The lies that smashed the unions and destroyed our coal industry

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So now we know that Margaret Thatcher lied about the scale of her attack on the British mining industry.

She told the country that only 20 pits were to be closed, when in secret she and National Coal Board chief Ian Macgregor had planned to close no less than 75.

The revelation vindicates then-National Union of Mineworkers’ leader Arthur Scargill, who claimed at the time that there was a “secret hit-list” of more than 70 pits marked for closure.

Documents released under what used to be called the Thirty Year Rule show that under the plan, two-thirds of Welsh miners would become redundant, a third of those in Scotland, almost half of those in north east England, half in South Yorkshire and almost half in the South Midlands. The entire Kent coalfield would close.

The workforce was to be cut by about a third, from 202,000 to 138,000.

Thatcher went on to use the lie as an excuse to break the power of the trade unions, setting the scene for the long decline in employees’ rights that has brought us to the current sorry situation in which part-time work, zero-hours contracts and fake ‘self-employed’ status are robbing us of what few entitlements we have left.

She used the police as a political weapon to attack picket lines, sowing seeds of distrust that persist to this day. How many people who saw the scenes of carnage during the miners’ strike can honestly say they trust the police to uphold the law without fear or favour? Is it not more accurate to say they fear the police as agents of a ruling elite?

She destroyed Britain’s ability to provide fuel for our own power stations, leading us into dependence on foreign powers for our energy needs. It is this helplessness – caused by the policies of that Conservative Prime Minister – that has put so many British families into fuel poverty under the current Conservative Prime Minister, forcing them to choose between heating and eating.

In short, Margaret Thatcher owes compensation to a huge number of British people.

Some might consider it a lucky escape for her that she died last year and will avoid our wrath, but then again, considering her state of mind at the end it is unlikely that she would have recognised what it was.

Perhaps it will be possible for some of her victims to claim compensation from her estate; that will be a matter for them.

But other leading Conservatives and civil servants were in on the plot – and they should not be allowed to walk away unpunished. These include:

• Nigel Lawson (Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time).
• Norman Tebbit (Employment Secretary).
• Sir Robert Armstrong (now Baron Armstrong of Ilminster, Secretary of the Cabinet in 1983). Armstrong has denied that there was a cover-up – an astonishing claim when documentation shows there was an agreement not to keep records of the secret meetings in which the plans were hatched and developed.
• Peter Gregson (although he may also be dead; attempts to determine his status have turned up nothing).
• Michael Scholar.

These are just the names on the document market ‘Secret’ meeting at No 10 on the BBC News report of the revelation.

They all knew about the lie and could all have told the truth but they did not.

They betrayed Britain.

Will they escape justice?

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No lawbreaking required: Secret police are spying on students to repress political dissent

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abuse, annoyance, apprehend, arrest, cambridge, Coalition, Conservative, corporate, Democrat, demonstration, disabled, dissent, envionmentalist, Facebook, free speech, Gestapo, Godwin's Law, government, hidden camera, infiltrate, infiltration, kettle, kettling, Liberal, Liberal Democrat, meeting, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, miner, nuisance, people, picket, police, political, politics, protest, rat, record, right, secret, sick, spy, strike, student, tax avoid, Thatcher, The Guardian, Tories, Tory, tuition fee, UK Uncut, undermine, Unite Against Fascism, university, Vox Political, weapon

Caught with his trousers down: Herr Flick from ‘Allo Allo’ – possibly the last secret policeman to be revealed in quite such an embarrassing way.

So now not only are our students facing the prospect of a life in debt, paying off the cost of their education (thanks, Liberal Democrats!) but they know they can expect the police to be spying on them in case they do anything radical, student-ish and treasonous like joining UK Uncut and occupying a shop to publicise the corporate tax avoidance our Tory-led government encourages.

Rather than investigate and solve crimes, it seems the police are embracing their traditional role (under Conservative governments) as political weapons – targeting suspected dissenters against their right-wing government’s policies, trying to undermine their efforts and aiming to apprehend key figures.

They are behaving like secret police, in fact. Allow this to go much further and we will have our own Gestapo, here in Britain. Before anyone starts invoking Godwin’s Law, just take a look at the evidence; it is a justifiable comparison.

According to The Guardian, police have been caught trying to spy on the political activities of students at Cambridge University. It had to be Cambridge; Oxford is traditionally the ‘Tory’ University.

