Politics

[Daniel Quinn]

Nah , steve no need for that , passion is always good . and Macca daily mail pithy comments need a good dose of reality .

[jammy395]

Good shit Steve.....
Deep breath, count to 10, let it all out.
There is no better forum in the known universe for a love / hate debate.
And as Kenny Everett would have said, "It's all done in the best possible taste".

[Macca]

Steve the thing is that nothing lasts forever and that included the coal industry and the communities it supported. Without the illegal strike it is likely that the whole industry would have been wound down over a decade or more which would have lessened the social damage caused.

Instead the miners allowed themseleves to be the shock troops of Scargill's Socialist Revolution - something that was always going to end badly for them.

And even if none of that had ever happened what place would coal mining have now with the utterly ridiculous Climate Change Act? One way or another it was always going to happen. The same happened to the Liverpool dock workers when containerization came in, to the mill-workers in Lancashire and Yorkshire, to the farmworkers with the combine harvester and so on.

[Daniel Quinn]

I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that you do not actually believe what you write .

[SteveTheShadow]

It takes a lot to annoy me, but that dig about Socialist Worker Magazine absolutely lit the blue touch paper.

Thatcher and that vicious American union buster Ian McGregor perfected their technique by first destroying British Steel in Sheffield before starting on the real target, the miners. With the destruction of the steel and mining industries, the hundreds of smaller suppliers and ancilliary organisations suddenly found themselves insolvent and had to sack all their employees. The fallout was catastrophic, and the wasteland that pair of fuckers created is still evident up here today.
Now TATA steel is pulling out of Sheffield because the workers wouldn't accept drastic reductions in their pension rights, The huge electric melting shop and rolling mill in Parkgate, that my late dad worked on the building of, during the 1960s, will soon be a silent skeleton, home to a few flocks of crows and for what? So a few rich industrialists can make a few million more dollars.

Once the industrial base was destroyed the out of town shopping malls went up, devastating the high streets in our communities until now all we have in my home town are takeaways, bookies payday lenders and charity shops.
The conversion from manufacturing to rampant consumption, selfisness and ordinary folk thinking they could be property magnates and financial whiz-kids is the root cause of the problems we face now, and those two arseholes started the whole thing.

Here is a nice little piece of prime bollocks from prominent American post war retail analyst Victor Lebow.

"Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals. It demands that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction in consumption. We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, discarded at an ever increasing rate"

£1.5Tn has been borrowed by British people, a hefty proportion of this for the purposes of consumption.

Tory Bliar and his Neo Cons did nothing to reverse this trend, in fact they positively encouraged more and more consumption, borrowing, gambling in on line casinos and all the bloody rest; the consequences of which are criminal bankers living high on the hog, an impotent debt enslaved workforce, whose rights are being eroded on a daily basis and the people are utterly powerless to do anything about it. Brown's robbing out of the pension funds was a piece of vandalism of the worst possible kind.

The Brave New World created by Thatch and Mc Gregor and consolidated by Bliar and Brown is a world of entitlement culture, rights without responsibilities and target driven workplaces where the culture is unchecked because of debt slavery.

I hope those two architects of the state we are in now are in eternal torment. And new Labour should hang their collective heads in shame.

The Doc's Artisan society ideas are surely not far away and will be preferable IMO

[Macca]

I grew up in Liverpool in the '70s and '80s. Since 1990 I've lived in Stoke on Trent. I know all about industrial dereliction, unemployment, poverty, the decline of traditional industries. So please don't kid yourselves that I have no idea.

I've been made redundant twice. No questions asked in the House, no protest marches, no industrial action, picket lines, nothing. Just so long and good luck. I don't see how that is any different to a miner or steelworker losing their job. At least they got paid off, I didn't.

The reason those pit and plants closed was not Thatcher or Mcgregor or any individual. It was Globalization - the march of time and 'progress', something that is as inevitable as death and taxes. If you've any solution to Globalization I'd love to hear it. Of course it is far easier to get all emotional about it and find a bogey man or woman to blame, work up a bit of hate. That's not my way.

[Daniel Quinn]

Responses to and the consequences of capitals search for increased profits and reduced costs throughout the globe are not inevitable and they vary from country to country .

[Dr Bunsen Honeydew]

Please note that there are thousands of people in Calais who can't wait to come to our industrial wasteland and work illegally in the burgeoning Kebab Shops. Everything is relative and the only thing that is certain is change.

[SteveTheShadow]

Things only happened bcause we allowed them to.
On a much smaller scale, the british motorcycle industry was destroyed because of
mismanagement, hostile takeovers and asset strippers. The Japanese couln't believe their luck.
The Meriden workers cooperative was a doomed venture from the start, and with hindsight looks desperately naive,
but it was only the workers trying to keep something going that unfortunately for them, had had had the heart and soul ripped out of it.

What you don't seem to get Macca is that Britain was the architect of its own industrial decline, not foreigners and globalisation.
There never was any need for this and there never will be.

[Daniel Quinn]

I looked up at the tallest building
Felt it falling down
I could feel my balance shifting
Everything was moving around
These streets so fixed and solid
Ah shimmering haze
And everything that I relied on disappeared

Downside up, upside down
Take my weight from the ground
Falling deep in the sky
Slipping in the unknown
All the strangers look like family
All the family looks so strange
The only constant I am sure of
Is this accelerating rate of change