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This article examines in what sense the decline of the coal industry contributed to the emergence of a debate about the genesis, shape und future of ‘Britishness’ in the 1990s and early 2000s. Taking a discourse-analytical approach, it argues that the decline of the coal industry contributed to bringing about the debate in two ways: firstly, by feeding into popular narratives of national decline and renewal, it helped to provide the debate’s intellectual background. Secondly, the political cleavages of the 1980s and 1990s between Old Labour, Thatcherism and New Labour elevated the coal industry to a contested symbol for a way of life and a political orientation. These differing interpretations, in return, were associated with a particularly British social reality, a self-conception of the British nation that was embedded in the London-centric political and cultural discourse. Changes to this self-narration required an explanation, which various contributions to the discussion of ‘Britishness’ in politics and popular culture sought to provide in the 1990s and early 2000s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers an original contribution to the literature on coal communities and the history of the coal industry in Britain by examining changes and contested interests within Britain’s coal territories since nationalisation in 1947. The analysis is organised around three distinct but over-lapping meanings of coal community: economic locality, ideological communality and occupational group. As economic localities mining communities became stronger in the 1960s, even as the coal industry itself was shrinking, but then less viable as all forms of industrial employment dwindled in the 1980s. In ideological terms coal communities were divided by gender as well as class, but became more cohesive with social change and greater opportunities for women. A network of increasingly solid localities contributed—despite the divisions of 1984-1985 and subsequent job losses—to the strengthening of a national occupational community, partly because deindustrialisation was a common working class disaster that transcended regional boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently there have been calls for sociology in Britain to reflect on its longstanding historical attention and focus, something which has been neglected of late. At the same time there is growing interest in the historiography of British sociology and critical reflection on how its early post-war assumptions went on to structure later research, writing and scholarship. Developing both of these insights this article looks at British sociology’s longstanding relationship with the coal industry, its work and especially its communities. From Coal is our Life (1956) through to Coal was our Life (2000) the sector has been an important site of sociological attention. It was an early focus of post-war community studies, becoming home to a residual traditional working class. Later still it was an arena of conflict on the front line of Thatcher’s Britain, before becoming a site on which to study loss and deindustrialisation. This article asks what sociology learnt from the deep coal mining industry and what it might still explore in the future around questions of regeneration and the ‘half-life’ of deindustrialisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The introduction draws on the work of Raymond Williams to identify the ‘structures of feeling’ that surround the figure of the coal miner in contemporary British culture. As an analysis of the media coverage of the closure of the UK’s last deep-coal mine in December 2015 demonstrates, mine workers were cast as ‘residual proletarians’ whose modes of being and consciousness were portrayed as both admirable and pitifully out of date. The introduction goes on to demonstrate the dominance that selective memories of the miners’ strike of 1984/1985 exert over contemporary understandings of coal mining. Drawing on the work of Williams again, the introduction reflects on how certain images and tropes have reached hegemonic status while others have been marginalised. The introduction concludes by arguing that historical scholarship must extricate itself from the stranglehold of ‘1984/85’ and contends that the true significance of coal for contemporary British history lies in the extraordinary range of emotions, meanings and significations with which both the industry and the miners were invested by the contemporaries themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By 1918, the British coal industry, like all industries, was facing the pressures of transitioning from a wartime to a peacetime economy. The pressures brought by a slowing economy would leave many coal miners, who possessed limited transferrable skills, harbouring deep concerns about their future employment. For those still in employment, concerns were increasing for workers’ health. Sharp increases in respiratory illnesses across the nation’s coalfields were now a major cause of disablement. Accompanying this was the almost inevitable possibility of unemployment, prompting major concerns among workers and trade unions. This article will explore how the nature of industrial relations across Britain’s coalfields changed during the interwar years in response to these challenges, and reveals how the government developed schemes to train disabled coal miners for work in other industries. The relationship between trade unions and the Ministry of Labour, and the incremental passage of legislation to address issues concerning workers’ occupational health in Britain’s coal mines will be examined. The onset of the Second World War ensured the coal industry was now central to the war effort. Recruitment was intensified accordingly. The improvement to working conditions underground, negotiated by trade unions, helped ensure that the workforce and the coal industry more generally were well-prepared for the challenges of the post-First World War economy, and the difficulties the Second World War would bring. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the shift in the economic direction in the 20th century in Great Britain. Topics discussed include the divisive changes in economic direction, corporatist interventions to stimulate aggregate demand, the Conservative Party's adaptation to the post-1945 mixed economy, related elements of economic management that influenced changes in economic direction after 1979 and a case study of the Scottish coalfields to show the changes in economic direction in the 1940s and 1980s.