The officer concerned tried to get an activist to rat on other students in protest groups in return for money, but the student turned the tables on him by wearing a hidden camera to record a meeting and expose the facts.

The policeman, identified by the false name ‘Peter Smith’, “wanted the activist to name students who were going on protests, list the vehicles they travelled in to demonstrations, and identify leaders of protests. He also asked the activist to search Facebook for the latest information about protests that were being planned.

“The other proposed targets of the surveillance include UK Uncut, the campaign against tax avoidance and government cuts, Unite Against Fascism and environmentalists” – because we all know how dangerous environmentalists are!

Here at Vox Political, it feels as though we have come full circle. One of the events that sparked the creation of this blog was the police ‘kettling’ of students demonstrating against the rise in tuition fees, back in 2010. It was a sign that the UK had regressed to the bad old days of the Thatcher government, when police were used (famously) to intimidate, annihilate and subjugate picketing miners.

Back then, BBC news footage was doctored to make it seem the miners had been the aggressors; fortunately times have changed and now, with everyone capable of filming evidence with their mobile phones, it is much harder for such open demonstrations of political repression to go unremarked.

In response, we see the police being granted expanded powers of arrest against anyone deemed to be causing a “nuisance” or “annoyance”, and now the infiltration of groups deemed likely to be acting against the government, even though they may not have broken any laws at all.

This would be bad enough if it was a single incident, taken in isolation – but it isn’t. It is part of a much wider attack on the citizens of this country by institutions whose leaders should know better.

The UK is now in the process of removing the rights it has taken nearly a thousand years for its citizens to win.

It is a country that abuses the sick and disabled.

And it is a country where free speech will soon be unheard-of; where the police – rather than investigate crimes – proactively target political dissenters, spying on anyone they suspect of disagreeing with the government and looking for ways to silence them.

Who voted for that?

Atos workers vote for industrial action

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Atos, below inflation, benefit, benefits, Coalition, conditional, Conservative, Department, Department for Work and Pensions, disability, Disability Living Allowance, disabled, DWP, Employment and Support Allowance, ESA, government, health, healthcare, Incapacity Benefit, industrial action, IT Services, living wage, making work pay less, medical, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, pay offer, PCS, Pensions, people, Personal Independence Payment, PIP, politics, professional, sick, social security, strike, thierry breton, Tories, Tory, union, Vox Political, WCA, welfare, work, work capability assessment

You know things have come to a pretty pass when the government’s own hit squad plans to strike against low pay.

It seems Atos workers who are members of the PCS union have voted for industrial action after they rejected below-inflation and conditional pay offers from their employer.

This is the company that is under contract to receive £1.6 billion from the UK government, to carry out the hated Work Capability Assessments for the Department for Work and Pensions, mark you.

According to PCS, members working for Atos IT Services and in Atos Healthcare voted to support strike action by a proportion of more than 80 per cent. More than 90 per cent supported action short of a strike.

A union spokesperson said: “As we demonstrated in 2012, members have shown they are prepared to support their elected representatives and defend their interests. Atos should be under no illusions that we are prepared to take action.”

If you’re like me, you don’t know they demonstrated anything at all in 2012 – but I have unearthed a previous press release from PCS that mysteriously doesn’t seem to have made it into the news.

It states that PCS members working for Atos were going to take action over pay on August 13 this year but suspended the action at the 11th hour when Atos made an improved offer.

This involved the immediate payment of the Living Wage (Labour must have been happy at that) to all PCS members with more than three months’ service; a two per cent pay uplift for members who already received more than the Living Wage in April this year; a £320 “non-consolidated payment” to all Atos IT Services staff and a £3100 “non-consolidated payment” to Atos Healthcare staff; a new pay process (for PCS members only – presumably other Atos staff could go whistle) in Healthcare and IT Services; a PCS and Atos working party to develop a more transparent appraisal system; and development of a joint PCS and Atos plan to promote “respect, dignity and fair treatment for all workers”.

This indicates that Atos workers receive a very low wage for what they do. You may find this surprising, considering the size of the contracts awarded by the Coalition government; in 2011-12 Atos received £112.4 million to carry out 738,000 assessments. That comes out at £152.30 per hour-long assessment.

