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Focus on Cornwall :
Third World Shuts Down The Last Cornish Tin Mine
By John Stevens


TIN MINING IN BRITAIN is to end after over 2,500 years, with the closure of the last Cornish tin mine, despite heroic efforts by local people to keep it going.  The industry has been destroyed by cheap Third World imports.

The last mine, South Crofty near Redruth, had been struggling in the face of undercutting by Thai and Indonesian tin mines, which enjoy the advantage of cheap sweated labour and a total indifference to the environmental ruin caused by their ruthless strip-mining techniques.  Three years ago the mine was only saved from closing by 1,500 local Cornish people digging into their own pockets to invest a minimum of £200 each in the mine.  As one of these small investors, the Rev Martin Boyne of Pendeen, who with his wife put in £1 000, said at the time:

"We don't want Cornwall to be a wasteland, a place only for serving cream teas to tourists".  The locals were helped out by Ulster-born engineer and entrepreneur Mr Gerry Wright, who invested £3million in the mine in what he described as a business decision tempered with a bit of patriotism".  The mineworkers themselves worked their guts out to keep the mine going.  As Mr Wright said of the mine workforce: "They have been magnificent, I can't see how we could get costs any lower".  All to no avail.

Now Mr Wright, the Rev Boyne and all the other small local investors, some of them pensioners who risked their life savings so that their community should not die, have all lost the lot.  Despite being scheduled to produce 2,200 tons of tin this 'year, South Crofty was running at a huge loss because it had to try to sell its tin on the global market, competing against dirt-cheap Asian tin produced by peasants working under River Kwai bridge labour conditions.  Whilst further handicapped by the high sterling exchange rate, which makes all British produce more expensive to sell to foreigners.  As a result the mine was losing about £600 on every ton of tin it sold.  So South Crofty has been forced to close.

This has ended an industry for which Britain was famed 2,500 years ago in Classical Athens.  Socrates, Aristotle and their contemporaries knew our land as the Cassiterides, the Tin Islands.  At its peak in the 1870's tin mining employed 30,000 well-paid Cornish miners, tin was the backbone of Cornwall's economy and the St. Just area was the tin mining centre of the world.  Since then cheap foreign imports from the Third World have steadily eroded Britain's tin share of the British and other markets.  The Third Worlders not only undercut our tin, they wrecked the tin market for themselves and everyone else by selling up a fixed-price cartel, the International Tin Council, which in the 1970's tried to corner the market and succeeded for a while in keeping the world tin price artificially high.  The result was that consumers switched to cheaper substitutes and the world market for tin collapsed.  Even today it is 18% down on its 1970's peak.  The Tin Council cartel collapsed in bankruptcy in 1985 causing prices to fall to 20 year lows, which put paid to most of the then surviving Cornish mines.

The closure of the last mine will cost 266 jobs in an area where one in four men is out of work.  The local Redruth and Camborne area was benefiting from the mine to the tune of about £3million a year pumped into the economy by wages and payments for the mine's goods and services.  This will also be lost, forcing shops and small businesses out of business and dumping more local people on the dole.  This will add to over 1,000 other job losses in Cornwall over the past year, with big lay-offs at ECCI - formerly English China Clays, but now in foreign hands - and the closure of local firms like Finn Shoes, which employed 140 people.  As Mr Greg Woods, president of Redruth Chamber of Commerce put it: "Redruth is gradually dying.  Cornwall was a proud and industrious place, now it is being turned into one big leisure park".

But it doesn't have to be.  British factories still need tin, and South Crofty and the rest of the Cornish tin mines already closed could produce it.  They could make producing it pay too, if only cheap foreign sweated labour competition was kept out of our market.  Safe behind high protective tariff walls, insulated from the speculations and fluctuations of the "global market", Cornwall's tin mines - and the rest of British industry for that mailer - could thrive.  This would provide jobs for productive workers, now roiling uselessly on the dole, and this would provide a living in turn for all the shopkeepers and tradesmen those workers would support if they had the wages coming in to do so.

"But surely", the parrots of the global Free Trade orthodoxy now slavishly echoed by Tory, Liberal-Democrat and new Labour alike will object, "protection will mean that British consumers will have to pay more because cheaper foreign goods are kept out".  This is entirely true!  But this extra is dwarfed by the extra those British consumers have to pay in taxes to finance the enormous Social Security costs of keeping millions of their fellow Britons on the dole, or on useless job-creation schemes or herded into seats of further education so as to massage the "official" unemployment figures.

Surely it is better to pay a little bit extra for Cornish tin than to pay a lot extra to keep a quarter of the Cornish population doing nothing on the dole?  Or to pay a bit more for British produce in general rather than a lot more for millions of Britons doing nothing productive.

If you don't agree that the price of escaping from the Global Market is worth paying now, you will one day.  For under Free Trade, Cornwall's present is all of Britain's future, especially as world population growth ensures an indefinitely continuing supply of cheap labour in the Third World.

Unless a change is accepted then Britain's future is as one big leisure park for foreign tourists.  Where those Britons not roiling in a permanent underclass on the dole will eke out a living dressing up as Beefeaters or Cornish Tin Miners flogging ice cream to chattering hordes of Japanese and other East Asian tourists.  Which is about the only job we can do that some Third Worlder can't do cheaper!  Cornwall's tin mines are only one of many lost British industries vanished down the gullets of Asia's economic 'tigers'.


This article first appeared in the now defunct 'vanguard', issue 48.


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