Re: Jerez is burning
 

but it will be orchestrated by the council reducing the amount they will pay for the work.
this should mean the main elements of refuse collection should remain the same, its the extras that will go by the board.

Outsourcing can sometimes work, and makes the councils look "lean and mean" but really all they are doing is transferring the admin etc onto another organisation, it still has to be paid for, some members of the public refusing to understand this doesn't help.

`

Re: Jerez is burning
 

3 years ago back in the UK a small parade of shops near our vets has a small newsagents cum general store, there the fluorescent tubes had been turned off so instead of 4 per unit there was only one. A sign of the times that even back then the asian couple that run it were having difficulty in paying the electricity, especially when they stopped stocking frozen food and turned the freezers off.

`

Re: Jerez is burning
 

But it was a reduction in the amount the council pays Urbaser (30% I think, €1.5 million a year) that kicked off the whole affair. They were going to pass all of this cut onto staffing costs, but now because of the strike they are having to bear some of the cost from their profits. Which is only fair, don't you think?

So in future in order to restore their profitability they will not replace people who leave, and cut the level of service to the bare bones of their contract.

At least their employees are getting paid though, there are some places where dustmen are employed directly by the council and they haven't been paid for months!

Re: Jerez is burning
 

I believe she has quite a lot of support, not everyone looks at Politics with one eye closed.

Re: Jerez is burning
 

Lots of support. Cometh the hour, cometh the Iron Lady.

She came along just when desperately needed, when the unions were trying to overthrow the democratically elected govt.
The country stupidly failed to back Heath when he made a similar stand in the 70s and paid for it, but little doubt people had decided enough was enough by the time Maggie came along.

She was the only one with the balls to bring the country back into the real world and did a great job during her first term of straightening out the main problems.
Just a shame she lost the plot during her second term, became a tad dictatorial and totally ignored any well meaning good advice from the rest of her own party.

Apologies for losing the plot myself :lol:,supposed to be about Jerez innit ?
Anyway good to see things are turning around and they're getting the place cleaned up.
Must have been down to all the bad press from B.E. :cool:

Re: Jerez is burning
 

Fancy telling me what she did that was SO right?

Re: Jerez is burning
 

totally agree.
Heath asked the nation "Who runs this country - the Government or the Unions" and the nation said the latter. After that he was very much a broken politician, having lost such a vote in an General Election.
Thatcher vowed she would never give in to the unions. Yes, it was bloody, but at the end of the day she stuck to her guns and refused to give in. That broke the unions, who yes lost many members due to redundancies, but considering they were in jobs that weren't needed, down pits that were not economically viable, feeding poor quality metals into steel plants that we should have bombed at the same time as we did the Ruhr.
But from that came a realisation that the unions were actually keeping the country lagging behind the rest of the world with bad practices and overmanning.
I repeat, under Thatcher we had a period where the unemployable were in jobs.
Bliar/Blown just did what the unions wanted, sucked up to them, not for the good of the country but for the good of the Labour party. Spent all the money so that when they left office they could leave notes saying "There's nothing left in the kitty"

And all Jerez is is what we saw 30 years ago, just Spain hasnt had the freedom to express itself under the Iron General.

`

Re: Jerez is burning
 

You tell em Don, no matter how many facts prove you wrong, you keep telling 'em!

Re: Jerez is burning
 

She emasculated the unions and she put a stop to the disgusting practice of sending good men underground to extract worthless coal.

Re: Jerez is burning
 

To be fair it wasn't worthless coal at all and while I agree she broke the union power and led to a change in union practices some might say she made it easier to bring in cheaper coal which ultimately led to our coal no longer being economically viable and the pits being capped.

She led the way to the now recognised disaster of our utility companies owned by foreign corporations and essentially unaccountable here in the UK. You only have to look at what nPower have announced in the last 24 hours, that despite the ombudsmen and government looking into the excessive and complicit price hikes, they will raise their prices for their poorest customers by 9%, on top of last years huge hike. I don't doubt that Twatcher brought an end to the shambles that came before her, she brought a certain stability to British Politics but to sit and claim there was zero unemployment and to rose tint her terms is utter tosh! Have we forgotten that unemployment hit 4 million? If she did so much good how on earth did that happen?

