| Marillion – Slainte Mhath Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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There is quite a bit more to it than that... The first part of the song reflects on a terrible irony of Scottish history. Non-British people have to realise that Scots and English are not the same, and that a frequent answer of Scots people to problems is to blame the English. But in many cases (the 1745 uprising - hence the jab about "princes in exile" referring to the exiled Bonnie Prince Charlie; the Highland Clearances; the miners' strike; and subsequently a government with many Scots in its leadership - Gordon Brown, Alastair Darling, John Reid - who took Britain into a war it should never have allowed and another that it cannot win) those who took their people to disaster were Scotsmen who had lost touch with the common people. The reference to Bilston Glen is to what some people would think of as the economic war waged on heavy industry in Scotland and elsewhere in the 1980s and 1990s. Bilston Glen was a relatively modern coal mine, opened in 1952, and at one stage produced a million tons of coal per year and employed 2300 men. In 1984 the British mineworkers' union, the NUM, called a national strike. There were violent protests at Bilston Glen, and when the strike ended a year later the owners mothballed the mine prior to closing it completely in 1988. As at Flanders, where the men of the line were "lions led by donkeys" into a terrible slaughter, so in Scotland where efforts to get better pay led to unemployment. And finally you have that wonderful triple-edged line: "the whistle still blows" - referring to the whistles that signalled the beginning of an attack in the WW1 trenches, the whistleblowers who expose truth among the lies, and the whistle that blows to signal foul play. |
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