THE 1988 Conservative Party conference heard enerry secretary Cecil Parkinson herald 'the ultimate privatisation: British Coal.
ast week's announcement that 31 pits are to shut at the cost of 30,000 mining jobs -and at least 60,000 in the rest of the economy - is part of the pre-sale softening-up process.
Of course, there is the element of revenge against the workers that toppled the Tories in 1974. As Parkinson himself, now out of Parliament, explicitly noted last week: 'Don't forget, in this great surge of sympathy, that the miners brought Mark Salmor Miners against Maastricht THE TORIES JUSTIFY the Major hits the pits down a government and abused economic power many times!
But at bottom, the decision remains a triumph of the government's never-ending quest for a privatisation fast buck against even the long term interests of British capital.
A leaked report from the government's pits privatisation advisors, N. M. Rothschild merchant bankers, made one point brutally last Autumn: 'In all market based scenarios, a substantial further pit closure programme is required!
As manv expert energy economists point out, the coal closures are madness in anything but the short term, even from & rational capitalist Competition standpoint.
More than £1,000 million will have to be spent on redundancy programmes; perhaps £2,000m will be added to the balance of payments deficit; 90,000 more dole cheques will have to be sent out every week, while direct and indirect taxation revenue is lost. All this before they count the cost in human On nationalisation in 1947, British Coal owned 1,400 pits. Before the year-long strike of 1984-85, there were still 170, employing 180,000 miners. As of last week there were just 53,000 in mines. On Rothschild's worst case projection, numbers could go down to just 10,000 in 12 pits by 1995. Driven to Major concessions