Pā 
@Paul F, she didnāt just go after Scargill though and thatās where I have a problem with her. She had no compassion, no softness and seemed immune to any reasoning or discussion.
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Yup - I was a holiday rep on the Costa Brava 1983-85 - we were inundated with striking miners and their families enjoying cheap package deals paid for by their union funded strike pay.
They couldnāt have given a stuff about their jobs, their country or the power cuts endured by much of the UK during that time! Iāll tell you what though they were great customers - I earned a fortune in commission for the excursions, trips, car hire, pub crawls etc etc they booked whilst in resort! 
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I miss spitting image 
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@anon88888878 I guess that if that was your personal experience I canāt deny itās veracity.
However what I remember was significant hardship amongst the strikers. I also donāt remember power cuts being much of a feature of the 1984 strike - the government had learned is lesson from the 1970ās strikes and stockpiled coal and had started the move toward gas as a fuel so even at the end of the strike the lights mostly stayed on.
Also, if I recall no strike pay was possible at all after late summer 1984 as the government seized the assets of the NUM the strike went on to the following March.
Yes Thatcher crushed the other big unions especially the dockers and rail workers and Scargill was right about the decimation of the mining industry (ironically he probably hastened this with the strike action) but, as I said, I personally heard him call for an armed socialist revolt against the government so I would not be surprised if Maggie genuinely thought she was facing the UK equivalent of the October Revolution
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Scargill destroyed the Mining Industry, iā wasā Itāsā price for āItāsā Ultra Left political ambitions, we have another, similar āLeaderā now, whats happened to the Labour Party, I, and my Parents, used to support 
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Paul - donāt let facts destroy a good story! 
I guess I can plead ignorant youth as a 19 / 20 year old living the dream!! That said - we were indeed flooded with striking miners taking a break. I appreciate itās all relative but back in the day, some our ābudget customersā were paying around Ā£60 for a week, full board, with return flights to Girona!! Anyway, I stand corrected and apologies for my faux pas!! 
Bill, might you agree that for you and definitely your parents life was grittier in those days and working people socialised with each other more, talked politics more, and consumed less of the cheaply available mind-sapping leisure pursuits than are on tap everywhere and without any demonstrable effort?
Over-emphasis on the individual, the small nuclear family, the totem of propertyāowning, the bogeyman immigran, the untrustworthy Foreigner, and the treacherous socialist: all these have contributed to the enfeeblement of the left.
I have not and will not betray the socialist ideal nor the Labour Party and I support Corby as a LP member. I hope you will think again. The Right want you to stay asleep or anaesthetised, but I think you and your goose are still uncooked.
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Sorry Peter, Corby and Co. are a disaster, the Party is āunelectableā with Him/Them 
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On verra du coup
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Scargill played his part, certainly but not in a woke up one morning and thought āRight Iāll sacrifice the mines for my personal political ambitionā. Like most socialists (and the miners themselves) he thought that he was fighting for the workers - OK in Scargillās case they were his footsoldiers but he felt that the Government wanted to close the mines and he was right.
On the Tories part I think there was a sense of ānever againā after the miners brought the country pretty much to its knees in the 70ās under Joe Gormley. Scargill played into their hands, of course, in calling an un-balloted strike which could later be declared illegal and used to drive a wedge between groups of miners (the Nottinghamshire mines and the UDM didāt really fare much better in the aftermath than the NUM did).
But, this was all inevitable - Scargill and the strike just brought things forward a couple of years - once the electricity generators found gas was cleaner, more efficient, easier to transport and less vulnerable to inductrial action the writing was on the wall for coal.
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Fairy Nough
Yepā¦it was wholly predictable that Corbyn would be branded as an āanti-Semiteāā¦AIPAC are a rather nasty kettle of fishā¦and Corbyn is in solidarity with the Palestiniansā¦shame on the guardian in this instance for their āreportingā on Gazaā¦of course weāve also got China trying to colonise Europe at the minuteā¦they seem to think that they are actually āthe chosen peopleā tooā¦theyāre getting $60,000 per immigrant from the IMFā¦Iām still jury out on Macronā¦heās from the Rothschild stableā¦(still following the lawyer who spent 20 years in high level banking exposing all the fraud and corruption of of the banking and judicial systemā¦ironically sheās currently incarcerated awaiting sentencing for āfraudāā¦) Yepā¦we shall seeā¦x Those Who Die in Palestine: Those With Dead Souls Here - Craig Murray
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I have read Craig Murrayās piece and most of the subsequent comments, the main preoccupation of which seems to be disappointment with Guardian. This seems to me to be emblematic of how many people see the world, as a kind of Game of Thrones fantasy in which they are participants and commentators.
I am of the view that matters are darker than any television dramatic representation of apocalypse. We seem to be edging towards war, of the kind predicted by Orwell. War for its own sake, because there are some who relish it, and will harness any contrivance or ideology to its furtherance, to the bloodshed and gratification of unmentionable lusts that luxury, and money, and sex, and cruelty on a small scale can not satiate.