Re: Jerez is burning
 

The mass unemployment regarded by Thatcher as "a price worth paying" as she famously said is what gave birth to today's benefit dependency culture, as in many areas outside the prosperous South East of England, since heavy industry all but disappeared, it became the norm for no adults in a household to be in work, which continued from generation to generation. Once something becomes the norm, there ceases to be any stigma attached to it.

It was during those times that moving unemployed people on to long term sickness benefit in order to disguise the true extent of employment first became official Government policy. Why are we surprised at disability benefit fraud today when this was actively promoted by Thatcher and her successors?

It is not only privatisation of the utilities that has proved disastrous and very costly for the consumer (and now details are emerging about how the private utility companies have manipulated the setting of wholesale gas prices, much like the banks did the LIBOR rate). What effect did contracting out services like hospital cleaning and sterile supply services have? Has privatising care homes for the elderly resulted in people receiving better care for lower prices? Has it hell as like. Railtrack - cutting corners on safety in order to keep costs down was found to be the cause of more than one rail disaster and led to the ultimate downfall of the company. And then the shareholders thought they should be compensated from public funds!!!!

Selling off council houses - very popular at the time and a vote winner for Thatcher. But that is what has led to today's situation of the taxpayer subsidising inflated rents paid to private landlords who have done very nicely out of what used to be the social housing sector.

Re: Jerez is burning
 

Although I think we should return to the jerez issue, I just have to say I am always absolutely amazed at how some people seem to have such a blinkered view of the Thatcher Years. Oh, I'm sure that many of the upper echelons did very well out of it, but in general the working man suffered badly. You could argue of course that it's still happening. I seem to remember that she deemed it necessary to deregulate the financial sector. Good move eh, leaving the financial sector to run riot unfettered.

I lived through it as well. I remember the nations discontent. I remember the high unemployment, interest rates and the recession, I remember her political life being saved once her popularity had waned, by the small matter of a small war. I thank Pocaloca for illustrating that the impression that employment was low at that time is a complete fallacy. Just not true! The working class suffered badly and anyone who thinks that NOT having unions to protect them (especially in this day and age) is deluding themselves.

So .... one of the least popular leaders of all time, and even within her party who eventually threw her out themselves to save the government :);)

Re: Jerez is burning
 

Maybe it needed to be pointed out! I wonder if a person of a similar character will come along to save Jerez? I do hope so.

Re: Jerez is burning
 

I've been to Jerez, why would you wish something so cruel on them?

Re: Jerez is burning
 

Me too. I would hope the rubbish has been taken care of when I eventually return.

Re: Jerez is burning
 

Winter of Discontent....unions threatened to bring the country to its knees.
Not just rubbish uncolected, cemetary gates locked, grave diggers on strike, corpses piled up.

Re: Jerez is burning
 

:rofl: Corpses piled up all over the place!:rofl:
Only 80 gravediggers were on strike in Liverpool and Tameside, Greater Manchester, in January 1979 and the 150 bodies were stored in a factory, but your "corpses piled up" sounds much better. A few militant gravediggers "up north" hardly bothered the rest of the country.

Re: Jerez is burning
 

Lorry drivers and dock workers blockading ports and roads. No sugar, no loo rolls! Many staples such as tea and coffee effectively rationed.
No petrol - the delivery drivers were on strike-- Queuing for hours to fill the car.
Rail drivers striking Tuesdays and Thursdays which meant the rolling stock was in the wrong place Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and most of Friday.
So effectively no trains.
So we tried driving but there was often no petrol and roads so jammed I had to leave home at 4 in the morning, and got home at 10 or 11 at night.
So I started sleeping on the office floor, weeks at a time. As did thousands of others.
Ambulance workers on strike and when I took my mother to hospital myself, she was left on a trolley for 48 hours because the porters were on a go slow. Mind you she had plenty of company!
The country bankrupt and dependent on funding from the IMF.
It is often said that if you can remember the 60s you weren't there. That certainly seems to be the case with the 70s.

Re: Jerez is burning
 

Well said Lynn.:thumbsup:

Re: Jerez is burning
 

Again very very true.

Re: Jerez is burning
 

Thereby putting those good men on the dole and their sons after them. I am sure all those Welsh miners would thank you for that thought.

