O/T The Gov, Not Fit for Fracking Purpose!!!

[KerrAvon]

It doesn’t matter what I call a tomato. It’s what you and I call a national ballot that is in issue. Can you confirm that you are abandoning your claim that there was one months before the strike?

I think your memory is playing further tricks with you. The Nottinghamshire miners voted more than three to one against striking (the local NUM leadership had pleaded with Yorkshire to keep flying pickets out of the county until after the vote. Perhaps inevitably, the Yorkshire NUM ignored that and, anecdotally, it is said that their conduct played a major part in the outcome of the ballot). Derbyshire voted 50.1% against striking.

So you took part in secondary picketing (and in doing so broke the law passed by a democratically elected government and terms of the injunction taken against the NUM). Why did you do that? If working miners wanted to work and, in the absence of the national ballot that the NUM constitution said they were entitled to, their areas had voted not to join the strike, why not respect their decisions?

Are you saying that secondary pickets never took part in intimidation, that working miners never suffered violence and damage to property, that, 30 years after the event, Rotherham supporters don’t spend most of the game chanting ‘scabs’ when playing a Notts team? And what about the 7000 who turned up at Orgreave? What do you say was the plan? To have a picnic and sing kumbayah?

And what about the killing of David Wilkie who you shamefully and oh so inevitably ignore? Did the police make Hancock and Shankland drop a concrete block onto his car as it passed below them? Or do you buy in to their claim that it was an accident? I mean, it happens all the time doesn’t it? Standing on a bridge with a lump of concrete that it takes two men to hold and then accidentally dropping it on car in which a working man is on his way to work.

Yes, the miners happily worked overtime to stockpile coal at pit heads and power stations as the government prepared for the strike. As I explained, the NUM had said that it would not accept the closure of mines on economic grounds and so the government prepared for the inevitable strike that would follow its decision to begin closures upon that ground. What are you saying? That it was 'unfair' of them to prepare for what was coming? The government went into the conflict with a cool head, whilst the NUM leadership went into it ignoring the requirements of its own constitution and swinging wildly at anyone who tried to stop it.