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She offers to train him for free and take him to an audition in Newcastle in a few weeks. Wilkinson doesn’t give up, though, and thinks that Billy has a chance at earning a spot at the Royal Ballet School in London. Her plan to shut down the mines also did not include any provisions to assist out-of-work miners in finding new jobs. Her ideology and economic outlook was based on privatizing industries that had been previously subsidized by the government. She wanted to reduce the political influence of trade unions overall. She began to push harder for mines to be shut down, regardless of union cooperation. However, Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party in 1975, and then Prime Minister in 1979, and she agreed with “The Ridley Plan,” as it came to be known, quietly setting into motion the suggestions that Ridley had advised. The industry had been restructured between 19, with the cooperation of the NUM: halving the workforce, along with government and industry initiatives and subsidies, to provide alternate employment for laid-off miners. The richest seams of coal had been mined and the remaining coal was more expensive to reach. Under the Labour Party, the NUM flourished, and eventually became one of the most powerful unions in Britain.īy 1984, only 173 mines were still operating, and employment had dropped to 231,000. Heath and the Conservative Party were voted out, and Prime Minister Harold Wilson of the Labour Party (who had been PM before Heath) was voted back in. Instead, the public grew frustrated with Heath and a general election was held. (The 1974 NUM strike and its repercussions are depicted in “Imbroglio,” episode 9 of The Crown’s third season). At the time, Britain got most of its energy from coal, and Heath hoped that the public would blame the union for the blackouts and massive disruptions that occurred from the shortened workweek. During the 1974 strike, Prime Minister Edward Heath declared a state of emergency and instituted a three-day workweek in order to conserve energy. The union had previously gone on strike in 19, both times over wages. It was a major industrial action to shut down the British coal industry in an attempt to prevent coal pit closures. The strike, led by Arthur Scargill, the President of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) was against the National Coal Board (NCB), a government agency that had managed the coal industry since 1947, when it was nationalized. But in a sense, she also won the battle in the long-term, since my experience with those lessons scarred me to the point where I didn’t play music again for nearly two decades. She won the battle in the short-term, but when she passed away when I was 12 years old, the lessons finally stopped, as my overwhelmed now-single dad didn’t have the time or inclination to force me to continue. My mother and I spent the next six years in a nonstop battle over whether I was going to stick with the piano or not. And so, she forced me into piano lessons instead, (which I hated) with a very cruel teacher who used to scream at me and hit my hands when I made mistakes, and who considered my own taste in music to be irrelevant and plebeian, which she reminded me of constantly.
I had wanted to play bass since I was 6 years old, but my mother – otherwise a sensible, progressive sort – had a notion, (probably deeply ingrained from her own childhood) that the bass guitar was not an instrument that girls played. I was 15 years old at the time, and I had long given up my own childhood dream of being a bass player. Billy Elliot - the story of an 11 year old boy from a mining town in Northern England in the mid-80s who dreams of becoming a ballet dancer despite his disapproving family - was released 20 years ago, on September 29, 2000.
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