
Contents
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Introduction Introduction
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I I
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II II
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III III
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IV IV
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Conclusion Conclusion
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Cite
Abstract
This chapter explores the structures of feeling within which the miners operated around the year 1997. It argues that the later 1990s marked the moment when the past finally crowded out the present, when cultural imaginaries trading in selective memories of who the miners ‘really’ were displaced concern for the working lives of the 17,000 or so people still employed in deep-coal mining. As the coal industry moved from the centre to the margins of public interest, two influential feature films etched into the national consciousness an image of miners as ‘decent ordinary people’ whose communal values and aspirations were admirable, but also hopelessly out of date. While the miners may have been beaten by Thatcherism, ultimately, they were beaten by history itself. Tony Blair’s New Labour project reaped the electoral benefits of this sentimentalized depiction of the miners. At the same time New Labour subscribed, arguably even more strongly than the Conservatives, to the underlying conviction that the miners represented a bygone age. Few attempts were made to stabilize the coal industry, let alone reverse the structural changes that had been wreaked during the eighteen years of Conservative government. While the NUM was ignored, the attention of both policymakers and social scientific research shifted from the workplace to the community, from the collective articulation of political demands to questions of coalfield culture and individual identity. In this emergent structure, coalfield communities represented a particularly intractable case of social exclusion, as the chapter shows.
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