Let alone the fact that the “dash for gas” leaves us in the energy security hole we are in now.

As for his assertions that the government of the day didn’t want the strike, that contradicts the memoirs of most of the politicians from that government.

Guess what Bob, you aren’t the only person on the internet who was in Yorkshire at the time, so your fake “authority” doesn’t wash.

The most amusing part of the whole business in retrospect was the way the scab union got shafted by British Coal and the government afterwards. They’d been promised job security in return for helping to undermine the strike, but many of them got the P45 all the same.

I attended college from 1984-1986, and back then UK student grants were means tested according to assessed parental income, with “the most privileged children” receiving lower awards than those from less well-off families. Everyone received tuition fees, however, if that is what you meant.

I’ll give you my own anecdote though. I was attacked by a police officer during what was, effectively, a police riot, during the last ditch demonstration 10 days before the end of the strike. Having beaten me up, he arrested me. When we were in the van he picked out a mate of his to act as a witness, and told him that I had thrown a bottle full of liquid with a rag hanging out of it at him. His mate said that he had seen that. In the van they proceeded to continue beating up various of us who had been arrested. In the police station they stopped attacking us, but turned their attention to the few women, all of whom were verbally harassed and groped by several of the police officers. When, eventually, the case came to court, the two police officers managed to succeed in contradicting not only themselves, but each other, in their descriptions both of what I purportedly did, and also what else was happening around them. These contradictions were clearly pointed out. The magistrate found me guilty. Most amusingly, when a police complaints officer visited me (after my dad, mortifyingly embarrassingly, called them) he basically said he believed every word I told him, that this was just a standard story, and that there was no chance of any complaint succeeding. The widespread criminality of the police during the strike was licensed from the very top, and was, in my opinion, much worse than the use of the secret services against the government’s political enemies. I have no regrets about working in support of that strike, and I would be ashamed if I hadn’t.

None of this addresses the economic case for and against pit closures. There are all sorts of good reasons for relying less on coal, and the economic argument for slowly scaling down the industry with appropriate measures to ensure that communities were not devastated and that well paid and skilled work would be available for members of those communities, was a good one, I think. I might have felt a real dilemma if that had
been what the strike was against.

I’m saying that all the evidence shows that the 1984/5 mining strike was totally pointless and that this is widely recognised nowadays in election results where Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party regularly comes at or close to the bottom of polls.

“Readers may be interested in these media reports about the background to the mining strike:”

and revealed that Scargill was a bit of a Stalinist & Vic Allen was in receipt of Moscow gold.

I’ll be blunt: so what? What proposition are you advancing about the strike? Anyone who knew their way around the Left knew perfectly well that Scargill was a bit of a Stalinist and that Vic Allen (to the extent that he had any impact on anyone) was a tankie; neither of these facts had any influence on whether or not anyone on the Left supported the strike, and nor (I would argue now) should they have.

The strike achieved absolutely nothing beyond impoverishing and embittering the strike-bound mining communities – many pits in the East Midlands, after balloting, (sensibly) went on working. In South Wales, an innocent cab driver was killed by striking miners. The donations, at least those that did get to striking miners, simply extended the agony.

The rhetoric of Scargill – president of the NUM - is open to the interpretation that he regarded the strike as an end-in-itself, a necessary part of the revolutionary struggle of the working classes. Towards the end of the strike, Mick McGahey, union VP and a card carrying member of the Communist Party, distanced himself from Scargill whom, he suggested, was just trying to create a monument for himself.

Afterwards, Scargill went on to create his own political party: the Socialist Labour Party. In elections nowadays, even in mining constituencies, the party regularly features at or near the bottom of polls with fewer votes than the British National Party. Indeed, it’s touch and go whether it gets more votes than the Monster Raving Loony Party.

As for energy prices, world oil prices got down to $10 a barrel in 1998.

The history of the British coal industry after its privatization by the Major government in 1974, is reported here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_Coal

(I hate to break it to you but philosophy professors are generally treated as working class heroes where I come from. Perhaps they should fund your own research? Compared to students they seem much more unambiguously members of a privileged elite. And that system seemed to work pretty well in the nineteeth century, which seems to be the reference point on these issues for many of Blair´s supporters. Taking on part-time work, as shelf-stackers say, would no doubt be a hardship for some of them, but there far more serious injustices in the world, right?)

I find it hard to believe that your argument that since the university system is already dominated by market imperatives we should not only accept this state of affairs but seek to consolidate it is actually meant in earnest. Actually I was reminded of these satyrical remarks from the Communist Manifesto:

For the rest, nothing is more ridiculous than the virtuous indignation of our bourgeois at the community of women which, they pretend, is to be openly and officially established by the Communists. The Communists have no need to introduce community of women; it has existed almost from time immemorial.

Our bourgeois, not content with having wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other’s wives.

Bourgeois marriage is, in reality, a system of wives in common and thus, at the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached with is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalised community of women.

Perhaps you endorse Marx and Engels´ satyrical conclusion here, which is arrived at by chain of reasoning structurally parallel to yours?

As for your assertion that:

the people who have their chances for self-realisation smashed to pieces at the very start of their adult lives are not going to college, and wouldn’t be even if it were free and there were a generous maintenance grant

it is simply false, on any reasonable understanding of the reference of your definite description (´the people who…´). These are some of the people but there are many, many others. Not everybody who begins university is able to complete her degree and of those who do it is ridiculous to assert that in a capitalist society they will all find fulfilling jobs, humanly tolerable jobs or even any job at all. As a university teacher you are surely aware of this. You are also doubtless aware that in the UK since the introduction of these policies HE dropout rates have risen greatly, especially among students from poorer families.

Anyway, to try to make my original point clear, it´s not the position on tuition fees which I find frustrating so much as the argument you give for it, which I do think is a particularly disreputable Blairite canard. The underlying principle and point of agreement between you and your stockbroker friend is that state subsidies of learning are unjust because they involve appropriating the earnings which other people are able to receive through their own efforts and ownership of productive resources. That is a libertarian argument, not a socialist one at all, even if you think (misguidedly in my opinion) that it can be employed in order to achieve material gains for workers.