King coal prepares for a comeback

Neil Barnett

6 September 2008

Neil Barnett says the miners’ union that took on Margaret Thatcher and lost is now talking surprisingly good sense about Britain’s future energy security

The National Union of Mineworkers’ headquarters in Barnsley has a splendid retro feel. In the assembly hall hang banners celebrating the struggles of the working class: from one of them, Arthur Scargill, Shredded Wheat comb-over to the fore, stares into the middle distance; another from Kellingley Colliery shows a miner wearing only trousers and a helmet, throttling a huge python labelled ‘Capitalism’. The script below declares ‘Only the strong survive’, while behind him an optimist has written ‘Socialism Leads to Prosperity’. The result is an original mixture of Stakhanovite propaganda, Wallace and Gromit and the Village People.

And yet one can’t help admire the tenacity of the NUM. Having come out much the worse from the ‘Great Miners’ Strike’ of 1984-85, its membership dramatically reduced, the union soldiers on, its ideology set in amber. But while the NUM’s rhetoric has not changed, the global energy market has, and suddenly the miners seem to be speaking plain good sense.

Supply and demand is such that energy markets are tightening not only in terms of prices, but so that physical supply can no longer be taken for granted. As North Sea resources run out, our government needs to think seriously how to secure energy supplies in the long term. For now, neither Westminster nor Brussels has more than a fig leaf for an energy strategy; both seem more concerned with appeasing the green lobby. So with hundreds of years’ worth of coal reserves sitting in the ground, last year Britain imported 43 million tonnes of coal, according to Malcolm Wicks, the energy minister, of which half came from Russia. A trifling 17 million tonnes was mined domestically.

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Richard

September 5th, 2008 2:53pm Report this comment

It's about energy security now: not being held to ransom by the Gulf States and Russia. And it was about energy secury then: not being held to ransom by the NUM. Plus ca change' plus c'est la meme chose.

David Lindsay

September 5th, 2008 6:35pm Report this comment

This retains an almost touching faith in privatisation, whereas what is needed is public ownership, which is British ownership, since nothing else can deliver what is necessary on the scale that is necessary.

And it is hysterically wrong about Russia, the point about which, for the present purpose, is simply that she is a foreign country, on whom we must not depend when we do not need to, since we must not depend on any foreign country when we do not need to.

Together with nuclear power, coal offers to secure high-wage, high-skilled, high-status jobs for the working class, and independence from Arab oil and Russian gas.

Among many other good things, this would contribute significantly to reversing Thatcher's destruction of the economic base of paternal authority, initially in working-class families and communities, but then very rapidly throughout society as a whole.

How could any conservative object to that?

Neil Capill

September 8th, 2008 2:42am Report this comment

I do hope Britain doesn't leave such a resource in the ground. here in Australia the importance of coal is recognised and mined in huge quantities. Also a coal to liquid fuels demonstration plant is in the process of been constructed.If anybody in Britain feels like getting a slice of the practical future then do come and invest in Australian coal

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