Coalfield Communities

Mark Spencer Excerpts

Tuesday 28th October 2014 Commons Chamber

[Michael Dugher]

As always, my hon. Friend brings to this place insight from his own constituency. Fundamentally, the Cabinet papers also show the true scale of the dishonesty in maintaining that the strike was about an industrial dispute based on economics, and it puts paid to the nonsense assertion at the time that Ministers were somehow neutral bystanders. The fact is that the Government of the day saw the strike in political terms. Far from Ministers being non-interventionist, they were in fact the micro-managers of this dispute.

One paper from a Downing street meeting shows that Mrs Thatcher told Ferdinand Mount, a senior policy adviser, that her Government should

“neglect no opportunity to erode trade union membership.”

In a paper prepared for Mrs Thatcher by the Downing street head of policy, the now right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood), it was said that miners had a “revolutionary” strategy, and it urged the Prime Minister to return to her original plan of

“encouraging a war of attrition”

against the miners. That completely reinforces the view at the time that the Government of the day regarded the striking miners as—to use that most infamous of phrases—“the enemy within.”

[Mr Mark Spencer (Sherwood) (Con)]

I hope that the shadow Minister will recognise that one of the fundamentals of trade unionism is that the union is there to represent its members, that it has a ballot and that it acts upon the result of that ballot. One of the fundamental flaws in the NUM strategy was that it did not have a ballot, which divided the work force.

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[The Minister for Business and Enterprise (Matthew Hancock)]

It is undoubtedly true that the history of Britain’s coal mining communities is a long and proud one and tied inescapably to the long history of this island. From the early mines to the mass expansion of the industrial revolution to the post-war decline of deep coal mining, the fortunes of the communities and of coal were heavily intertwined. At its height, almost 3,000 collieries produced about 300 million tonnes of coal, and each colliery was surrounded by a close-knit community.

[Mr Spencer]

Did the Minister notice that the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Barnsley East (Michael Dugher), spent 24 minutes looking backwards and one minute looking forwards? Does the Minister intend to use his speech to look forward at how we can help improve coalfields and work together in this Chamber to improve the plight of the communities that live there?

[Matthew Hancock]

I welcome my hon. Friend’s tone. It was a pity and a surprise to hear the shadow Minister say he could think of nothing that Conservative Members could bring to this debate. That was deeply regrettable.

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[Mr Mark Spencer (Sherwood) (Con)]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker.

[Matthew Hancock]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Mr Spencer]

I give way.

[Matthew Hancock]

Does my hon. Friend agree that at the end of this debate, those on the Opposition Front Bench should dissociate themselves from the disgusting remarks of the hon. Member for Lanark and Hamilton East (Mr Hood) and from the mistaken comparison of these issues to the behaviour of Jimmy Savile, which was astonishingly made by the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Barnsley East (Michael Dugher)? If they do not, people will understand that the Labour party has got its priorities completely wrong.

[Mr Spencer]

I am grateful for that intervention.

I am the only Member of Parliament in the Chamber today with a working colliery. Although I would like to say that it is a pleasure to speak in this debate, the truth is that I am quite sad to be doing so, as it is a massive missed opportunity to look at the future of our coalfields and former coalfields and how we could work together across the House to try to raise standards within those communities and support them.

We can spend lots of time looking backwards at what happened, and it gives me no pleasure to look back at some of the communities that the hon. Member for Lanark and Hamilton East (Mr Hood) mentioned, which happen to be in my constituency. We can talk about how the NUM flooded Nottinghamshire with flying pickets to try to prevent my miners from working in those coalfields, and we can talk about how, if Scargill had had a ballot, the Nottinghamshire miners would have had a vote in that ballot and it would have given a lot more power to some of the arguments that we are hearing.

[Mr Peter Hain (Neath) (Lab)]

Is the hon. Gentleman aware that the former chief constable of Devon and Cornwall, John Alderson, complained officially that the Thatcher Government had used the police against the miners in a completely wrong way?

[Mr Spencer]

I am very much aware. I was there and I lived in those communities at that moment. I saw what was happening on the picket lines. There were friends of mine whose fathers were on the picket lines and whose brothers were on different sides of the argument, one in the National Union of Mineworkers and one in the Union of Democratic Mineworkers. Those scars are still there in my community and they are not helped by holding party political debates such as this one, instead of working together to try to improve those communities. I am saddened that this is more about trying to draw a groundswell of support for the Labour party at the ballot box than it is about genuinely solving the challenges we face, certainly in some of my communities in Nottinghamshire.

I say “some”, because in towns such as Hucknall and Calverton, in the former coalfields in the bottom half of Sherwood, where there is access to employment and good transport links, the communities are bouncing forward. There is very low unemployment in some of those villages, but further north, in places such as Ollerton and Clipstone, where the communication and transport networks are not as good and where there is not the same access to work, the communities face challenges in trying to aspire their way out of it. I now have families in my constituency who are third- generation welfare-dependent. The aspiration has gone from some of those kids.