If this money is not going to the so-called ‘medical professionals’ who carry out the assessments or their support staff, it could go a long way towards explaining how Atos boss Thierry Breton managed to bump up his pay package by £280,000 to £2,329,250 this year.

It also shows that the ministers at the DWP (after this blog was upbraided for insulting gutter vermin with a previous comparison, let’s call them pond scum this time around) and their allies at Atos, including Mr Breton, seem to have no problem with treating their own staff almost as badly as they treat claimants of sickness and disability benefits.

The DWP, in partnership with Atos: Making Work Pay Less.

This is how democracy ends: Not with violence but with a shrug

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BBC, bushtucker, cerne abbas giant, commissioner, Conservative, crime, Damian Green, democracy, election, I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here, Labour, Liberal, Liberal Democrat, Mark Easton, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, PCC, people, police, politics, poll, Question Time, strike, Tories, Tory, trial, turnout, union, vote, Vox Political

Someone has suggested that more people might have voted for participants in today’s ‘bushtucker trial’, on I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here, than for candidates in the police and crime commissioner elections.

The suggestion was made on the BBC’s ‘live blog’ as results were awaited for the least effective exercise of democracy in British history. Both votes took place yesterday

Voter turnout was expected to be around 15 per cent – the worst ever result in a peacetime election, totalling only two-thirds of the previous worst-ever result, 1999’s European Parliament vote. This statistic raises the obvious observation:

This is not democratic.

How can it be? The vast majority – around 85 per cent of those entitled to vote – never bothered to turn up.

Already the speculation machine is churning out possible reasons for that: Not enough was spent on the election; the government should have funded a mail-out to all voters, explaining what was going on and who their local candidates were; many people did not even receive a leaflet from their candidates; people were being asked to traipse down to a polling station in the middle of winter (actually it’s still technically autumn); it was a dark and wet day.

No. Here’s the reason:

It is a bad idea and the vast majority of the population aren’t stupid enough ever to accept that it is a good one.

As I write this, only one result is in – Wiltshire will have a Conservative police commissioner. One may safely assume that Angus McPherson, elected by a fraction of a 15.3 per cent turnout – and those who did vote had no less than five other candidates to choose from – will be a cheerleader for Tory policies of privatisation and staff cutbacks.

He will receive £70,000 a year to be a figurehead. The people of Wiltshire might just as well have elected the Cerne Abbas Giant.

Bear in mind that the – what is it? – £100 million spent on this election could have funded an extra 3,000 police officers. Instead, the Tory-led Coalition is axing 15,000.

Responding to criticism over the election turnout, the live blog told us policing minister and serial Question Time liar Damian Green said the PCCs were a new idea that would need time for people to get used to.

Mark Easton, the BBC’s Home editor immediately responded: “Real flaw was the public were never persuaded they needed elected police commissioners.”

This is the truth of it – and the idea of commissioners affiliated to political parties was anathema to voters. That’s why they stayed away in droves. Look at these responses, all taken from the live blog (I’m keeping it there to show the strength of feeling on just one news outlet).

John Amos in Plymouth emailed: “I am unhappy that political candidates came first and second in Wiltshire. Police Commissioners should not be political. We do not want a politicised police force.”

“Had the choice only been between the three main parties’ stooges I would have spoiled the paper. This will be a disaster for policing,” wrote ‘Richard’ on the BBC news website (and quoted in the live blog).

Araura Berkeley in Glastonbury emailed: “I did vote but am very disappointed in the lack of proper information on candidates – I had early on requested the full info on all my candidates but had to wait until the official leaflets were put through all doors. This was very late on and there was no telephone number whereby I could quiz any of the candidates about their manifesto.”

Nigel Coldwell tweets: Don’t assume low turnout is apathy. I actively didn’t vote. Would’ve spoiled paper but I thought they’d count it in turnout.

Peter Wilson commented on the BBC News website: “Voted last night and learned on arrival that there was a second choice system if there were more than two candidates. Asked how that would work and no-one knew. Presiding officer looked in their information book and still no answer.”

So: A bad idea, handled in a shambolic way.

The Conservatives will say the low turnout is not undemocratic, and people will warm to the idea of having commissioners once they see it in practice.

The response from their opponents will be just as predictable: The next time a union calls a strike, and gets a mandate for it on a low turnout, that will not be undemocratic either.

And you never know, once people see a really big strike happening, they might warm to that as well!