Politics Show: Yorkshire and Lincolnshire

Len Tingle Political Editor, Yorkshire and Lincolnshire

Politics Show, Sunday 07 March 2004

On this week's show...

Out of the pit?

Twenty years ago this week the first picket line went up at Cortonwood Colliery near Barnsley.

It was the spark for the year-long strike to save the coal industry.

This week the Politics Show for Yorkshire and Lincolnshire revisits the same spot.

There's not a single trace of the pit. It's now the site of a Morrison's supermarket .

Twenty years ago this week the total number of men and women with a job of any kind in Yorkshire was 1.8m people.

Today, despite the complete failure of the strike to save such a huge local industry, the workforce has grown to 2.1 million.

Twenty years ago this week entire classes of local schoolboys went to work in highly unhealthy conditions thousand of metres below ground.

Today children in the former coalfields are using education as the platform to far different adult lives.

This week, live from the site of what used to be Western Europe's biggest colliery, Len Tingle and Anna Crossley explore whether the striking miners suffering was necessary.

Is the region is now better off without the pits?

Join presenter Cathy Killick for The Politics Show on BBC One on Sundays at Noon.

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