Who would have thought that if you pile soil up in a tall pile as high and steep as you can, right next to a huge pit, then occasionally it might fall back into the pit...
A 5 year old on the beach could tell you that...
A 5 year old on the beach could tell you that...
Holy shit.
And the senior officials got off with a slap on the wrist. That reads like a complete failure of the government.
Why did the right people not hang for that?
If you scroll down the wiki link you can see that the changes to the Mines and Quarries Act ultimately lead to things such as the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act (1974) which provided some teeth with which to bite the owners that cut corners, paid off inspectors, etc.
Swings and roundabouts though, a little while later came the Miners' Strike of 1984-1985 which was easily one of the most bitter industrial disputes Britain has ever seen.
a turning point in British history. Miners left their pits to fight the attempt of the Thatcher government to close the collieries, break the miners’ union and the labour movement in general, and open the way to a free market economy in which deregulated financial capitalism would be set free by the Big Bang of 1986. The full force of the police, the courts and the media were mobilised to defeat the miners, culminating with the battle of Orgreave on 18 June 1984. Thousands of miners were arrested, fined, imprisoned or sacked, some never to work again.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/aug/27/40-yea...
All part of the delicate balance between those many hordes wanting good wages and working conditions and those few that want all the profits.
The UK and the US aren't really big players, the single largest market for mining stocks is the Toronto TSX by a long shot - many loosely commonwealth trans national companies (Australia, Canada, South Africa, etc) with Russian, Chinese, Brazilian partners, etc.
Machines play a big part - Western Australia mines almost a billion tonner of iron ore alone per annum with a tiny population, but cheap labour and lax environmental regs don't play nearly as great a part as you might think.
Long term stability on 20 to 50 year time scales is pretty desirable on projects with forward capital investments of 300+ million dollars, high skill levels and good wages improve success rates, the larger mining companies have been trending more and more toward being accountable with respect to populations affected and post operation rennovation .. although that's a shift from don't care and never so .. <shrug>
From a political "how society works" PoV the mining strikes and Thatcher push backs weren't about the coal either .. it was a reflection on how the new neoliberal 80s Tories intended to deal with those not aligned with their vision.
There were other directions to turn labour forces of the 80s toward, but the vision as such for that time was propert development pyramids, fintech, and all that jazz. Better to be a barrow boy in The City than a gay dancing coal miner.
Yet it led to a huge (literal) battle? It was all political: an attack on the gov by the communist miners' union, backed by the Labour Party. It was never about economics, which were obviously terminal. Everybody knew that, on both sides.
Get a grip.
Break free of whatever bicameral Red V. Blue blinkered global view you have - there are more shades across the world than Joe McCathy dreamed of.
(The barrier for gov ownership is slightly lower than a capitalist, because the gov has to pay transitory unemployment benefit to those put out of work, and it was still not economic).
Actually, that person is not just a small-c communist interested in the community, but a big-C Marxist, who wants the gov to lose money for his selfish reasons.
Are you perhaps, tentatively, obliquely, hinting, in a roundabout fashion, with elliptical prose, that Arthur Scargill was not a communist..... fascinating.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Scargill#Socialist_Labo...
Have you ever done any manual work for a living? Worked with any miners in trade unions? Met any actual communists? Maybe worked in Rio Tinto as a labour negotiator?
Some of that might help you sound more grounded an less disconnected from the world as it is.
Scargill was a commnist in his youth, he veered elsewhere on the left later in life - but more to the point here, Scargill was not the trade union, he was a single human being.
Not all miners in trade unions are communist, far from it; and not all actual communists are miners (likely very few), we're in a world of Venn diagrams here and broad reductionist brush strokes don't achieve much beyond polarisation
But that was not the case in the British coal industry in the 1980s. Only a handful of marginal mines survived into the 2000s. The last coal-fired power stations will close this year.
No profits, no discussion (except the offer I mentioned above, which is the only true test of whether it is really profitable, on a risk-adjusted basis, judged by those with the most information).
Profit and loss can be gamed. Old generals always fight the previous wars.