The article explores the local history and set of conditions central for the rise of “coal nationalism” in the post-industrial town of Doncaster. Based on ethnography, interviews and archival research, the essay shows how Doncastrians were not merely victimized by the effects of neoliberal restructuring programmes and deindustrialization, but strived to cope with and give meaning to the changes affecting their lives. In the space left by the dissolution of industrialism, new competing scale-making projects over meaning, memory and future played out. Several social actors nostalgically invoked the industrial past to cope with existential insecurity. Some called upon the lost empire or the EU, while others turned to exclusionary Englishness as the solution to current hardship and grievances. United Kingdom Independence Party (Ukip), strategically locating their annual conference in 2015 in the white-majority working-class town, tapped into local anxieties and disillusionment, promising to secure future and security for British nationals in the extractive industries. Examining the tensions emerging out of the intersection of various scale-making projects, the essay suggests that the rising appeal of English nationalism cannot be reduced to neoliberal restructuring, nor just the legacies of industrialism, nor to the passage of transition or global migration. It is all of these, which in turn constitute the Ukip code. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

From approximately 1770 to 1850 Great Britain successfully completed the world's first Industrial Revolution. One of the main reasons for this was the country being endowed with extensive cheap coal supplies which not only provided cheap energy and a lucrative export trade but also acted as a stimulus to innovation in a wide range of industries well before 1770. The author explores these developments through early GB patents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘So much depended on coal’, the journalist Peter Jenkins argued in 1963, wistfully recalling the early promise of Clement Attlee’s Prime Ministerial tenure. As Jenkins’ post-mortem suggested, by the early sixties the coal industry in Britain—under direction of the National Coal Board—had been all but dismantled, along with the Labour Left’s hopes for the country after the Second World War; the two phenomena had been inextricably bound by the Labour Party’s 1918 Constitution, and the decline of the coal industry in Britain was expressed compellingly through the English folk revival (c.1945–70). The folk revival represented a concurrent cultural phenomenon that also echoed, in its pseudo-socialist idealism, many of the social and political anxieties of the post-war Left; indeed, the relationship between the miners’ plight and English folk revivalism after the War was marked by a broader Leftist concern with the place of the working-class in the midst of a consumer-driven ‘age of affluence’. The difficult realities of an industry in irreversible decline were illuminated as the myth of nationalization faltered, and the folk revival provided an important but conflicted voice for those being left behind. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The author explores the problems and potentials of vernacular song and verse as sources for an "ethnography" of historical industrial production in northern England, with particular reference to the northeastern coal industry. The work seeks to contextualize the political and social contingency of work-related song and verse in the coalfields, and suggests that the surviving, exceedingly rich, oral tradition of the region can give important insights into the social relations that operationalized the means of industrial production, relations that would otherwise be missing from traditional industrial archaeological approaches to the study of mines and miners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the extraordinary political swing that occurred in the Durham coalfield in the 1931 general election. Having won all eleven county seats in 1929, Labour lost all but two in 1931. This was despite the dominance of the coal industry, the strength of the miners' union, and the increasing pre-eminence of Durham's Labour organization. While the circumstances of the election certainly motivated a traditional anti-socialist base, the article suggests that previous explanations have failed to acknowledge the extent to which mining constituents may also have been responsible for the result. Rather than any uniform political identity amongst the mining community, it finds that allegiances were fluid and complex, swayed by factors such as political charisma (particularly with regard to Ramsay MacDonald, re-elected at Seaham), specific local concerns, and paternalistic loyalties. In doing so, it reveals the fragility of the Labour Party's appeal even amongst its 'core' supporters. The National success in 1931 demonstrated that Labour's dominance in Durham remained recent, limited and as yet provisional, a finding that has significant implications for the wider picture of Labour's national advance, revealing that Labour's progress in the inter-war years was conditional and erratic even in its most 'natural' strongholds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paul Sweezy's work on the history of the British coal industry gave rise to his doctoral thesis and a published monograph at exactly the same time that he was making the transition from mainstream economics to Marxist political economy. This note explores the peculiar disappearance of this work from his subsequent contributions despite its apparent influence upon and consistency with it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides information on the energy sources of Great Britain which was significantly decreasing over the past years. It discusses that during the late 19th century, Great Britain was the world's leader in coal mining. However, according to analysis by the Trade and Industry Department, their undeveloped hydrocarbon deposits shrank to 16 - 25 billion barrels of oil equivalent. Information regarding Britain's relations with Russia and its strategy on energy concerns are also discussed.