We have to ask ourselves: what did the Blair Government do when they created the Coalfields Regeneration Trust? They spent far too much money on grassing down pit tips, planting trees and building women’s institute huts and scout huts, when they should have been putting in place infrastructure and transport networks and creating jobs. If someone does not have a job and their lad comes to them and says, “Dad, I want to go to scouts,” they cannot give him a tenner to go to scouts, because they cannot afford the money, even though there is a brand-new scout hut in their community. However, if they have a job and their lad comes to them and says, “Dad, my scout hut’s knackered. We’re trying to raise money for a new scout hut,” they will have a tenner to give towards that fund-raising event. That is where we went wrong in the period following the closure of those pits. We should have been putting money into infrastructure projects, apprenticeships and transport networks, to give people in those communities the opportunity to get out and get a job.

I was fortunate to have the Minister in his previous role come to Sherwood to talk about apprenticeships and to look at some of the great work being done in and around my community and at how we are moving forward. The good news is that I held a jobs fair in Sherwood about six weeks ago. There were more jobs advertised in that room than there are unemployed people in my constituency. The bad news is that there is a skills gap. Some of those communities still lack the skills to take on those roles. The Government are working flat out to try to fill the skills gap by creating apprenticeships and jobs that the kids coming out of those schools can go into. That is the way to solve the coalfield communities’ deprivation: to give them the ability to aspire out of it, the ability to work their way, and the confidence that the Government of the day are looking after their ability to move from wherever they are to any point in the social scale.

That is our mission; that is what we are trying to achieve. So what a tragedy it is that this debate is such a missed opportunity. We are going to spend three hours looking backwards, talking about flying pickets, Scargill and the good old pit days, when we should be talking about how we move forward—how we give jobs and aspiration to the next generation and how we work, whatever colour of Government, to try to solve the undoubted challenges faced in those former coalfields.

I congratulate the Minister on working with me to assist at Thoresby colliery in any way we can, working with UK Coal and the unions to try to extend the life of the colliery, which will run out of coal in 2018 anyway. I would like to get to the point where all the coal is extracted, but I am grateful for the support and the work done together. We need at some point to start thinking about the post-Thoresby period, because it will run out of coal in 2018. We should be planning for that event now, working together to make sure that the next generation—because we have missed one—has that ability to aspire.

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[David Mowat]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention, and he knows that I more than partially agree with him about the carbon price floor and the impact on energy-intensive industries, but is it right to pretend that the vote that took place on 4 December did not matter? The hon. Member for Barnsley East (Michael Dugher) did vote with Baroness Worthington and all of those people for the accelerated closure. That is what happened and I think it was a key moment in the history of the Labour movement that that vote took place with apparently so little concern.

The hon. Member for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland (Tom Blenkinsop) mentioned the carbon price floor and that is part of it, as is the subsidy regime that we have put in place. The closure of coal stations is being driven by the large combustible directive and we are pursuing that, but it is worth saying that we are increasingly acting unilaterally in this regard. We should remember that we are the only country in the EU that is cutting the amount of coal we use. That is an extraordinary statistic and people should reflect on that, particularly those on the Labour Front Bench.

On 4 December there was a Labour three-line Whip for a vote on Lords amendment 105. That amendment said that the emissions performance standard—which means that new coal must, effectively, have carbon capture and storage—was to be applied to existing coal stations. That is what Opposition Members were whipped through the Lobby to support, and I think it is incredible. Apart from the effect on fuel poverty, we have seen the effect on Tata Steel and we are seeing the effect on the coal industry. The coal industry around the world is prospering. I shall say it again: no form of energy increased in absolute terms as much as the coal industry did.

[Mr Spencer]

I just wonder if my hon. Friend recognises the challenge. At Thoresby colliery it is 8 km from the pithead to the pit face, and it is 1 km down. How does it compete in a global market to get that coal from the face to the surface, when in China and the States they can just bulldoze it out of the ground in open-cast sites?

[David Mowat]

I am not an expert on the economics of the coal industry, but I would just say it is pretty heavy stuff and having to transport it an awfully long way has got an economic impact. I am not suggesting that the entire coal station fleet in the UK has to be sourced by UK Coal; it will come from abroad as well. I do say, however, that by turning our back on coal more quickly than any other country in Europe or the world, we are saying something about our intentions. We are taking important decisions for the future.

I know that many hon. Members, particularly those who represent constituencies in the coalfields, agree at least in part with a lot of what I am saying. I really believe that there is more than one Labour party in this regard. There is the Primrose Hill branch which has forced this stuff through—the three-line Whip, the vote on Lords amendment 105. I believe, however, that many Opposition Members—particularly those sitting on the Opposition Front Bench, whom I respect greatly—do not really agree with some of that stuff, and some of them at least did not vote for it, whether by accident or design. Nevertheless—[Interruption.] Yes, indeed: clearly by design. Nevertheless, that is what happened and what we are talking about here is an issue in the Labour party. It needs to decide whether or not it wishes to support our coalfields in the same way that other parties across Europe support their own coalfields, or does it wish to just give in to the Primrose Hill section of the party?