Re: Jerez is burning
 

Ummm, the unemployable were in jobs! That makes a lot of sense. A lot of bloody hardworking men thrown on the scrap heap so we could then import coal and steel from abroad. These same men would then be put on unemployment benefit so instead of their taxes going in to the coffers of the Government the said Government would be paying them unemployment pay, plus whole villages became ghost towns as the shops that provided them with goods could not then stay open themselves. We have now become a service industry and hardly make anything ourselves importing everything from China, and the Phillipenes etc. What else did she do she sold off our electricity, gas and water so that the only people who benefit from their profits are the share holders. When I think of it she did the same for the railways. Oh yes Maggie did a grand job breaking the Unions.

Re: Jerez is burning
 

Well no-one has said she got everything right but she certainly sorted out the festering pustule that was Britain in the '70s. Another thing she got right was killing off Old Labour. The fact that this gave rise to Bliar's New Labour was an unfortunate consequence.

Re: Jerez is burning
 

And when you really think about it, did she really even do that? IMO, the NUM did more to defeat themselves, with the idiotic leadership and tactics adopted by Scargill (I hate that man nearly as much as I hate Thatcher) and the willingness of the UDM to break the strike because they thought it would save their own jobs. Well, they found out in short order how much any assurances they might have been given on that score were worth.

As far as the rest of the unions are concerned, I seem to remember that only a couple of months ago the tanker drivers only had to hint that they MIGHT go on strike to spark a bout of panic buying that led to such ridiculous situations as people trying to fill jam jars in the boot of their car with petrol. I've read the Colonel Blimp types on this forum complaining only this summer about the rail unions holding the country to ransom by threatening to strike during the Olympics. Likewise about the public sector unions such as the Border Force staff striking. They don't sound exactly moribund to me, although numbers have certainly declined since the 1980s.

Re: Jerez is burning
 

Basicallly it was a combination of Maggies determination and public opinion that finally did the trick.

Unfortunately public opinion was very much divided when Heath made his last stand in the 70s.

Even that was bit late in the day, because the rot had already set well in back in the 60s, when such as the car workers were repeatedly downing tools at the drop of a hat, not having enough sense to see that they were shooting themselves in the foot and playing a major part in handing over their industry on a plate to the Japanese.

Re: Jerez is burning
 

In those times I wasn't working in any of the industrial heartlands or big cities, nor did I use rail transport or have to visit hospital, but I can't remember experiencing any of the other things like no loo rolls, sugar, coffee, tea, petrol etc. I just read out part of your post to my wife and asked if she could remember these things, just in case I'd lost my memory. Like me, she says she can't remember any of those things.:confused: Not saying it didn't happen where you were, but not where we were living.

Re: Jerez is burning
 

So if you had a business frying eggs, and you employed 50 people to fry one egg a day but only had 10 eggs left with no more eggs being laid, would you carry on paying everyone on the grounds that you wanted to employ their sons to fry eggs that you will never have?

Re: Jerez is burning
 

Memory does play tricks, but all I remember is the unending misery of years and years of railway and power strikes. Hours standing on freezing platforms not knowing when or if a train might turn up, or if it did, whether it would actually go to its destination or stop half way. Begging floor space from friends when the last train did not materialise.. Sleeping at the station a few times, freezing all the time. Until they closed the stations.
Buying a gas hob for the first house I bought (although it already had an electric stove) so that we would be able to cook something if the electricity were off, and could use the electricity if the gas were off. And everybody I know still does that to this very day - just in case.
We had to buy and install a standby generator to put on the office roof (not easy to afford with so many companies on the brink of collapse) so that we could keep the ancient switchboard running and some form of power to keep the lights and heating on with all of us sleeping on floors.

I think the intention was to bring the cities to their knees.

I remember during one of the strikes the office boy (18 years old and a real East Ender) not turning up till lunchtime on a Monday.
Given how close we were to going out of business (we were an import export company with blockaded goods rotting in the docks), he was about to be sacked when we found out he had taken his dad's car or van across on the ferry, loaded up with loo rolls or sugar, and sold them around his neighbourhood at a considerable profit. Later wound up running the trading division of one of the larger merchants.

Re: Jerez is burning
 

Main thing I remember (we had just moved into our first house) was being constantly cold at night because the power was off, and going out regularly in the evening after work to the local country pub where we could at least sit in the warm by a log fire

Re: Jerez is burning
 

Yes - it seems people think that the mining industry (and others) should have been some sort of charity. For balance I would say that more should have been done to provide alternative employment in the worst hit areas.

