TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady is correct to demand that the government drop its dogmatic refusal to offer state aid to what remains of Britain’s deep-mined coal industry.

It makes no sense to allow this priceless asset to be mothballed through a “managed shutdown” of two out of three surviving pits in Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire.

The government is prepared to shell out £20 million to allow UK Coal to phase out Kellingley and Thoresby collieries over the next three years.

But it is not willing to invest three or four times that sum to extend the lives of the pits through to 2018, despite knowing that its stake would be repaid out of profits gained from coal sales of £500m in that time.

What a contrast between this response to a reasonable request for essential financial investment in domestic energy provision and government attitudes to cash demands from the private banking industry.

Gordon Brown’s new Labour government set aside £1.3 trillion to bail the banks out of a mess of their own making even though there was no guarantee of a return on this huge subsidy.

Neither Tories nor Liberal Democrats disagreed with Labour’s Adopt a Distressed Banker scheme.

They shared Brown’s view that the banks could not be allowed to fail even though the City’s obsessive profiteering in preference to investment in productive industry lies at the heart of many of Britain’s economic problems.

All three main Establishment parties took as a given that the government role was to take the bankrupt sector in hand, nurse it back to health, force-feed it state cash and then allow it to return to its key role of ripping customers off to the joy of corporate shareholders and boardroom fat cats.

Even as their recovery was set in train with a constant drip feed of public funds, they kept up a stream of “expert” advice to government.

Investment in public services should be cut, hundreds of thousands of jobs should be axed, pay and benefits must be frozen or slashed, indirect taxes should be raised while corporate and high-end earners’ taxation had to be trimmed.

Neither parliamentary front bench had the guts to expose the banking emperor’s new clothes. They accepted the economic wreckers’ advice without demur.

Barclays’ announcement that it will axe 14,000 jobs in Britain over the next two years, which sparked a share price boost on the stock exchange, emphasises the anti-social nature of banking transnationals.

Its commitment is to private profit and shareholder dividends alone.

Meanwhile in the real world, hundreds of skilled miners face unemployment while energy security becomes a little more hazardous and the government doesn’t give a damn.

Energy Secretary Ed Davey went so far as to insist that the European Union would veto state aid as being in breach of EU competition rules.

He has been forced, in light of evidence that Spain and Germany have invested heavily in their own coal industries to assist national energy security, to admit that the EU would not indeed block investment in Kellingley and Thoresby.

However, “we can’t justify putting any more money in.”

It would be closer to the truth to say that the government couldn’t justify not putting more money in. 

Ministers’ willingness to wash their hands of the coal industry should be challenged in Parliament and outside in defence of jobs and domestic energy security.