In death, as in life, Margaret Thatcher left Britain divided today as working-class communities gathered for huge parties to celebrate her passing while a rag-bag of royals, political and business leaders arrived in London to mourn her death.
One of the biggest parties marking Thatcher’s death was held at Easington Colliery in County Durham, where former miners held a seven-hour gathering.
Easington Colliery was the last pit to close in the once-mighty Durham coalfield.
A commemoration to mark the 20th anniversary of its closure in April 1993, had been planned for months. Thatcher’s death brought an added incentive for the party in the community’s local club were prices were cut for the celebrations to a pound a pint.
Miners also arrived at Easington from Yorkshire, some wearing the distinctive yellow and black “COAL NOT DOLE” stickers worn in the 1984-85 strike.
Dave Douglass, who worked at Doncaster coalfield for 35 years, said he was there to mourn her birth as “she represented the system that we are all still suffering under.
“I’m also here to commemorate the loss of this pit and every pit in Great Britain,” he said.
“I have been watching so much psychotic drivel on the news this morning talking about the names of each horse in the funeral.
“It’s the kind of stage-managed stuff we see in North Korea.”
Former mining communities in Yorkshire were also at the heart of celebrations.
At one event rockets with images of Thatcher pasted on to them were ignited and soared skywards, exploding in bursts of colour.
At Dodworth outside Doncaster, where the pit once provided more than 1,000 jobs and was the economic bedrock of the community, celebrations lasted all day, culminating in an evening concert.
Former miners at south Elmsall in West Yorkshire booked a local hotel for a party, laying on a free buffet to all who joined in.
And National Union of Mineworkers Yorkshire area chairman Chris Skidmore took part in celebrations at Higham, near Doncaster.
“I worked at Bullcliffe Wood, one of the six pits on the original hit-list before the strike,” he said.
“People remember Cortonwood – but Bullcliffe was one as well.
“The lads always said we’d have a toast with champagne when she went.”
Scottish miners celebrate Thatcher’s funeral with whisky and morbid jokes. Wreaths are laid at memorial to dead pitmen at Monktonhall as one sacked miner says: ‘She destroyed Scotland’: here.
Thatcher’s funeral: Pomp in the service of political reaction: here.
Senior Tory figures attempted to exploit the aftermath of Thatcher’s funeral to urge even more brutal anti-union laws today – but were branded “hypocrites” by leading trade unionists: here.
Lingering resentment felt by mining communities towards Baroness Thatcher.
Street parties break out as some of those who were most opposed to her policies seek to counter those paying tribute.The death of Baroness Thatcher has been welcomed by critics of the former prime minister – who labelled her “heartless” and claimed she “destroyed” parts of the country.
Street parties broke out in several locations as those who resented her policies and their consequences celebrated the leader who was more devisive than almost any other in recent history.
As tributes to the 87-year-old flooded in from across the globe, widespread condemnation of her legacy – particularly on social media – showed her ability to polarise opinion remained.
Margaret Thatcher milk snatcher? Iron lady still divides in death
by FP Staff Apr 9, 2013
… But while US President Barack Obama spoke for many in the wider world in praising the grocer’s daughter with the eyes as steely as her resolve, the scars of bitter struggles left Britain itself as deeply divided now as under her leadership.
Tuesday’s newspapers told the story: “The Woman Who Saved Britain”, declared the Daily Mail from the right; “The Woman Who Divided A Nation”, headlined the left’s Daily Mirror, which questioned the grand, ceremonial funeral planned for next week. …
“Very few leaders get to change not only the political landscape of their country but of the world. Margaret was such a leader. Her global impact was vast,” said Tony Blair, whose term as Labour prime minister from 1997-2007 he acknowledged owed a debt to the former leader of his Conservative opponents. …
Obama led an outpouring of tributes from the United States: “America has lost a true friend,” he said.
Mourners laid roses, tulips and lilies on the doorstep of her house in Belgravia, one of London’s most exclusive areas. One note said: “The greatest British leader” while another said to “The Iron Lady”, a soubriquet bestowed by a Soviet army newspaper in the 1970s and which Thatcher loved.
Mrs Thatcher’s death was a “great day” for coal miners, David Hopper, general secretary of the Durham Miners’ Association said. The ex-miner, who turned 70 today, spent all of his working life at Wearmouth Colliery. He said: “It looks like one of the best birthdays I have ever had. “There’s no sympathy from me for what she did to our community. She destroyed our community, our villages and our people.”
