
Education is the liberal Inquisitions
most fiercely defend asset and the NUT their most devout foot soldiers
I am an ex miner (1954-60). the mines were grossly overstaffed & top heavy with poor legacy practices & undercapitalised to boot. Union membership was compulsory & damned expensive. Many were worked out.
Mrs T did the right thing but spawned a benefits culture in the villages which is still there today.