'the truth of the matter is that the mining industry has been sucessfully run down by successive English governments,'

don't you think GSS that the miners realised that? Nobody believed Tebbit's assurances that not a single miner would lose his job. Everyone knew HE was lying.

As for Ollaimh's points about safety standards being crap. Amongst the older miners who had worked pre nationalisation - the feeling was that things were better than before 1948 - as my father in law remarked -'in them days the whole place was held together by shot wire'....

The Notts miners felt they were in a closing down sale and they had to grab what they could while they could.