Natural monopolies and barriers to entry, Jac – healthy competition ain’t always a given. Still, a bit of antitrust legislation couldn’t have hurt like you say.

A pleasure Victor!

I know I keep on banging on about it (and I’m sure that some will think it’s an obsession that I have about putting this link in posts! Jac could stop that by publishing it on here 😉 . But I’m convinced that there is a basic requirement that is missing, before we can move on in our struggle as a nation. It’s our self awareness & knowledge of ourselves. I’ve posted this link before – it’s an essay I wrote back in 2002 on the subject of our decline that is directly related to our education, or rather the missing bit in our education of our young ones. If you’d like to read it you can find it at: http://sccambria.com/essays/erth-add_saesneg.htm

With your self-stated interest in the subject I hope you’ll enjoy it! Perhaps the “handshaking” can take place in due course! 🙂

Than you Big Gee ! It appears I may have a new friend to go forward with, but I am a cautious person until shaking hands and meeting face to face.

I wholeheartedly agree. Especially when it comes to EDUCATING OURSELVES. That is the missing key, hidden by the English education curriculum since they brought in the original Compulsory Education Act of 1870 for the UK (minus Scotland). We’ve been on a downward spiral ever since in Wales, with a linear decline in our knowledge of our own history, culture, traditions and heritage. It’s almost got to the watershed point of no return by now.

Both. You can’t cherry pick specific reasons. There were composite reasons for the conflict that reflected what was happening throughout society & how it felt in the late seventies & eighties – not just within the mining industry. Miners believed they were fighting a greater cause for the wider many (rightly or wrongly with hindsight).

The general feeling amongst the working classes in the sixties was that their lot was improving. ‘Her’ policies made the common man in the street feel that we were regressing back to the Victorian “poor” period. Much in keeping with the general depression amongst the worst off right now, that’s being generated again by the Posh Boy Millionaires in london

AMEN! Absolutely excellent post Leigh – I wish I had written every word of that! I certainly agree wholeheartedly with everything you’ve said so eloquently. You just can’t hide or distort the facts of history when they are laid bare like that. Brilliant.

I actually lived in the Rhondda when the miners strike was on, and my neighbour next door but one was using his house and garage as a food parcel distribution centre, where people brought cardboard boxes of food to give to striking families. It was something I won’t forget. At the time, the strike didn’t affect me personally because I was running my own electronics company and doing very well. However the impact of living amongst and seeing others suffer, and still suffering like that, had a huge impact on the way I see things. People can talk about it, and pontificate about it from a distance, but when you see it that close up it has a different effect. That’s why I get so annoyed listening to this sweetened & glazed over talk about ‘her’ this week.

Never mind street parties and songs about witches being in bad taste, it’s the glossing over of the true facts about the suffering caused by her that is distasteful to me. That’s why I will never forgive the Tories or the so called Socialists for the way they continually treat ordinary poor people with such contempt. That’s why I’m a Patriot & my political hero to this day is Fidel Castro – who was also a patriot and lover of his people & country first and any other political pigeon-hole that others wanted to put him in second.

The reality though is that everything she put in place was to advance the “haves” in London & the south east at the expense of the “have nots” throughout the rest of these islands. One thing those sorts of people have in common is that they have absolutely zero sympathy or empathy for anyone, because to them, low paid workers kept on a short leash are a commodity for them to exploit in order to fatten their bank accounts (another Darwinist outlook on life). They got the taste for it when they carted slaves to the West Indies a few hundred years ago. It’s been brought into acute focus during Thatcher’s years, and then followed on by the Pink Tories’ reign and now the posh boy millionaires in the Westminster corridors.

Suddenly it’s not shameful to be greedy, exploitative & self centred – after all it’s the fault of the scroungers behind closed curtains when the martyrs go to work isn’t it? Shameless bankers and stockbrokers are the flag-bearers of that mob.

We need to start governing ourselves using a different set of rules based on hard work, justice and above all a proper social conscience. Leave the Anglo Saxon system to its own devices – that’s why I said earlier that we are wasting our time getting sucked into this hyped up drivel of a debate.