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i remember being REALLY happy when they stopped it.
that aside, it was great. especially when it was cold and your bottle froze. loads of fun.
Some schools are bringing in fruit for the kids these days. Just goes to show that parenting hasn't improved in all these years...
In primary we used to get pretty balanced meals. A lot of them werent that great but they were still good. I got free meals and was given milk every day. Can't remember how much it was but now in Secondary it's £1.15 for the basics and whatever you want is extra. Fruit is about 30p, juice/pop is 45p and a small packet of chips is 55p. Rip-off
Jamie Oliver is an awesome guy, he gives a lot back to the community. He spends a lot of time and his own money helping kids.
it's all processed, and expensive. For a turkey burger (including one reconstituted microwaved turkey burger, one processed bap with sesame seeds) it's 97p. + another 9p if you have salad cream on it.
the maggie thatcher milk: milk is still free in primary schools up to a certain age just not after that. Also, the mining industry was making a loss, but they should have thought of ways of closing it sustainably. Note that lots of call centres are opening up near mining towns because they get grants for bringing jobs to the area.
I stand corrected if some areas continue to provide free milk.
Not all mines were making a loss, profitable mines were still closed. It wasn't just the issue of profitability but also the methods of execution that maintain the bitterness.
It's great if call centres are now opening up (even though the wage difference doesn't come close to those in mining), trouble the years in between have left massive problems which will continue for years. These places and people were just abandoned after providing the power to Britain's industrial wealth for 200 years.
The sad thing is that there is always the faint air that the miners brought it on themselves. The BCB were always going to rationalise the mines, but the miners striking about it meant that they lost all sympathy and allowed the BCB to do it quicker. By striking they lost their jobs.
Militant trade unionists were not popular in the early 80s, it's why Thatcher was elected so strongly after Heath and Callaghan. Leaving bodies to rot because of strikes, and having the telly go off at 10pm because of strikes meant that people wanted the unions destroyed.
It's good that they lost their strangehold, but we do still need them.
we shut the coal mines down cause it was cheaper to ship it all the way from australia to an english coal fired plant or wherever, than it was to mine it here
its called competition, and well the australian have less deep mines and more surface mining thus it is cheaper
This is utter cock. The miners had massive support for their strike. Thatcher was bent on closing the mines, striking prolonged the battle, it did not make them lose their jobs.
This is such a childishly simplistic reading of it. How old were you at the end of the 1980's?
The unions are totally powerless now, which is a very bad thing. All mine does is try and sell me insurance. :mad:
Another childishly simplistic interpretation of events.
the NUS is worse, full of career politicians and rip off prices
my uni's union is hopefully going to disaffilate from them soon so we get most of our funding from our university anyway
It's what it comes down to though. Mining in the UK was not economically viable - it was actually loss making.
No, not all. This assumes that the only reasons were economic. They weren't. It was a concerted effort to smash collective action in the working class to pave the way for a specific economic philosophy. You're view implies that it was the only course of action that could have been taken, that it was somehow "natural". It wasn't, it was the result of a very specific agenda.
lol, im not talking about the action that was taken, i am talking about the economic situation then. It was loss making - it was run by the government more or less so miner's wages were from the government. Then when you look at it in black and white terms to continue mining in the UK was more expensive than to import. If there were other reasons influencing the decision then thats up to thatcher, but you do realise that because of the overly powerful mining union it actually prevent a slow transition. Wages had to be high, or they would strike. But normally wages would have been reduced since there was less demand for the stuff they were mining, until it would just be closed down all together, if that was the only possible alternative.
It was very much an all-or-nothing situation, and looking at the cost and benefit of either importing or mining at the levels they were, it was a good economic decision. Whether it has caused negative external effects due to the labour surplus in some areas is not the point. Would we have continued it for another 50 years, still loss-making?