The abiding domestic images of her premiership will remain those of conflict: huge police confrontations with mass ranks of coalminers whose year-long strike failed to save their pits and communities; Thatcher riding a tank in a white headscarf; and flames rising above Trafalgar Square in the riots over the deeply unpopular “poll tax” which contributed to her downfall.
“I found her to be confrontational, dogmatic, abrasive, she attacked people in her own country and didn’t listen to people in her own party,” recalled Caspar Joseph, 51, a history teacher in Manchester. “She was destructive, nihilistic.
“I will be raising a glass. I have some 1992 Dom Perignon which I have been saving for either the birth of my first grandchild or the death of Margaret Thatcher … but actually I might drink some Argentinian wine – her attitude was contemptible over the Falklands.”
Some opponents said on social media that they would hold a party to celebrate her death while a website set up to ask if Thatcher was dead had received 180,000 likes by midday and was updated with a large block-capital “Yes.
To those who opposed her she was blunt to a degree.
“The lady’s not for turning”, she once informed members of her own Conservative Party who were urging her to moderate her policies. In power, she faced plotting inside her party from those who thought she was unreasonably divisive.
Margaret Thatcher’s death greeted with street parties in Brixton and Glasgow: here.
Hundreds gather in Glasgow, Liverpool and Brixton to ‘celebrate’ death of Margaret Thatcher: here.
Some responses by artists and performers to Margaret Thatcher, who died yesterday. here.
The dictate that one ‘not speak ill of the dead’ is (at best) appropriate for private individuals, not influential public figures: here.
MARGARET Thatcher was ignored by the bourgeoisie for 23 years after she was put out of office by the Tory leadership in 1990. This was when her disastrous attempt to bring in a Poll Tax started a revolt on the scale of the original 1381 insurrection. She has now been rediscovered after her death by the same ruling class that dumped her: here.
Left MPs will boycott an emergency parliamentary session for Margaret Thatcher tomorrow, branding it a “waste of taxpayers’ money”: here.
CHARLESTON — A report released today by the United Mine Workers of America on West Virginia’s worst mine disaster in 40 years said conduct by the company was “industrial homicide.”
In a cruel irony, as the third anniversary of the Upper Big Branch (UBB) mine disaster approaches this week, cuts due to the “sequester” are leading to the dismantling of legal teams assembled by the government to enforce mine safety. The cutbacks will reduce by $2.1 million the $22 million Congress originally allocated to a temporary project to speed up the processing of safety citations against mine operators.
The April 5, 2010 explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine in Montcoal, West Virginia, owned at the time by Massey Energy, killed 29 coal miners. Flagrant safety violations on the part of Massey led to the disaster. Basic precautions were ignored, including ensuring proper ventilation and dusting work areas. A spark ignited accumulated methane gas, generating a massive coal dust-fueled blast that traveled through miles of tunnels, destroying everything and everyone in its path.
In a rationally organized society concerned with the welfare of its working population and the safe operation of industry, the UBB disaster anniversary would be the occasion to assess conditions in mine safety and consider what new steps could be taken to improve the conditions of mine workers to prevent such tragedies in the future.
But the opposite is occurring. In the current climate in Washington—in which there is “no money” to finance anything but the bank accounts of the corporate elite—cuts are being implemented that will allow mine operators to continue their unsafe operations, inevitably leading to more accidents and deaths.
The Litigation Backlog Project was set up by the US Labor Department in the wake of the Upper Big Branch disaster to deal with the backlog of contested mine safety citations. By contesting citations from the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA), mine owners have been able to avoid racking up large numbers of repeated serious violations that would land them in the agency’s “pattern of violation” program, where they would face greater scrutiny and could even be shut down.
After the UBB disaster, the number of unresolved appeals by mine operators had grown to 16,600, and Massey Energy had the highest contestation rate of any operator in the country. As long as the citations were being challenged, MSHA could not issue higher fines for repeated serious violations. In the five years leading up to the tragic explosion, Massey had been fined a mere $1.89 million in penalties on 1,422 citations at the Upper Big Branch mine.
The sequestration cuts will close two of the Litigation Backlog Project’s five offices, and 30 of the 74 lawyers hired for the project will be laid off by June 1. Robert J. Lesnick, chief judge of the citation review panel, criticized the move in a comment reported in the Washington Post: “If litigation is the bite in any enforcement model, then [the Labor Department], in firing 30 attorneys, is pulling its teeth.”