Doesn't this also apply to public transport, roads, waste collection, education, and most other public goods?
Which people are you referring to? Since the National Coal Board was running the mine, I wouldn't have expected capitalists to be to blame, and the Labour party were in power at the time of the disaster. I'm not very familiar with this, so may be missing something.
Look at what people and organisations do and not what they call themselves;
Coal reserves were nationalised during the war in 1942 and placed under the control of the Coal Commission, but the mining industry remained in private hands.
Straight out of the gate, the NCB was headed up by Lord Hyndley [1] as chairman (director of the Bank of England between 1931-1945, managing director of Powell Duffryn Ltd, collieries, 1931-1946).
NCB actions in the early days were to maximise returns using public funds for improvements that benefitted private owners with little improvement in safety or working conditons:
the NCB spent more than £550 million on major improvements and new sinkings, much of it to mechanise the coal-getting process underground and by 1957 Britain's collieries were producing cheaper coal than anywhere in Europe.
Alfred Robens, later elevated to Baron Robens of Woldingham, loved the trappings of power and oversaw policy implementations that originated from mine owners and government policy before his tenure; substantial cuts in the mining industry and neglect of spoil heaps, things that lead directly to the Aberfan disaster.
And that was the the first two tenures of the NCB - nominally running coal for "the benefit of the people", actually running coal to maximise throughput and profits for owners.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hindley,_1st_Viscount_Hyn...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Robens,_Baron_Robens_of...
Those responsible, then, include all the mine owners with a footprint in the House of Lords, all the various enablers on the committees that set policy for the NCB ala Yes, Minister, the founding chairman, and the second chairman who was parachuted with gifts into an established front.
> Coal reserves were nationalised during the war in 1942 and placed under the control of the Coal Commission, but the mining industry remained in private hands.
This quote is in the background section of the Wikipedia article - the NCB was formed 4 years later and "took over the United Kingdom's collieries on 'vesting day', 1 January 1947" as described.
The legislation (in particular the first subsections of each of [1] and [2]) support this, the previous owners were compensated, but did not own the coal mines after the vesting day.
[1] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo6/9-10/59/section/5/...
[2] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo6/9-10/59/schedule/F...
Fair point, I'm Australian and very second hand to the fine detail.
On the flip side, I'm > 60 and have been around mining most of my life, working in, geophysical exploration and mapping, global mineral intelligence for markets, etc. and I remain deeply skeptical about underlying realities of control versus appearances.
The UK NCB, from many snippets of conversations with various UK people on both sides of politics, (including some off record comments from Alistair McAlpine, Thatcher's political party treasurer) funneled a great deal of money by various means back to the usual suspects .. the former owners of the coal fields .. now cashed up "coal experts" that continued to profit by providing "services" and "advice" to the NCB.
I think we can agree that the actions of the NCB in prioritising resource extraction over mine safety led to several mine disasters including this big one at hand.
I'm claiming that while the NCB was on paper some kind of peoples ownership of coal, it was still essentially being run from behind the scenes by the same class of people that once owned the coal, who still profited from the policy decisions they pushed through, etc. etc.
I admit I missed the detail about the transfer of ownership but I'm unsurprised, it's a not uncommon pattern and one that has been roundly satirised in UK media such as Private Eye and Yes, Minister.
I still lay the blame for such disasters at the feet of those on committees making actual policy and decisions for the NCB .. and from what I can read that does trace back to Lords, bankers, and their proxies.
Indeed, the disaster was one of the main inputs that led to the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974, the act under which senior officials nowadays can be (and sometimes are) prosecuted for negligence leading to deaths.
I don't know if you are Turkish, but unfortunately this statement is not a given in Turkey, mostly because of corruption, nepotism, and a general lack of respect for knowledge and experience.
I personally know some of the people who built this mine.
This is a rude and uncharitable (bordering on disingenuous) paraphrase of the post you're replying to. The fact that you tossed in an extraneous "hurr-durr" of your own seems to indicate that you feel particularly incapable of responding to what was actually said.