It is a measure of the decline of a once-great industry that a colleague of mine, on hearing that one of the last pits in Yorkshire is to close, remarked that he was not aware that we still had any pits in God's own country.

But first the BBC and then The Independent remind us of the presence of Maltby colliery near Rotherham in South Yorkshire – Dennis MacShane country – only to tell us that it is indeed going to close.

Hargreaves Services, which operates the pit - the scene of some of the biggest pickets in the 1980s strikes - says the it is no longer viable on safety, geological and financial grounds after producing coal for 104 years. About 540 staff were issued with redundancy notices last month.

View full article here

Slightly O/T. But i see that the bashing of our best hope to keep the lights on, continues.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/new...england-cumbria-20228176

I agree with Brian Daw not Saw!

I'm surprised anyone in Warwickshire can tell the difference ... is there anyone there who can read? Any road, blame the Independent ... I copied out that bit from their site.

BBC got it rite tho ...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/new...y-warwickshire-19224234

Interesting article.

When you consider that in 1913, 292 million tons of coal was produced by manual labour, men, boys and ponies, then these figures look even more impressive.

In this day of anti-CO2 mania, it is often forgotten that 'King-Coal' powered an industrial revolution and helped grow an empire - Ships needed vast amounts of coal at the time. That coal came from pits in England and Wales. It heated our homes and provided industry with energy, resources and jobs.

Even as all this fades, we can take a morsel of comfort in the fact that it will still be there should we need it. Unfortunately this country is being sorely let down by the very people we place our trust in. By ignoring our bounty in energy like coal and shale gas we are becoming too dependent on the good will of others.

Our loss of sovereignty in energy generation means we can no longer act without the permission of another. The one size fits all mantra will erode the competitiveness of the UK as the EU seeks to create an internal level playing field.

I guess this article, in its own little way, shows us the path to what can be called managed decline.

Quite a few pits are being used for underground coal gassification. With all these reserves this may be a way forward.

Hmmm, Dr. N. Born and schooled in a S. Yorkshire mining town, me; so, from my view, your post today contextualizes S. Yorks. in interesting ways.

Now that place is/was red hot in political terms; however, I don't think any humanitarian could deny that the miners were justified in their fight for rights, safety regulations, ending of child labor, etc. The issues were deadly serious and had to be dealt with. Even latterly, I witnessed some first hand effects. I worked in hospitals there and saw what could happen to a man when a carelessly used coal-cutting machine hit him rather than the coal face; and then there's the pneumo- stuff: -silicosis and -coniosis. At least in those days, though, the NHS worked for the patients; foreign labor was not yet murdering indigenes in their beds.

I also know that one of the 'geological problems' is subsidence; my grammar school (built 1905) is among places which developed a crack or two. What interests me is that local politicos closed the school because this subsidence had rendered the building "unsafe"; however, it is presently deemed suitable for habitation by flat-dwellers, so safety for the goose is apparently different from safety for the gander. In addition, someone took the opportunity to sell off all the solid oak-panelling and flooring, and the playing fields.

Of course, the masters care not for the land we love, either. Everyone knows what open-cast mining does to it; on aesthetics, it's up there with windmills.

But back to that politicisation of miners ... have they not provided 'muscle and blood, skin and bone'* for Marxist-Communist politics in Britain? Now, though, they've turned into the first Useful British Idiots to have been sacrificed by that system. In more than one sense, the enemy went for the very heart and backbone of Britain.

Lord love 'em. If it wasn't the industrialists, it was the government who needed cannon fodder; and then came the commies. So now the entire country gets to buy everything from the Enemy; to sell no one anything; to give up our towns to invaders; to let them kill our sick and old in the institutions (genocide); and to sit quietly and wait for the foreign controlled lights to go out.

I wonder: can Harrogate (Yorks) find a way to work with this situation?



********************
P.S I hasten to add later - Just for the record - I don't mean to imply that miners and S. Yorkshire people are natural idiots; most of those I have known are not. I'm referring to the invasive Communist ploy of converting 'natives' to their cause, and then of turning and destroying those people once their usefulness is past. Yuri Bezmenov (Communist Defector and ex KGB agent) is among those who explain this employment of 'Useful Idiots.' The videos are on youtube.




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*I say we need a good Ernie Ford/Johnny Cash-type talent to help present the case, at some point ...

Edited by user 10 November 2012 01:24:51(UTC)  | Reason: Clarification of terminology

I'm from S. Yorks. (Catcliffe, now part of Sheffield.) Some of my family, on my mothers side, worked at Haworth Colliery on the Yorks./Notts. border. Haworth closed but I doubt it was mined out and I've lost contact with the last miner I know of in my family.

As for Catcliffe, it sprawled onto the adjoining flood plain and in due course flooded a few years back, much to everyones surprise. (Clue: It's in the name flood plain.)

One or two points of fact.

There are currently four deep coal mines in Yorkshire. (And, to put that into context and out of interest, there are records in the Coal Authority's archives of around 100,000 recorded shafts in Yorkshire - and an estimate of perhaps as many again that are unrecorded).

Maltby colliery is still producing but under notice of closure. (Owned Maltby Colliery company = Hargreaves).
Hatfield Colliery is still producing (Owned Hargreaves)
Harworth Colliery is under "care and maintenance" and would likely cost a quarter of a Billion to re-open (Owned UK Coal)
Kellingley Colliery is still producing (Owned UK Coal)

Elsewhere in the UK there are:-
Thoresby Colliery (Nottinghamshire) still producing (UK Coal)
Daw Mill Colliery (Warwickshire) under notice of closure (UK Coal)

Then there is Tower Colliery in South Wales, which has been converted to an opencast mine (joint venture with Hargreaves)
And a couple of small drift mines in Wales, Aberpergwm and Unity which are also under threat of closure:-
http://www.thisissouthwa...00931-detail/story.html

There are probably still a few 'one man and a pit pony' operations in the Pennines. And then there are opencast or surface mines. But although there are now a few more surface mines than when Prescott was in charge of Communities & Local Government and sat on every Planning Inspector's recommendation of approval, recently permission is only granted to small proposals, mostly less than a million tonnes.

So, as of today, there are still five reasonably big deep mines operating, but within a year I expect that to reduce to a couple. If we're lucky. Maybe less.

And, sorry to correct you, Derek but there are NO coal mines in the UK where underground gassification is being used, and the EA and CA have indicated that they won't give licences for any to start, unless proposals are for offshore. At Harworth and at the former Selby mines and a few others coal bed methane is being extracted and used to generate electricity.

That's it.

There is absolutely no prospect that I can see of anyone investing a groat in coal whilst ever the political morons are insisting that any new coal burn generation must have Carbon Capture & Storage fitted. "Technology" specifically designed to make coal uncompetitive and which has never been demonstrated at large scale. Ever. Anywhere.

And, as has been noted, in a very real sense, it was coal that made Britain Great.

The final straw has probably been the amount of coal from the US which has been purchased in long contracts by US generators, but which is now being exported to Europe because shale gas is now cheaper to burn and there are US export facilities for coal but none at present for gas.

Many reasons for the collapse of the UK industry. Management ineptitude amongst them. Apart from a brief period around the Millenium, price wasn't the problem and production costs at Selby, for example, were a third of German production costs. But there can be no doubt that the politicians of every party for the last 25 years are primarily responsible for this fiasco.

A heady blend of dogma, incompetence, greed and malice.

Meanwhile Germany has opened two huge coal fired power stations this year, with a further 14 to follow by 2020.

http://notalotofpeoplekn...-2nd-coal-power-station/