Back on the march - ex-miners to protest over pension funds
A former miner will lead 1,000 of his colleagues on a protest march over pension funds.
Bert Moncur, who worked at Murton Colliery from 1974 until its closure in 1991, will head the parade of pit workers from Trafalgar Square today.
And he admitted it may be a last chance for some of them to go on the march.
They will head to Downing Street and on to Westminster Hall to lobby MPs in their long-running row over the Mineworkers Pension Scheme.
Representatives of the National Mineworkers Pension Campaign, including Bert, claim billions of pounds have been taken from the scheme.
People from all over
Britain including the former Northumberland and Durham coalfields, Scotland, Wales and Yorkshire are expected to join him.
Mr Moncur said: “It is probably the last time we can do something like this. I am 66 soon and I won’t be marching again. I knew I had to do something.
“I shall be marching with some help from my friends. We are hoping there will be banners there, people with placards and people with
T-shirts saying ‘Stop The Pension Theft’.”
‘We are hoping that, on the back of the blood scandal and the Post Office, we can get our story out there.”
Around 110,000 former miners, and their beneficiaries, are left in the scheme, he said.
‘To date, successive governments have taken £8billion from the scheme and further £1.4billion reserve.”
He said that this was while many former miners were on £80 per week or less, and widows on even lower amounts.
In 2021, the Sunderland Echo reported that hundreds of ex-miners had died without ever seeing a penny of the several billion raised through the scheme since the privatisation of British Coal in the 1990s.
It was agreed the Government would act as guarantor for the corporation’s pension payouts, the Echo added.
It said that, since privatisation of the scheme in 1994, the Government has received 50% of surpluses in its value, in return for providing a guarantee that the value of pensions will not decrease.
Mr Moncur said: “The government didn't put one penny in but have plundered it.”