General   (General discussion, talk about anything.)

Whups it’s not just about the number of pits closed. The more important figure is the rate at which the industry was being run down which is relative to the strain in finding alternative employment for the miners affected.
Harold Wilson oversaw a decline of 39 pits per year, Mrs. Thatcher 10 pits per year. For every miner looking for a new job in Mrs. Thatcher’s time there were 4 during the tenure of Harold Wilson.
Insofar as closing pits which had ‘200 hundred years life left’ it was irrelevant because the end was in sight for the UK market for coal for power generation. Events have proven that to be correct.
Your posts on coal and the NHS are driven by the dogma of the left which is as bad as the dogma of the right. The vast majority of the population generally settle for the middle ground which precludes a contribution from either left or right dogma proponents.
There are 4 million people on the NHS waiting lists. The Blair government tackled a similar situation by giving patients the choice of selecting a private provider but the continuous howls of privatisation has seen that facility quietly withdrawn except for a few exceptions. Mistakes were made in the rush to hand out contracts to private providers but these could have been corrected.
The NHS has never had the capacity to operate without a waiting list. The growth of the population over the past few years wasn’t foreseen by the long term planners in the higher echelons of the civil service, this has added a further complexity to the ability of the NHS to manage patient demand. For the NHS to perform with an insignificant length of waiting list it would need to have a continuous peak load capacity plus which would mean upping it’s staff and facilities by around 15 to 20% at a cost of £ tens of billions.
The middle of the road thinker would see no objection to using private sector capacity if it meant getting prompt treatment providing it was safe and effective.