Re: Jerez is burning
 

£millions was pumped in but misspent by union bosses and their friends, some was spent for the good of the community but far more was wasted or ended up in the usual Spanish practice - back pockets and brown envelopes.

even the miners dying of coal related diseases were shafted by their unions and the firm of solicitors they had to use, losing up to 40% of their payouts, some never lived long enough to receive it because unions and solicitors dragged things out.

for how long do you keep sending men down into the depths to scrabble for coal that isnt worth bringing to the surface, that costs more and more every inch they go underground, not just financially but in the cost to the people themselves. If there was so much "good coal" down there surely someone with modern technology would have had it out by now.

and how much did Scargill take from the Russian miners union to feather his own nest, money that was paid over to support the UK's miners.??

`

Re: Jerez is burning
 

The same is happening in Spain, they are having to dig deeper and deeper to produce even more expensive poor coal. Some coal is double the price of coal on the open market, only the open cast mines are profitable. Huge subsidies have kept coal mining afloat, and the recently cut in subsidies had the miners marching to Madrid and running battles with the police. I predict it won't be too long before it goes the way of the UK coal industry, there comes a point where you can't keep pumping subsidies in what is a dying industry.
http://www.libremercado.com/2012-07-...lo-1276463068/

Re: Jerez is burning
 

More done by whom though? If you have one bucket of cash to hand out money adding another name on the bucket doesn't increase the amount you can hand out.

Re: Jerez is burning
 

At the end of the day the miners were much better out of it.
The ones I know from my own area are honest enough to admit it.

Some took a few years to get back into work again, but with the sort of redundancy payments they received they could afford to, that's if they hadn't stupidly blown it on a bar in Spain, which quite a few of them did.

I once visited an NUM annual conferance as a guest. They used to throw members contributions around like confetti.

As much booze as they could drink, as many women as they wanted and a special all-in treat for a party of visiting Russian Miners Union reps.

A far cry from the Siberian Salt mines. :cool:

Re: Jerez is burning
 

my paternal family were miners, my father's 5 elder brothers told him he wasnt to work down the pit where they and father were, when he protested they told him he had to find something else to do, if he took one step on the site they would physically throw him out.

yes, there were horror stories, grandfather and his relatives were all down the mines as well, but generally all lived to well past their 60's and one or two into their 80's. I am not saying they had a medically fit lifestyle but they were around to play with children and grandchildren.

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Re: Jerez is burning
 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkOteYufGOg

I indirectly saw plenty of the dark side of it and this sad ballad is very apt.

Working Man"


It's a working man I am
And I've been down underground
And I swear to God
If I ever see the sun

Oh for any length of time
I can hold it in my mind
I never again
Will go down underground

At the age of sixteen years
Oh he quarrels with his peers
He vowed they'd never
See another one

In the dark recess of the mine
Where you age before your time
And the coal dust lies heavy
On your lungs

It's a working man I am
And I've been down underground
And I swear to God
If I ever see the sun

Oh for any length of time
I can hold it in my mind
I never again
Will go down underground

At the age of sixty four
He will greet you at the door
And he will gently lead you
By the arm

Through the dark recess of the mine
He will take you back in time
And he'll tell you of
The hardships that were had

It's a working man I am
And I've been down underground
And I swear to God
If I ever see the sun

Oh for any length of time
I can hold it in my mind
I never again will go down underground

I never again will go down underground

Re: Jerez is burning
 

:starsmile:

:goodpost:

Re: Jerez is burning
 

Funny how we've gone from burning rubbish to burning coal!

But there are still miners working in horrible unsafe conditions all over the world, like the ones in S Africa who got shot when they went on strike, or the ones in Chile who were buried underground. You'd think in this day and age they could get machines to do this sort of work?

Re: Jerez is burning
 

Machines now do much of the work, but still need men to operate them.
In addition there are many variable factors and problems continually occuring, that can only be sorted out by guys being down there at the sharp end in the filth and foul air at the coal face.

Re: Jerez is burning
 

see its got you confused

we have gone from Jerez to Thatcher to Mineworkers, its so easy in BES

mining machines have to have a man to operate them, they are not yet fully automatic and can't tell when the seam alters course.
that is why all the cries about the amount of coal left in closed UK mines falls on deaf ears.
and I know I wouldn't want to travel 5miles out under the North Sea to a coal face, where the water dripping in is pure North Sea.