Although I didn’t appreciate it at the time, I suppose I first encountered Margaret Thatcher when I was a primary school pupil, and she was the Education Secretary in Ted Heath’s government. Thatcher the Milk Snatcher they called her, as, in 1971, she ended free school milk for children over the age of seven. Just my luck to turn seven that year. The government in which she served was brought down by an energy crisis resulting from repeated miners’ strikes. It seems, in view of her actions towards the miners when she became Prime Minister years later, that Mrs Thatcher neither forgot nor forgave the miners’ actions.

Losing free milk was the least of my issues with Mrs Thatcher. Growing up in a once industrial town in the north east of England, dubbed the largest shipbuilding town in the world, and with coal mines aplenty (in some of which my ancesors worked), my teenage years and my twenties witnessed industrial dereliction on a spectacular scale. Proud working people were thrown on the scrapheap without a moment’s thought. In those days there was no talk of a “just transition”. Rather, Mrs Thatcher referred contemptuously to people who dared to protest at the deindustrialisation of their communities as “Moaning Minnies”. Miners who went on strike in opposition to her ruthless project of coal mine closures were “the enemy within”.

As an articled clerk interviewing deaf miners (or almost all ex-miners, since Thatcher had put them out of work) in the late 1980s, I travelled round former mining communities in Durham and Northumberland, and witnessed the devastation that she had unleashed on those communities. I know well enough that the striking miners were lions led by donkies, but I also saw the fundamental decency of mid-ranking officials of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). One day in Ashington I saw NUM officials acting as a cross between councillors, Citizens’ Advice and the Samaritans. Local people trusted them and came to them with their daily problems. They were the community and the community was them. That’s all gone now, of course. Another infamous Thatcherism is “there’s no such thing as society”. She certainly succeeded in destroying much of the society that I knew as a child and as a young man. No wonder I joined the Labour Party. But that was then and this is now. My Labour Party card was torn up long ago, and I have no regrets about that. I look at the current Labour government and despair. I see only a less competent version of Thatcher’s government, but one that is every bit as destructive.

These thoughts have occurred to me for some time, but I was stirred into talking about them by an article in the Scotsman with the heading: “Just transition? It’s getting as brutal as 1980s mining shutdown for oil workers”. I disagree profoundly with the Scotsman’s statement that “[t]he drive to renewables is clearly a national imperative” but there is much in the article that I do agree with, such as the rest of that sentence and the next one: “…but so too is the economy and energy security. There is little to be gained and too much to be lost by securing one while sacrificing another.” And this:

There is, however, one clear and expert voice capable of cutting through the babble, a voice that has been too seldom heard in this debate: the voice of workers. So far, our drive to renewables is something that has been done to our energy workers, not with them.

The transition underway from Forth Valley to South Wales, from Grangemouth to Port Talbot, is the opposite of just. This transition, the one politicians don’t like to discuss, is brutal, a thing to be suffered not embraced, and measured in redundancies not opportunities. It is the same transition our mining communities endured in the 1980s and cannot, must not, be repeated.

Labour – once the party of the workers – is now just as much their enemy as Thatcher ever was. ‘We’ve been let down big-time by Vauxhall closure’ is the headline to a BBC website article but the workers quoted in it have their understandable wrath turned on the wrong target. It’s not their former employer – Vauxhall/Stellantis – that has let them down, but the Labour government. Without its rabid insistence on net zero and its absurd targets attempting to force on people a lifestyle they don’t want and which will cost them dear, those Vauxhall workers might still have jobs to go to.

It isn’t just jobs that are being destroyed, though. Starmer, like Thatcher, cares not a jot for communities and their love of place. Anyone seeking to protect their landscape from the industrial blight this wretched Labour government is determined to inflict upon them is treated with the same casual contempt. Where Thatcher talked of Moaning Minnies and the enemy within, Starmer talks of blockers and NIMBYs. Nothing and nobody is to be allowed to get in the way of the project, a project which is every bit as dangerous and destructive as Thatcher’s was. He plans to change the law to get what he wants and to stop the “blockers” from protecting their special places. How ironic too that Starmer spoke out in 2021 against the idea of opening a new coal mine in west Cumbria, an area of considerable poverty and unemployment, even though it would have created hundreds of well-paid jobs. Thatcher, I am sure, would have been so proud.

I am left, sad and angry, with floating before me the image from the final page of George Orwell’s Animal Farm:

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.