Mining the Data

Alan at Biased BBC caught a rather striking example of a certain way of thinking at the BBC, as put into words by Nicky Campbell on Radio 5 Live during an interview with Labour MP Fabian Hamilton:

Would you like to do to the arms industry what people say Mrs Thatcher did to the coal mining industry, would you like to phase it out and close it down?

Alan describes this as a "schoolboy error" on Nicky Campbell's part, and presents the data to support it.

I can only add a little more data - but it's strikingly revealing data, and confirms that those "people" who Nicky Campbell mentions have only half the story (at best). The figures come from the National Coal Mining Museum in Wakefield.

Here are the number of people employed in the coal mines since the start of the 20th Century:

1900 - 780,000
1910 - 1,049,000
1920 - 1,248,000
1930 - 914,000
1944 - 710,000
1947 - 704,000
1950 - 691,000
1955 - 699,000
1960 - 602,000
1965 - 456,000
1970 - 287,000
1975 - 247,000
1980 - 230,000
1985 - 138,000
1990 - 57,000
1995 - 15,000
2000 - 8,000
2004 - 6,000

As you can see, the most dramatic drop happened between 1920 and 1930 - a fall of 334,000 (presumably something to do with the General Strike?). 

The next most most dramatic plunge came between 1960 and 1970 - a fall of 315,000.

The fall between 1980 and 1990 - a drop of 173,000 - was significantly smaller. 

The decline in coal mining jobs was well under way before Mrs Thatcher came to power, having already plummeted by over a million (an 81.6% fall) between 1920 and 1980. 

That may surprise some people, especially at the BBC perhaps.

Update: Many thanks to David for sending us the following fascinating graphs, which makes the story of the long decline of coal mining even starker.