Almost the whole of the British coal industry has closed since the early 1980s. The authors assess the extent to which the areas once dependent on coalmining have adapted to this job loss. A `labour-market accounting' approach is employed to document the principal changes in employment, unemployment, commuting, and activity rates among men in the English and Welsh coalfields over the period to 2004, building on previous similar research covering the period 1981 -91. The authors point to a strong recovery of employment among men in these areas, though this is not yet on a scale to offset all the coal job losses and there is important variation between areas. There is also evidence of extensive and continuing `hidden unemployment'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A chapter of the book "A New Sociology of Work?" is presented. It discusses a research project that examined the post-strike experiences of a South Wales coal-mining neighborhood in the mid-1980s. The author argues that community work provided a significant occupation for residents. The chapter discusses communal relations in working-class areas, community interaction, and community organization as a factor in economic growth. It also examines the significance of women's relationships to public and private spheres and the possible reconfiguration of communal and class relations.

Since the second world war the British coal industry has declined from a position of dominance and seeming security in the national energy market to a marginal position. The decline can be linked to changes in national energy policy and the structure of the national energy market and to the internationalization of markets for coal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

British coal mining historiography is still dominated, whether consciously or unconsciously, by a militant narrative running from the 1926 General Strike to the national disputes of the 1970s and 1984/5. Any exceptions to this, most notably the behaviour of the Nottinghamshire miners, has to be explained as deviation from a conflict-ridden norm. In most accounts, the period of nationalization and attempted industrial relations partnership between the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and the National Coal Board (NCB) barely interrupts this picture of inexorable and ubiquitous class conflict. This article focuses on the decades after nationalization and before the 1972 national strike. We argue that, during this period, not only did nationalization improve industrial relationships at national level, but also at many collieries. Using a wide, impressionistic range of testimony from autobiographies, earlier studies and our own interviews with former Coal Board workers (mostly from the Midlands), we challenge four New Left myths about nationalization: 1 that there was a crisis of (radical) expectations among ordinary miners following nationalization; 2 that the NCB management failed because it merely continued discredited capitalist management policies; 3 that there was only phantom worker participation; 4 and that pay and payment systems were at the sociological root of conflict where it occurred. We conclude by sketching an alternative scenario, as a basis for further research. Accordingly, something close to industrial partnership did emerge at many collieries, particularly in the prosperous Midlands coalfields, but the habit of strike action spread from declining collieries in Scotland and South Wales, as the economic scope for compromise narrowed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the developments in the field of energy policy in Great Britain in the 1990s. Publication of a White Paper on energy sources for power generation; Path of internationalization with the contraction of the indigenous coal industry; Ramifications of government policy on the energy issue.

Focuses on issues of the specialization of coal ports in Great Britain. Advantages and disadvantages of specialization; Balance between specialization and diversification; Evolution of coal ports; Demand of railways on port facilities.

Examines the importance of joint consultation in the coal industry in Great Britain. Role of the National Coal Board in providing consultation as prescribed by the 1946 Nationalization Act; Comparison between collective bargaining and joint consultation; Relevance of consultative minutes on industrial relations and labor processes.

Deals with three distinct periods when national policies in the British coal industry incorporated the social welfare of coalmining regions differently. Perrow's linkage of catastrophic risk and national policy; Policy issues of social welfare, resource development, and energy.

The article focuses on John Sankey's political development after the investigation of the coal mining industry in 1919 and also on his relations with the Labour Party both in and out of government in Great Britain. It explores the change in Sankey's political awareness which made him the obvious choice as Labour's Lord Chancellor in 1929. The author also examines his role in the highly charged events of 1931 and assesses the factors which governed his conduct after the critical episode in Labor history.

Presents a study on the workforce of the coal industry in the 1980s and early 1990s in the United Kingdom. Discussion on globalization; Methodology used to carry out the study; Illustration on the English and Welsh coalfields.

Discusses the implications of the 1992 collapse of the British coal industry on the formulation of energy policy in Great Britain. Essential components of energy policy; Discussion of the contents of the White Paper on the coal industry; Government initiatives on regulation of energy industries; Limitation and denial of subsidies; Analysis of downward pressures on the coal market; Definitional issues.

The author, who worked for seven years as a miner and is now studying at Glasgow University with a Miners' Welfare National Scholarship, here discusses some of the main causes of lack of co-operation between capital and labour in the mining industry. On the side of the owner there is distrust of legislative ‘interference’, lack of consideration for the worker (as evinced particularly in the treatment of miners on short time) and a tendency to regard wage-cuts as the sole method of reducing costs. On the worker's side there is an undiscriminating resistance to all forms of change and a blind loyalty to the Union which leads him to follow its counsels in the teeth of reason and of his own interests. A change of attitude on both sides is necessary if there is to be any real rapprochement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the non-rectilinear relations between Great Britain and the rest of European integration in various industries like coal and steel, oil and gas and electricity. It talks about Great Britain's withdrawal from the European Union by winning upon the Brexit vote in 2016. It talks about political blunders and wrong strategies associated with the Brexit campaign leading to separation of UK from the rest by making the mutually conducive negotiations tough and difficult.