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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
The UK's last coal plant will sigh out its final pollutants Monday before shutting down for good and officially ending the country's century and a half of coal production. Nottinghamshire's Ratcliffe-on-Soar plant was the last of its kind following Britain's 2015 commitment to close all coal power plants by 2025. Ratcliffe was originally scheduled to shut down in 2022 but stayed open after Russia invaded Ukraine and Europe entered a gas crisis.
The Ratcliffe plant once had 3,000 engineers but only employs 170 staff now. That group will gather to watch a livestream of the plant being turned off, and over 100 of them are set to work on decommissioning the plant over the next two years. Many of the other employees will enter new jobs at different power plants owned by Uniper, Raticliffe's German owner, while others will enter training programs to work on other aspects of the industry.
Britain opened the world's first coal power plant in 1882, London's Holborn Viaduct, with the help of Thomas Edison's Edison Electric Light Company. Coal has played a major part in the UK until very recently. According to a report from energy think tank Ember, coal was responsible for 39 percent of the UK's energy supply in 2012 but shrunk to just two percent in 2019. The decrease in coal production was reportedly equal to double the amount of all greenhouse gases used in the UK in 2023. Between 2012 and 2023, wind and solar generation also increased from six percent to a 34 percent share of the UK's energy. Britain still has a long way to go, but this step has made it the first G7 country to remove all coal power production.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Friday October 04, @05:51AM (3 children)
> decade earlier, in the 1970s
Maggie Thatcher took power in the 1970s.
> They could hardly be called Communists.
I entirely agree. You were the one who called the unions Communists!
> rampant right-wing authoritarianism have taken over
Well the UK has been bumping along on the middle ground for a couple of decades. David Cameron, Tony Blair, Keir Starmer are/were all pretty centerist. There was a few year blip with BoJo et alia but they only lasted about 5 years and, I believe, did considerable harm to the right wing arm of the tories.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Friday October 04, @11:51AM (2 children)
The point I was making was that the three day week was 73-74 and the miners strike was 83-84. Yes, Maggie got in in 79. The way the unions were portrayed in the press back in the 80s was that they were far-left radicals, essentially Communists. I knew a young Tory who told me that the Labour Party, strongly associated with many of the unions was Communist. I've read Alexei Sayle's memoirs in recent years. The Labour Party distanced itself from the Communists after Stalin came to power in Russia and oppressed and murdered millions of people.
In recent years the right had bandied about terms like "far left" and "undemocratic Marxists" and the creepy "cultural Marxism." They were even labelling Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak a "socialist."
There's a lot of misinformation going about. It's more important than ever to do your research and to employ critical thinking skills.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 4, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Friday October 04, @03:18PM (1 child)
Okay, I guess I don't subscribe to the argument that there was a strong discontinuity between the unions in 73-74 and the unions in 83. 10 years is a long time - but, to take a contemporary example, I don't think it is correct to suggest that the Tory party in 2014 (two years before Brexit) is so radically different from the Tory party in 2024. Cameron is out, but Boris Johnson is still a big figure. Nigel Farage is still a lurking evil.
I wasn't born in the 70s so my evidence is second hand!
Just to be explicit, I'm not trying to link the things that happened in 1980 with modern politics. I'm not claiming Rishi Sunak is a socialist, nor that the 1980s (or 70s) coal miners were communists. I'm just trying to put context into, and mitigate, your demonisation of Thatcher. As with all PMs, (and people who try to do things in general) she had to make some difficult decisions to try to keep the country moving.
Doing stuff is hard.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Friday October 04, @06:30PM
I don't think it is correct to suggest that the Tory party in 2014 (two years before Brexit) is so radically different from the Tory party in 2024.
It's very different. The hard-right ERG took over, essentially when Johnson became leader. There was a purge of the remaining One Nation moderates (Ken Clarke, Michael Heseltine, Anna Soubry, Dominic Grieve). They've been tacking further and further to the right to try to out-do Farage.
I'd bet money on the Conservative Party being taken over by Farage's Reform UK soon. We might have seen our last ever Conservative Prime Minister, and that was Rishi Sunak.
The ERG used to be a lunatic fringe group of Little Englanders. John Major (Conservative PM) famously referred to their predecessors as "bastards." Margaret Thatcher was apparently the architect of the EU Single Market. Despite their admiration for her, the ERG took us out of that Single Market.
Their current preoccupation is the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). They want to take us out of it because it's "a foreign court" and we British should not be subject to the rule of Johnny Foreigner. This is despite us participating in its running. The ultimate irony is, their great hero Winston Churchill, was one of the primary architects of Human Rights and the ECHR.
These swivel-eyed loons have forgotten their history. They have forgotten how we got here. They have forgotten the horrors leading up to and including the Second World War.
All of these things they find so abhorrent, all this working together with our neighbours, was championed, designed and implemented by the very generation who had to suffer that horrific war, to ensure such things would never happen again. The NHS and the Welfare State also came out if it.
They are ignorant and blind. They are dragging us back into a Dickensian society. They are worse than fools. They are ideological zealots. They do not listen to reason.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].