The winding down of the project is only the latest installment in a process that has allowed Massey Energy to receive what amounted to a slap on the wrist for the deaths of 29 miners. The company was assessed $10.8 million in fines for 369 citations—astonishingly the largest financial penalty for any mine disaster in US history.
Unsafe amounts of mercury have been found in four in five adults and 60 per cent of fish sold at markets in a Peruvian jungle area ravaged by illegal gold mining.
Mercury is a byproduct of small-scale gold mining practiced by about 40,000 illegal miners in the Madre de Dios region on the border with Bolivia and Brazil.
The institution said women of childbearing age were worst hit – and also the most vulnerable to mercury.
The metal is a neurotoxin and can cause severe, permanent brain damage to an unborn child.
Unlike legal mining in the Andean highlands, the mining in Madre de Dios consists chiefly of scouring riverbeds and alluvial deposits for gold flecks that stick to mercury.
SQUADS of the Greek anti-terrorist units and riot police armed with automatic weapons, early on Thursday morning occupied the small coastal town of Ierissos in northern Greece, about 100km east of Salonica.
The armed police raided houses in the town of those accused of attacking the installations of the gold mining company Greek Gold last week.
The police operation, likened by the town’s inhabitants to a ‘foreign army occupation’, triggered off mass protests with people confronting the armed police and demanding that they be withdrawn from the town.
Instead the police attacked them, making extensive use of tear-gas. People then set up barricades and made fires to lessen the tear-gas’ effects. The clashes between the town’s inhabitants and the armed police spread to the fields around the town.
Tear-gas choked up the town and a canister hit a boy in a school yard. Students came out in the streets and were confronted by riot-police. Four 15-year-old students were arrested. Despite the Ierissos’ school headmaster’s protests to the town’s police station, the military-style operation continued all day.
The Salonica director of the office of public prosecutor Panagis Yiannakis called a joint meeting for yesterday morning of Ierissos representatives, the area’s Mayor Christos Pakhtas and the chief of police Athinagoras Pazarlis.
The meeting did not take place as both the Mayor and the chief of police refused to attend. The Ierissos people’s committee issued a statement saying that Mayor Pakhtas is not welcome in the town. In 2003, Pakhtas resigned as deputy Finance Minister after being accused of involvement in illegal negotiations for the sale of the gold mines.
Thousands of people demonstrated in Salonica on Thursday against the police operation at Ierissos.
In Athens on Thursday about 3,000 college and university students marched through the city centre against the government’s scheme to close down at least one third of all college and university departments throughout Greece.
More than 10,000 people took to the streets of Greece’s second largest city Thessaloniki on Saturday to protest against a gold mine being developed by a Canada-based transnational: here.
Mr Griffin has attempted to cash in on the campaign by making a statement in support.
The group responded with a swift rejection.
They said in a statement: “It has been drawn to our attention that the fascist BNP’s leader Nick Griffin has voiced support for the campaign for a public inquiry into violent police action at Orgreave cokeworks during the 1984-85 miners’ strike.
“We wish to make it unequivocally clear that Griffin and his BNP are anti-trade union and enemies of the miners and the organised working class.
“His support for our campaign is unwanted, unwelcome and totally rejected.”
Leading Environmentalist Rebecca Tarbotton of Rainforest Action Network Dies at 39
Leading environmentalist and human rights champion Rebecca “Becky” Tarbotton, executive director of the organization Rainforest Action Network (RAN), has died at the age of 39.
According to RAN, Tarbotton died Wednesday on a beach in Mexico while vacationing with her husband and friends. The coroner ruled cause of death as asphyxiation from water she breathed in while swimming.
“Tarbotton was the first female executive director of RAN, and a strong female voice in a movement often dominated by men,” quotes RAN in a press release. “Under her leadership, RAN was engaged in protecting endangered rainforests and the rights of their indigenous inhabitants. Most recently, she helped to design the most significant agreement in the history of the organization: A landmark policy by entertainment giant, Disney, that is set to transform everything about the way the company purchases and uses paper.”
