DAY 216 - MULHOUSE TO COLMAR: 25.7 MILES (51,400 STEPS)

25 November, 2011

25.7 miles (Total: 2132.9 miles) –51,400 steps (Total: 4,576,801 steps)

The days are closing in now. Often I start in the dark and finish in the dark. This can be a bit hazardous when travelling along main roads, as it is nice to be seen. It is also hazardous as I found when you are forced off the main roads and get lost in a dark forest (pic) close to the Black Forest! My cousin Stephen, before he left, had lent me a head torch; it was a great addition as it had a flashing red light function as well as strong LED white beam. I look like a miner and actually feel quite positive about the nostalgia of that connection.

The miners were heroes for us growing up in the coalfields of Durham and Northumberland. I am normally not given to strong arguments, but as I placed the torch on my forehead I got a flashback to a vigorous ‘altercation’ with a ministerial colleague outside the Members’ Dining Room in the House of Commons following the then Conservative government’s decision to announce the closure of the thirty-one coal mines, effectively turning out the lights on the mining industry in the UK all with one week’s notice!

The trigger for the debate was the massive underestimation of what this decision meant. I was told that there were ‘only’ 25,000 workers impacted, to which I protested that this was a blow for millions of people whom, though they have never worked in the mines, have an affinity for these brave and proud men who worked in such appalling conditions to keep the lights on and the fires burning. Just in the north east of England alone, the mines used to employ 225,000 people at their peak and almost every family had a member who had been a miner.

The minister rebuked me for being sentimental and blind to the economics of the mining industry and the need to eradicate subsidies. The markets wanted the government to take action to remove subsidies and privatise the former state owned industries. I responded by asking him whether he took the same view about farming which received equivalent state subsidies? He said that farmers were important to maintain the natural landscape of Britain. I agreed, and added that the miners were important to maintain the social landscape of Britain too. The only difference was that he probably knew lots of farmers, but thought a miner was someone under the age of 18. The latter point was a cheap shot and I later apologised for it, which in turn weakened my case and reminded me that in politics as in sport, it is always advisable to play the ‘ball’ and not the ‘man’; by playing the former you might just score, by playing the latter you might just concede a penalty.

My substantive point was that we weren’t going to remove the subsidy, they were simply going to change to whom the subsidy was granted, for all they were going to do was to put the miners on Incapacity Benefit and other state benefits so there would be no net saving to the taxpayer at all, but there would be a massive social cost in creating benefit dependency for generations to come.

I of course recognise that for the miners and the appallingly led NUM (National Union of Mineworkers) saw it merely as a social issue and were unwilling to even engage with the debate over economics, or that industry and consumers now had a choice of abundant supplies of cheap gas and oil and therefore there was a need to raise productivity so as to keep down costs.  As a result, consumers would express their great admiration and loyalty for the miners as they switched to gas central heating in their homes.

If the unions and the Labour Party chose to see it only as a ‘social’ issue about keeping communities together and providing the dignity of work, then the Conservatives made the opposite mistake of seeing it as purely an economic argument and refused to weigh in the social consequences of such moves. We now know that the issue was not social and it was not economic, but it was socio-economic.

Interestingly enough of course, there was not quite the same ideological hue and cry about inefficiencies and subsidies from the markets when they required a £100 billion bail-out from the taxpayer to keep the banks in business. Clearly the Labour government were mindful the social impact of losing banker’s bonuses on community cohesion St John’s Wood  and Kensington (careful now—you almost gave away another penalty—does he ever learn!). Essentially we are told that a state owned bank was a systemically important investment in the economic infrastructure, whereas a state owned mine was a drain on economic efficiency. Or perhaps it is just when it is our job on the line, it is an ‘investment’, and when it is someone else’s it’s a ‘subsidy’.

The mining communities deserved our respect and gratitude as a nation for their service.  There should have been a longer period of transition, perhaps as long as twenty years, to allow communities to adjust and for the new generation to be equipped with the skills to establish the enterprises which would be the new life blood of those communities. I am absolutely convinced that both the economic and social costs would have been far less over time; we may have actually seen today members of those communities receiving their incomes from a new business rather than from an old Post Office.

I am gratified to see that the present government recognise this as David Cameron has spoken so often of the value of community, as has Iain Duncan Smith about the value of work. It is a shame they weren’t in charge of these aspects of policy in the eighties and nineties, but government is an imperfect animal because it relies on imperfect people to administer it, imperfect people to elect it and, dare we say during the Leveson Inquiry, even imperfect people to report and comment on it. If we have the humility to acknowledge this weakness we might actually witness the strengthening of our public discourse and quality of our decision making as a result.