People like Trump, and Netanyahu, and Boris Johnson, and others who admire them and aspire to join them in their gluttony.
I weary of it, and of the weak, jingoistic, narrow-minded and insecure stupidity of many who think of themselves as our leaders. And who expect us to swallow their lies or, if unwilling to do that, to pretend that we do out of craven paralysis that we will be called unpatriotic or worse. By the Sun or the Daily Mail.
I have no fear of Russia, or China, or Iran, or if it comes to it, America, Russia or Japan. I am an internationalist with no national allegiance to trump my allegiance to humankind. Any other doctrine is, in my view, pernicious, destructive, and unintelligent.
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The story never leaves me.
There is still an investigation going on and there is much more to it all than meets the eye.
So sad.
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Macron really deserves a chance and if it works out for him it will be great for Europe.
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I often wonder what life would be like if the switch were to be flickedā¦put in re-verseā¦ and our stolen countless trillions returned to us one and allā¦Imagine the creativity that would suddenly explode across our planet and the world we could all co create with unfettered access to our inherent value ā¦??? I took a passing interest in Q-Anon for a week or soā¦but quickly saw that although the info was probably a wake up call for many still sleepingā¦it was/is info that I already knew/knowā¦āAll are equal but some are more equal than othersā¦ā Animal Farmā¦
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Yes, Helen6, there are many matters to be settled. We are said to have borrowed trillions, but we are never told to whom we owe this debt. Or from what source ātheyā acquired and amassed this extraordinary wealth, or how.
We know that, if we are granted a loan or mortgage, the āmoneyā is generated by adding a few noughts to our account electronically. No new money is involved, it is conjured out of thin air, plucked from the magic money tree we are supposed to believe doesnāt exist.
Much of the myth arises from the notional value of property, particularly housing, the value of which is grossly inflated by the policy of creating an artificial property shortage, and by generating homelessness. People only vaguely know this, but cannot grasp that it is a totally deliberate policy, as is austerity.
Other people will say that this is left-wing lunacy; I think you and I see it for what it is. A huge amount of the UK economy rests on the manufacture and global sale of military consumables, and it necessarily follows that policy reflects the urgent need to extend the market, to generate demand for weapons and consumables, thus to further follow foster wars and the capacity to wage them, into the limitless future. As the saying goes āthere is no plausible alternative explanationā.
We are headed for a new conflagration, to be carried on abroad, as always. Hundreds of thousands of foreign and inevitably non-White lives are to be sacrificed by hideous weapons ādeliveredā remotely by IBM or drone to ātake outā innocents who just was NT to live in peace with their neighbours and bring up their kids.
We saw it in Iraq and weāve seen it world-wide, instigated for the last sixty years or more by the USA with the UK in unholy alliance. It sickens me to despair, and makes me ashamed to be associated with warmongering and the political dĆ©ception carried on by our leaders in our name.
The French have almost always shown commendable scepticism about American imperialism, but I doubt Macron will uphold the tradition. I smell sell-off about him. We shall see. I support popular opposition to his resolve to disempower working people. They will not be cowed, I believe. Workers of all lands unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains. 
EnvoyĆ© depuis lāapplication Mail Orange
Le 08/04/2018, Ć 21:46, Helen Wright a Ć©crit :
Helen6 Helen6 Helen Wright
April 8
I often wonder what life would be like if the switch were to be flickedā¦put in re-verseā¦ and our stolen countless trillions returned to us one and allā¦Imagine the creativity that would suddenly explode across our planet and the world we could all co create with unfettered access to our inherent value ā¦??? I took a passing interest in Q-Anon for a week or soā¦but quickly saw that although the info was probably a wake up call for many still sleepingā¦it was/is info that I already knew/knowā¦āAll are equal but some are more equal than othersā¦ā Animal Farmā¦
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In Reply To
Peter_Goble Peter Goble
April 7
I have read Craig Murrayās piece and most of the subsequent comments, the main preoccupation of which seems to be disappointment with Guardian. This seems to me to be emblematic of how many people see the world, as a kind of Game of Thrones fantasy in which they are participants and commentators. ā¦
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Loving your mind Peterā¦Iām probably going back 10 years when I first started questioning the illusion of debtā¦not just personal debt but all debtā¦governmental and globalā¦What is itā¦??? What is debtā¦??? Once you ask a purported lender for proof of claim then it is readily apparent that my/our/your signature was the value of the loanā¦Nothing was borrowed and nothing was lentā¦the alleged debt was paid in full the moment me/you/anyone signed on the dotted lineā¦nothing to payā¦paid in fullā¦we can extrapolate this to all purported and alleged debt (currently creating austerity and needless war) Nothing was borrowed and nothing was lentā¦everā¦x
I still do not understand why someone who works for the French rail network should retire at
55 is it 55? And a doctor goes on working way passed 65.
They are all /both as important, or should I correct myself vital for the very circulation of life which takes us through and on our long journey.
If we could get this question of balance in check France would be in fine form.
We need the train to reach our destination but without our doctors the journey is cancelled
forever.
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