Of course, Mrs Thatcher didn't know that would be the effect of what she was doing, after all we were importing thousands of tonnes of cheap open cast coal from Australia and various other countries. Pit closures were about uneconomic mines, controlling inflation and the power of trade unions (the 'enemies' within), not climate change or clean air, both of which were barely mentioned.
What it did do was reduce our dependence on domestic coal, reduce the size of the coal industry and make pit closure politically easier in the decades that followed.
But the greater irony for me is the fact that even later, when climate change was a real factor in political thinking in this country, Johnson's own party were still loathe to take responsibility for closing mines.
Johnson's unscripted comments were seen as another foot in the mouth moment by the gaffe machine from No 10. It will be particularly embarrassing for Nigel Adams, still just a junior minister at the Foreign Office, who claimed in 2016 that it was EU rules which ‘forced’ us to close coal mines like Big K - Kellingley Colliery near Knottingley - costing hundreds of well paid jobs and devastating local communities.
He took out a full page ad in The Selby Times on the eve of the referendum to tell us about it (see it HERE).
Now Boris Johnson has praised Margaret Thatcher for doing exactly the same thing in the 1980s and credited her for giving us a "big early start" in achieving our climate change goals. So it appears that the EU were actually helping us, for which they were rewarded with a resentful local and stupid MP urging his constituents to vote to leave. Perverse or what?
Adams is left looking even more of a pillock than usual. This loss of local jobs was a key reason for Brexit according to him but according to Johnson this was really a benefit of being in the EU and is helping us to reach our carbon reduction targets.
We know that Brexit is full of doublethink and this is just another example. It isn't impossible that a future Tory leader will in thirty years time, shamelessly admit that being in the EU was actually a good thing. In fact, I would bet money on it.
None of it is new or even shocking. Government ministers have been taking credit for cutting emissions for years, doing it quite openly and after 2016 too. We all know that this has been government policy for ages and we would have closed coal mines in or out of the EU. Cameron’s coalition supported the Industrial Emissions Directive in Europe and voted in favour in 2010.
What should be shocking is Nigel Adams using a clear falsehood as a reason to vote to leave the EU and set us on the road to years of fractious arguments, internal division and a souring relationship with Europe in order to make ourselves poorer for decades to come and throw a spanner into any efforts to ‘level up.’
One is also bound to ask, with such cowards in charge of policy, how will they ever make the tough decisions in future without having someone else to blame? Answer - they won't.
Our present gang of political dwarfs should be compared to the ones we had in the past. I noted this morning a Twitter thread from an Anglo-German historian about British efforts to join the EEC in the early 70s. Holger Nehring has found some words by Harold Wilson from nearly fifty years ago which were extremely prescient:
And this remark by Harold Wilson is interesting, too (to Bernard Donoughue): a win for No 1975 ref would "empower the wrong kind of people in Britain: the Benn left and the Powell right, who were often extreme nationalists, protectionist, xenophobic and backward-looking." (9/10)
— Holger Nehring (@Holger_Nehring) August 6, 2021
How right he was.
I think I'll leave it there for today,
