Midlands Forms: Fill & Download for Free

In the minds of the leaders of the NUM the strike was never really about closing pits. They used that as an excuse to try to bring down the Thatcher government.The coal industry was in the soft and smelly with money being poured into uneconomic pits whilst cheap coal was being imported from the communist block at ridiculously low prices. Thatcher made the decision that was not going to continue.The NUM had brought down governments from both sides of the political divide including a Tory government in which Thatcher was the Education Minister.Thatcher set a list of pits that had to be closed because they were uneconomical. Scargill, the leader of the NUM, openly stated that if a particular pit was closed he would bring out the miners on strike. At that time he had a mandate through a ballot to do so.At the same time, 1981, there were a series of inner-city riots in the UK that showed how unprepared the police were for major public disorder. Thatcher invested money in police training and equipment in respect of public order. She also spent on improving police conditions of service and recruitment.She also stocked up on the essentials to keep the nation running in the event of a protracted strike. When the arrangements were made in 1984 she closed the pit Scargill had specifiedScargill had painted himself into a corner. It was nearly 3 years since he'd obtained the mandate to strike and should have had another ballot. However, he couldn't risk the ballot going against him and so he relied on the original ballot.A number of coalfields in the East Midlands were making good money and didn't want to strike. The ones that were in danger of closing wanted to secure their future. This caused a massive breach in the mineworkers with the East Midlands forming the Democratic Union of Mineworkers, and not coming out on strike.There followed a year of conflict. The strike caused untold hardship for mining communities. It caused splits in families where fathers sons and brothers were on different sides of the dispute. Marriages broke up because of the strain of no money coming in for a year. Soup kitchens were set up to try to feed the communities and local businesses donated food to the kitchens.Even today there are many older miners who blame Thatcher for their hardships and fail to recognise that they were sacrificial lambs on the horns of 2 totally opposite political dogmas.It was a fight that had to be fought given that the unions had brought down Labour and Tory governments on an ultra-left political agenda. Something had to give and the miner's families suffered in order to settle it.

The part that is now called America. Occasionally in Britain (please note, England is just one country that forms part of the UK) you may hear speech that seems to sound vaguely like American English. But no region of the UK talks like this. We have enough accents of our own already thanks.British accents include:Oxford RP (Received Pronunciation)London genericLondon cockneyLondon EstuaryKentSussexWest Country genericCornishSouth WalesNorth WalesShropshire and BordersWest MidlandsBirminghamEast MidlandsEast AnglianYorkshireScouseMerseysideLancastrianCumbrianGeordieBorder ScotsEdinburgh ScotsGlaswegian ScotsHighland and Island ScotsDoric ScotsOrkneyShetlandBelfastDerryGeneric UlsterJerseyGuernseyEtc, etc, etc…

Regional dialects are alive and well and in fact are proliferating:American English DialectsBoston accent - WikipediaPeople tend to believe that dialect differences in American English are disappearing, especially given our exposure to a fairly uniform broadcast standard in the mass media. One can find this point of view in almost any discussion of American dialectsThis overwhelmingly common opinion is simply and jarringly wrong. The research reported here will demonstrate that the reverse is actually the case. New sound changes in progress are driving the regional dialects of English further and further apart, so that people from Los Angeles, Chicago, Toronto, Philadelphia and New York speak more differently from each other than they did in the middle of the 20th century. I would not expect most readers of this book to accept this statement lightly and I will do my best to put enough evidence before you to make it believable. We will be dealing with sounds that are not easy to describe in print, but I will try to direct your hearing so that you can begin to observe some of these new sound changes around you in every-day life.The recent development of diversity in the Inland North, headed by the Northern Cities Shift, is not unique. The Atlas of North American English shows vigorous new sound changes in Canada, the Mid-Atlantic States, Western Pennsylvania, the Midland and the West. The dialects of Chicago, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Los Angeles are now more different from each other than they were fifty or a hundred years ago. The metropolitan dialects of Boston and New York appear to be stable. On the other hand, dialects of many smaller cities have receded in favor of the new regional patterns. The unique dialect of Charleston has given way to a general Midland form (Baranowski 2007) and so has the dialect of Cincinnati (Boberg and Strassel 2000). St. Louis is abandoning its traditional merger of far and for, card and cord, and has adoped many features of the Northern Cities Shift (Labov 2007