The cost of everything, the worth of nothing

Subject: The cost of everything, the worth of nothing.

Can one believe that the coal miners who were lost, killed during a shift were docked their wage for the shift by the owners for not having completed the shift. It's almost beyond belief that the mind set of the mine owners would value their workers, other human beings, with such low esteem. The owners valued the pony's more than the miners, the pony's were harder to replace and it was money and only money that had worth. The conditions underground, the lack of safety, the implicit inhumanity towards a section of their own community was staggering.
Film of the conditions down the pit were shown to people who had worked in the colliery in Wales known as the Big Pit, near the village of Blaenavon.  Men sprawled on their side hacking away at the coal seam with a pick in high temperatures, in the pitch black other than the light from the lamps on their helmets. Could that men be asked to work in such conditions one would expect their pay and entitlements to amount to something for the risk and the hardship but no, as the mine owners jealously guarded their profit even the size of the lump of coal had its price and much of the coal hewn from the face was not deemed worth paying for. Man's inhumanity to man is never more evidenced than working down a coal mine in the 1930s
I had reason to visit Blaenavon in 1997 when a chap I had known decided to move to there to take advantage of a cheap house, £20.000 and a grant to do it up.
"Ye donna get owt for nowt" and the downside was that he entered a traumatised society, dismembered of self respect, living on the dole, time on their hands to feed the flame of their discontent in the pub, with frequent fist fights and enormous animosity towards the English who in the form of Margaret Thatcher were the epitome of evil.
As I drove passed the old slag heaps which in winter look so bleak, in summer burst into green, nature unwilling to let go, I entered the slothful Orwellian life of the unemployed. There was no sign of vigour, only the routine acts which are necessary to survive, a dull plaintive acceptance of their lot. The youth never having known any better, stood on the street corners and looked with bored hostility at this car and its occupant. I found my friend in the pub surrounded by his cronies well into his second or third beer, a poultice against the harsh reality of his move into a forgotten land where the once proud miners had been betrayed by government.
We sneer and carp at Arthur Scargill, at his frenzied call to arms in the face of a Governments cold hearted indifference as it closed the mines for cheaper coal from the Continent, cheaper by the ton but at what cost to the society who's only source of income was their ability to mine the coal. The net cost was what I saw, a local society destroyed by a mathematical calculation of Sir Ian MacGregor and his boss, Mrs Thatcher.