NUM

The NUM has always regarded education and knowledge as a powerful tool for the working class and as this site develops it is hoped that this will be of assistance in providing the visitor with an understanding of how the world is seen from the eyes of the National Union of Mineworkers.

The National Union of Mineworkers is alive and kicking, and is still representing miners, their families and their communities. The NUM is still very active industrially and politically. It is over twenty four years since the start of the Great Miners' Strike of 1984/85. We warned then that if our arguments for a role for coal in our energy requirements were not heeded then the country would pay a heavy price. Twenty four years on we have been proved absolutely correct.

Most of the nation's collieries have been closed, we are now at the mercy of foreign importers and gas and oil prices are rocketing. Our own gas reserves have been depleted at an alarming rate as we have squandered them in massive quantities in gas-fired power stations when we could have used coal. At the same time we have been squandering our indigenous coal reserves, with which this nation was blessed, by sterilising them in closed coal mines. At the same time we have been squandering the talents of our skilled workforce by making them redundant.

In the next few years we will have to import gas and oil from politically unstable or war torn regions of the world such as Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Algeria and Equatorial, New Guinea in some cases through pipelines wide open to terrorist attack.

We will present the compelling case for Britain's coal industry more fully as the site develops and place the blame for a looming energy famine where it belongs, with those who have and are putting our energy needs in peril for purely political and vindictive reasons.

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