Democratic Mineworkers

Charles Moore is baffled at the hostility to Margaret Thatcher among the former miners of Nottinghamshire, since "she was their ally" against Arthur Scargill.

But how many working pits are there left in Nottinghamshire? Or in County Durham, where the substantial opposition to the strike left wounds that are still so far from healing that, within a single pit village, sons sometimes do not turn up to their fathers' funerals? What did Margaret Thatcher leave them, in the end?

With "allies" like her...

Still, the last week and a half seem to have revived the half-forgotten sense in this country that the mining communities have the last word. Herbert Morrison ruled out joining the embryonic EU because "the Durham miners would never wear it". In his maiden speech as Earl of Stockton, during the miners' strike, Harold Macmillan called those same Durham miners "the best men in the world", earning him an unprecedented standing ovation from what was in those days the massively Tory-dominated House of Lords.

All that is necessary now is to revive the historical basis of that state of affairs, namely the tapping of what are still this island's vast reserves of coal. Rather than insanely importing it from the ends of the earth while sitting on centuries' worth of our own and paying benefits to the men immediately above it.