Wealth & Money Quote by Arthur Scargill

Scargill is doing what he always did best: dragging the argument away from tidy market metaphors and back to the bruising arithmetic of power. “Alternative supplies” sounds like a clever technocratic fix - import a bit more, switch fuels, diversify. He treats it as a sideshow. In a capital-heavy industry, the costs are sunk, the workforce is trained for a specific system, the equipment can’t be repurposed on a whim. So the choice isn’t simply “buy elsewhere.” The choice is whether the state and employers are willing to write off an entire industrial ecosystem, with communities attached to it, as collateral damage.

The phrasing is blunt to the point of menace: “You still lose the money.” It’s a warning disguised as common sense. If you replace domestic coal with “alternative supplies,” you don’t magically avoid the bill; you just move it. The loss reappears as stranded investment, unemployment, hollowed-out regions, political backlash. Scargill is insisting that economic decisions are never purely economic - they are decisions about who eats the loss.

The context is the late-20th-century British battle over coal and the state’s role, especially under Thatcher: pits closing, unions fighting, government arguing efficiency and energy security. Scargill’s subtext is accusatory: diversification isn’t neutrality; it’s a strategy to break labor’s leverage while pretending it’s prudent management. He frames deindustrialization not as modernization, but as an elective write-down - and dares policymakers to admit they’re choosing it.