Democracy Now! host Amy Goodmanwrote about Tarbotton’s work this May after RAN activists climbed 100 feet to suspend a banner on Charlotte’s Bank of America stadium, where President Obama was scheduled to make his nomination acceptance speech. The banner read “Bank of America” with the word “America” crossed out and replaced with “Coal.” Tarbotton told her: “Bank of America is the lead financier of mountaintop-removal mining, which is a practice of mining which is really the worst of the worst mining that we see anywhere, essentially blowing the tops off of mountains in Appalachia, destroying people’s homes, polluting their water supplies. And that’s even before it gets into the coal plants, where it’s burnt and creates air pollution in inner-city areas and all around our country … [it’s] the canary in the coal mine for our reliance on fossil fuels.”
“Becky was a leader’s leader. She could walk into the White House and cause a corporate titan to reevaluate his perspective, and then moments later sit down with leaders from other movements and convince them to follow her lead,” said Ben Jealous, executive director of the NAACP and a close friend, upon news of her passing. “If we had more heroes like her, America and the world would be a much better place.”
Researchers are using termites to find precious metals beneath Australia’s landscape.
CSIRO RESEARCHERS ARE USING termites to track gold and other precious mineral deposits.
“A lot of Australia’s landscape is covered by a layer of material that is capping and hiding resources, so we are using termites to help see beneath that. Because they construct their nests, in part, with material which is a little bit deeper down,” says Dr Aaron Stewart, a CSIRO researcher.
Termites and ants burrow into the depth of the ground where ‘fingerprints’ of underlying gold deposits are found. The insects bring traces of these fingerprints up to the surface when making their nests.
Large termite mounds in Northern Australia and Africa have previously been used in mineral exploration. But by studying termite sites in Western Australia the CSIRO research team has shown that smaller nests, which are common throughout Australia, are just as valuable in identifying gold deposits.
“Our recent research has shown that small ant and termite mounds that may not look like much on the surface are just as valuable in finding gold as the large African mounds that stand at several meters tall,” says Aaron.
Termites could be used to mine other precious metals
In the future insects could be used commercially by mining companies to determine the location of gold and other mineral deposits, according to scientists. The technique could present an environmentally-friendly alternative to invasive drilling methods.
“By developing these methods it will make life much easier for exploration companies working in areas with a lot of transported sediment cover,” says Dr Ravi Anand, who co-authored the paper. “It will also cut down the cost of exploration.”
“We haven’t demonstrated that we can use termites to find other mineral resources yet,” says Aaron. “But in principle, there is no reason why we can’t.”
Mineral resources make up $86.7 billion of Australia’s exports and new discoveries in many commodities are needed to sustain production, which pushes pioneering exploration research.
One should hope that exploiting the gold and other metals found by the termites and ants will happen without mercury or other stuff poisoning the environment of those termites and other wildlife, as happens often in gold digging.
World’s largest reindeer herd in danger of extinction
George River herd shrunk from 8-900,000 to fewer than 30,000
December 2012. A reindeer herd which was once the largest in the world has shrunk to a fraction of its former size, official surveys have revealed. Canada‘s George River Herd once numbered 8-900,000, but a recent government survey found that only 27,600 animals survive.
The herd’s unprecedented and dramatic decline has left local indigenous people fearful for its survival. A ‘tsunami of factors’ has been blamed for the decline, which government ministers have called ‘significant and frightening.’
63% drop in 2 years
The reindeer, known as caribou in North America, is central to the lives and culture of many indigenous peoples in the sub-Arctic. The 63% population drop just in the last two years has left many of them shocked.
Mining
Speaking to Survival International, George Rich, an elder from northeast Canada’s Innu people, said, ‘one of the major factors is continued mining and mineral exploration. For example, Quest Minerals has recently announced that it wants to build a road through the heart of the calving grounds, as well as flying helicopters and planes back and forth from exploration sites.’
Canada’s promotion of industrial projects on its land has destroyed large tracts of the reindeer’s grazing grounds, heavily disrupting migratory routes. The herd’s decline has led some biologists to blame indigenous hunting practices. However the Innu, who have co-existed with the caribou for thousands of years, have been quick to defend themselves.
Rich said, ‘the government always blames the Aboriginal people, but we are deeply connected to the caribou and have lived with them for generations.’
Many Innu are calling for greater control over their territories and resources, and to be treated as equals in decisions that affect their lands and the animals that live there.
Stephen Corry, Survival International’s Director said today, ‘It’s easy to blame indigenous peoples for over-hunting because they’ve usually no voice to defend themselves from these accusations. Yet it’s been proven in countless studies that they are the world’s best conservationists. When will governments and scientists realize this? We need to start listening to what indigenous peoples have to say about matters on their own land: they know best.’
