The Lord Palmerston blog says:
It was the ever-erudite @allanholloway who brought to my attention a few weeks back that more coal mines closed under Harold Wilson’s governments than under Margaret Thatcher’s, and I owe him an apology for not having credited him sooner, given the number of retweets I got for passing that on earlier. Based on these figures from the government about 290 mines closed under Wilson in all his time in office, and about 160 under Thatcher. Because the figures are based on year end totals of pits operating, it’s not possible to be precise, but the relative scale of those numbers is clear. So why isn’t Wilson execrated by the Left for his part in the decline of coal mining?
You are right, a loss making public enterprise could very well be converted to a profitable private company. Just look at the likes of British Gas or British telecom (BT), and especially British Petroleum (BP).
The issue with British Coal mines is that no-one wanted to buy them, why do you think it was the workers themselves who purchased the mines and not an already established mining company?
To look at why no-one wanted to buy them, you will undoubtedly bring about many emotional responses. The mine workers were regarded as over-paid, militant and unproductive workers by comparison to their international colleagues. The mines would have required a huge and costly overhaul, no doubt resulting many job losses (particularly with the pen-pushers) it would have needed spending cuts and possibly even some part-closures. There is no way the NUM would have let that any of that happen, regardless of the necessity for it.
It's not hard to see that no investor would have wanted to spend £millions trying to give the mines a profitable overhaul, only to be forced back into a loss-making position by the NUM.
It's a sad state of affairs to lose an industry so deeply routed in British society but it is very true what they say, Thatcher didn't kill the mines, Arthur Scargill and the National Union of Mineworkers did.
Mmmmm, good question. Why?