The soon to be ex wife of Michel Gove, Sarah Vine, is – for reasons I have never been able to fathom – paid vast sums to serve up a weekly diet of complete bilge in the Mail on Sunday. If Mr Gove is looking for an excuse for his historic drug use, I’d suggest that having his Mrs read her column to him each week is one that would gain the sympathy of many. Today, Vine deals with Thatcher, coal and global warming prompted by Boris Johnson telling an unfunny and factually inaccurate joke last week.
The article is HERE and is complete fake news. In it, Vine suggests that the Left needs a lesson in history. I suggest she needs to sit in on the classes too.
Johnson suggests that Thatcher slashed mining in the UK as she was an early believer in the global warming pseudo religion and Vine goes along with that. But adds in that Thatch was driven by the reckless greed of the always striking miners and the need to crush militancy.
Both fail to grasp that coal production did not actually collapse under Thatcher. Unlike Vine and Bozza, Thatcher had a great grasp of numbers and appreciated that an industry which saw unit costs per tonne at £24 at the lowest cost pit but over £120 at the least efficient had an issue. That issue is that most of the UK pits were old and almost worked out so hopelessly uneconomic. The cost of subsidising them meant that there was insufficient cash available to invest in expanding output at viable mines and that the hard-earned money of the taxpayer was being blown on an industry where wages were hugely higher than the national average. Where is the social justice in stealing from the average man to give to the well off?
Coal output the year before Thatcher took on the miners in 1984 was c105 million tonnes a year from 180 pits. By the time she had beaten the miners’ strike and rationalised the industry in 1988, output was ….100 million tonnes a year. But the workforce had been slashed by 2/3 as inefficient pits were shut. So Mrs Thatcher did not, as Boris joked and Vine reiterates, slash coal production.
But what about her being a believer in global warming? She was indeed an early believer but as a scientist always reviewed evidence as it came along so changed her mind, just as she did over Britain’s membership of the Evil Empire. Cultists at the BBC, the Guardian and elsewhere often try to wheel out Thatch as a true believer in man-made climate change in order to stump those of us who are both admirers of Britain’s greatest ever leader and also climate change sceptics. They willfully ignore how, as she examined the evidence, she changed her mind.
My late uncle Christopher Booker, who would have delighted in how bad Vine’s article is, discussed Thatcher’s Damascene conversion with her at length at a house party they both attended after she left office and penned a number of articles on this matter such as this one.
Vine, like Boris, is so lazy as a journalist that she simply accepts that Thatch was an early Greta because that is what the rest of the metropolitan liberal media classes believe or want we dirty plebs to believe as our energy bills are racked up to achieve carbon neutrality, the sort of mad and regressive measure Thatch would never have considered for a second. Viewing Lady Thatcher as a global warming cultist is a distortion of the truth as is this whole pitiful article.
Postscript: A relative refers me to page 449 of Statecraft by a certain M Thatcher published in 2003.
“Hot air and global warming.
The doomster’s favourite subject today is climate change. This has a number of attractions for them. First, the science is extremely obscure, so they cannot easily be proved wrong. Second, we all have ideas about the weather: traditionally, the English on first acquaintance talk of little else. Third, since clearly no plan to alter climate could be considered on anything but a global scale, it provides a marvellous excuse for worldwide, supra-national socialism.”
Please note Sarah Vine, it is time for you to enjoy a history lesson and take that twit Boris Johnson with you.