CWU going same way as NUM ?

[Mr Rush]

There's still plenty of coal underground but it's not being dug up. There's plenty of letters in frames but they're not being delivered. The parallels are striking, unlike the unions.

[Tman]

Despite the political machinations of Th*tcher and co, and the later idiotic posturing of Milliband etc, coal could still be utilized for the good of the economy.
It has a potential future, unlike the 19 century concept of writing stuff on a bit of paper and physically transporting it hundreds of miles.

Not many parallels at all, really.

[NWpostie]

From a quite critical article of post-strike Arthur Scargill in the (left leaning?) New Statesman this year:

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2 ... ng-camelot

The NUM, which boasted 250,000 members when Scargill was elected president, now represents fewer than 90. And Chris Kitchen, its current general secretary, believes it will be forced to close before it can commemorate the strike’s 50th anniversary. “Just looking at the age of membership and the cost of being a trade union, it’s not sustainable,” he tells me. Now, he explains, with every major coal mine shut and new mining licences banned, the NUM’s membership is largely made up of administrative staff, health and safety officers and legacy members. It still campaigns for improved pensions and compensation for its former members, but that won’t sustain it. “We may turn into some sort of association or charity to preserve the NUM’s legacy,” Kitchen explains. In fact, he tells me that plans for that transition are already underway, the final dissolution of a union that, in 1922, numbered over a million strong.

Scargill picked the wrong battles and lost the war, the biggest failure was not calling for a ballot, on this he has no moral authority, he ruined lives and split families, streets, villages and towns that will never heal for generations all because he wanted a political fight rather than a negotiated reduction of pits and redeployment of workers.

A point to note Labour actually closed more pits than Thatcher ever did.