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Dole not coal

With the remnants of Britain's coal-mining industry hanging by a financial thread, Morning Star northern reporter Peter Lazenby presents a personal view

I've been on the coal face at Kellingley colliery in Yorkshire several times.

To reach it you have to drop a quarter of a mile in the pit "cage" at frightening speed, then lay down on a rumbling conveyor belt for the three-mile journey to the face.

The coal seam being mined is eight feet from floor to roof. The face is itself a quarter of a mile long.

The rock above the face is held up by 40 pit props - not the wooden props of old, but gleaming, hydraulicly powered stainless steel pieces of machinery which are a tribute to the skills of the engineers who designed and built them.

They are called Panzers, and move on tracks like those on a tank or bulldozer. Each one costs £1 million.

After the coal ripper has moved deafeningly along the coal face, gouging out thousands of tons of coal in a single journey, miners operating the Panzers put the tracks into motion.

There is a hiss of compressed air as each prop is lowered from the rock roof, lurches forwards, and rises again, clanking the steel plate at the top of the prop back against the rock roof.

All this happens in seconds, a mechanised Mexican wave.

Then there's a rock fall as the roof caves in behind the props - the area from which they've just moved forward. The roof fall is deliberate, part of the technique known as advance mining.

Kellingley colliery is one of the most famous pits in the world. A modern pit, sunk in the 1960s, it became the first in Europe to turn out one million tons of coal a year.

It employed 3,000 miners. That was in part due to the fact that the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) branch at Kellingley insisted that no-one who applied for a job at the pit would be turned away.

That was in the 1970s, and the union branch secretary was a hero of mine, Jimmy Miller, a communist from Scotland.

As a teenager in the 1920s Jimmy was Scottish Young Communist League delegate to celebrations of the Russian revolution in Moscow.

At Kellingley he proudly wore a hammer and sickle badge.

He told me: "Ah cannae remember if it was Trotsky or Stalin who pinned it on ma breast." He wasn't sectarian.

As industrial reporter on the Yorkshire Evening Post in the 1970s and '80s, I would take parties of young trainee journalists on underground visits to Kellingley colliery, insisting that the trips took place on working days when coal was being "turned" as they call it, so they would experience the noise, the dust, the heat, the faceworkers stripped to a pair of shorts but still dripping sweat.

I hoped the experience would stay with them forever, that they would remember it when they moved to national newspapers and were asked to write about the "greedy miners."

And so to today. Kellingley employs 719 miners. They produce more than two million tons of coal a year.

It goes to Drax power station a few miles away where around 7 per cent of Britain's electricity is produced.

There's a billion-pound public investment programme on the way to enable it to burn "clean" coal through a system called Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), which will massively reduce the environmental damage caused by burning coal to make electricity.

But if the government has its way, by the time CCS is in operation, Drax won't be burning coal from down the road at Kellingley. It will be burning coal shipped in from Australia, Colombia, Poland and Russia.

Why? Because of the economics of the madhouse.

Normally the madness would be called "market forces." But market forces don't apply to Britain's energy industry. Not even Tory market forces.

Next year, by autumn at the latest, Kellingley colliery will be shut down, its millions of tons of reserves abandoned, its skilled mineworkers thrown on the dole - if the dole, or jobseekers' allowance, or whatever, still exists by then.

UK Coal, which owns Kellingley and a sister pit Thoresby in Nottinghamshire, is to close.

The United States is exploiting cheap energy created by "fracking" - fracturing of deeply buried shale to release gas as an energy source.

Coal, which the US has aplenty, is displaced, and is flooding the world market, forcing down prices. Kellingley and Thoresby, with the most skilled mineworkers in the world, have become "uneconomic." That's the one bit of market forces which are applied to Britain's coal-mining industry.

To soften the blow of the closure of two of Britain's last three deep coal mines - and the third, Hatfield in Doncaster, won't be far behind - the government is prepared to cough up £10m of our money to finance a "phased" closure, which will take place around October next year. It's a loan mind - with interest - not a subsidy.

Then take a look at the nuclear power industry. Examine the finances of just one of Britain's nuclear power stations, Sellafield in Cumbria.

It is being decommissioned. But the government doesn't know what to do with Sellafield's nuclear junk. Used plutonium and uranium are stored in two buildings erected in the 1950s and feeling their age. Nobody wants the nuclear waste.

Local authorities have been offered bribes millions in taxpayers' cash to allow it to be buried within their municipal borders. But even Tory councillors can recognise electoral suicide when they see it coming. So they've said no.

The bill for just "managing" the decommissioning of Sellafield and storing its waste fuel until - if ever - a solution is found is £79 billion so far, and rising.

That's just one nuclear power station.

 

Now the government is planning to build another 10. The subsidy for that is so far estimated at £480bn from the public purse.

Yet the government is quibbling over lending UK Coal £10m to run down Kellingley colliery.

Blackmail has been introduced - the loan will be made only if the NUM agrees to the closure.

Of course, there's politics involved in this lunacy. The coal-mining industry had to be destroyed to eradicate the strength of the NUM. No matter that doing so would mean abandoning Britain's only indigenous source of energy. Britain is left reliant on fuel imports from, or across, some of the world's most unstable regions.

Nuclear power presents a bill to the taxpayer of unimaginable proportions.

But, lemming-like, successive governments - Labour as well as Tories and their lickspittle Lib-Dem allies - continue to follow each other towards the cliff top to hurl themselves and us into a bottomless energy void, while we sit on an abandoned reserve of fuel which would see us right for at least 200 years. Utter madness.

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