People do love to rewrite history

IT is amazing how some people rewrite recent history when there are still people around who were living at the time. Mr John W Gray (Feedback,

October 30) maintains that the unions did not break our industry in the 1970s and blames it on Ted Heath and the three-day week of 1973/74.

If he cares to carry out some research he will find that even the Labour-friendly newspapers The Guardian and Independent blame industrial action, especially of the miners, in bringing the country to its knees.

There was a worldwide problem of oil supplies and the miners seized the opportunity of bringing the government down by creating a coal shortage.

Apart from bringing the government down, it also caused a lot of small businesses to collapse. Arthur Scargill tried the same trick ten years later

but it did not work.

What did happen was that the UK got a bad record for industrial action, so much international business did not come our way and gave other countries the opportunity to gain from our sad situation. Mike Milligan (Chronicle,

October 30) also uses a quote out of context to make a political point.

Norman Tebbitt’s ‘Get on your bike’ speech was in response to riots over unemployment in certain parts of the country.

What he said was that riots were not the answer, he was taught metaphorically to get on your bike and look elsewhere for work.

The same problem exists today. There are some parts of the country in which there is a labour shortage but many people are not willing to move to find it.

Before becoming an MP, Norman was a union official and when in government he still maintained his union loyalty.

I think we can forgive him for his much later outbursts on a number of subjects after the horrific experience he and his wife had in the IRA bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton.

BRIAN TAYLOR, North Shields