No, as I said, this is a very simplistic view. Decisions like this are not based entirely on economic terms. They are part of a much wider political picture. How much did it cost in terms of policing? Benefits payments? Redundancy payments? The social deprivation that followed?
The study of allocating our scarce resources among their alternate uses for the benefit of the largest number. The waiver justification for sufficient economic reason is based on when the use of another supplier would create an economic burden and not be in the best interest of the company, university, etc. Responsible economic procurement relieves the company, university, organization, etc. of potential additional expenses that would result from not making the purchase.
our scarce resource: money, we want the highest benefit of the largest number (society) - we do this by having more money. If we are spending more money than we need to and the negative effects of not spending that money are not so large that we'd be better off as we were, then we should choose that allocation. Economically speaking, involving the social welfare of society as a whole, it was a good decision. Those few who were affected wouldn't want it to happen, but the extra money we've saved and will continue to save (for every year we are not loss-making we have gained that extra x of resources) so we can put this money back into those affected areas (because there is a market failure in that they are not geographically and occupationally mobile - there are jobs in london but they wont move, and they dont have the skills to take up new employment easily where they live) and help them get jobs.
In the long run it's a good decision, certainly not a popular one, but an effective one. Becuase a few suffered the majority benefitted by a greater amount.
You said the other things were not incorporated into an economic decision. And money isn't the scarce resource, it's how scarce resources are quantified! Money is only worth it's value.. but it's incredibly hard to say "2082342342 loaves of bread, 234234 tonnes of iron ore, 23489 syringes.." and list everything that will be effected by a decision, so if you use money and say how much each thing is worth in money (i.e. price) then you can easily quantify lots of things, and government can say how much money they have available and how they will use it. Printing more money off will not increase what we can buy with it because it's real value will decrease. But if you have a better way of quantifying the value of every single thing we have then please feel free.. just currency has done a good job for the past few hundred years (well, at least as far back as the romans with a standardised currency).
That's not the point though, my point is that the overall gain as a society was greater than the loss of the few individuals. Even though people are convinced it was the other way round - if that was true it wouldn't have happened. The economy is vital to the nation and any PM's duty is to see that the economy is growing and getting stronger. Thanks to hard decisions like this it has been growing and getting stronger. Imagine if they opened up the mining industry tomorrow again, you'd have to either pay extra tax or services would suffer. The nation is about the 60,000,000 or so people in the entire country, not the few hundred thousand who lost their jobs. That's the harsh truth of it. In a working economy they should get other employment, because no private firm in their right mind will do it because it's not economically viable, and the government came to its senses and did the same.
Perhaps so, but perhaps that was better for society as well?
heres an interesting read
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3503545.stm
I'd disagree.
Why?
It's not, but it means a lot. I don't know where the saved money went but I assume it went to the most needy people - so people like doctors could have jobs. Once they 'freed up' the money if it was best for society that those people are down there mining and contributing to society in that way then that's where it would have gone. It really doesn't do for an effective government to allocate resources in the wrong place.
Since no subsequent government has reopened the mine, that either indicates they agree that it was an inneffective allocation of resources or they are just weird perhaps a good political strategy would actually be to open those mines again and get all the miner votes - since its usually the minority groups that swing elections not the country as a whole.
You think so? :eek:
As I already pointed out, that's not the reason why the pits were shut.
Errr...
Subsequent governments are continuuing the same neo-liberal agenda.
Well society is better now than it was 30 years ago, not sure what you mean by neo-liberal agenda (new liberal? as in, a new way of making people have more freedom? whats wrong with that?) but if things do continue to improve then let them shut down more pits.
And whatever the reason she decided to shut them down, it was a good economic decision since the economy did benefit, and in turn so will the miner's families and society as a whole.
Erm... tax cuts for a few actually...
Oh, and for information, the mining village where I live still gets grants from the Govt as a result of shutting the mines...
In what respects?
I thought you knew about economics?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-liberalism
What a load of toss. How exactly have miners families benefitted from their livelihoods and communities being destroyed?