Labour MPs in areas that voted to leave the EU should not enable a process that will bring their constituents more misery
It took 35 years but now, perhaps, comes the final act of the miners’ strike that tore Britain apart for one long, bitter year in the mid-1980s. Decades later, the second woman prime minister is promising balm to heal the wounds inflicted by the first, as Theresa May offers bundles of cash to areas of the country punched hard by Margaret Thatcher’s war on the pits.
Of course, that’s not how it’s being presented. It’s true, too, that not every Labour leave-voting area now being pledged “transformative” investment was once marked by pitheads. Even so, a map of the Labour heartlands that voted to leave the European Union in 2016 does match up remarkably closely with the old coalfields. It would be easy to cast May’s proposed multibillion fund as an act of atonement for the damage the Tories did by crushing the miners, closing the pits and leaving many of those towns and villages to rot.
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2TwAqU5
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