UK Coal, Indeed

And so a country literally standing on coal is probably only two years away from having precisely one working deep mine.

All the while fretting about energy dependency on Russia and on the kind of places that have oil.

Isn't privatisation grand?

Wasn't the defeat of the Miners' Strike a triumph?

Isn't the EU left-wing (to be fair, no proper left-winger thinks that it is), even though, you know, it was, like, Margaret Thatcher who signed up to the Single Market?

My personal favourite is when her defenders affect compassion for the frightful working conditions in the pits. As if people fought that hard in order to save their intolerable jobs.

Or, come to that, as if coal were still mined in the same way as it was 30 years ago. Any more than, a mere 30 years ago, it was still being mined in the same way as it had been 60 years ago, or 90 years ago, or 120 years ago.

Nor is it burned in the same way, if anyone feels like trying to inject an environmentalist argument. Last year, coal use rose to its highest level since 1990 in Germany. That's right. Germany. The heartland of environmentalism.

The Germans are supposed to be phasing it out by 2018, but believe that when you see it. Increased use of something, to the highest level in a generation, is not the most obvious way of phasing it out.

It is not even as if we hardly used coal. It is just that, despite having vast reserves of it, we nevertheless produce only eight per cent of what we use.

We import the rest from any and everywhere, from any and everyone, including from child and slave labour.

Anything, anything at all, to avoid the employment of our own working class, especially of its men, and that in permanently unfashionable parts of the country.

If Thoresby and Kellingley did close, and it really does look as if they are going to do so, then that would leave only Hatfield, which is employee-owned. The last pit in Britain would be a workers' co-operative. There is a message in that.

The astonishingly long-lived Tower, which was possibly the oldest in the world and which certainly operated continuously for more than 200 years, survived on that basis well into the present century until there was no coal left in it.

That will happen everywhere eventually. But it will not happen on this Island as a whole for a very, very, very long time.

Funnily enough, it was John Redwood, of all people, who deserved a lot of the credit for Tower's successful experiment in the workers' control of the means of production.

It was a mistake not to hold a national ballot in 1984, but it was a mistake for one very specific reason.

The result would have been clear. That would have cut the ground, so to speak, from under those who went on to form the UDM, and who are now enjoying the hospitality of Her Majesty.

In this thirtieth anniversary twelvemonth of the Miners' Strike, a television documentary needs to explore both the sordid tale of whatever happened to the UDM, and the sad but salutary tale of whatever happened to the pits that worked through the Strike.

Patrick McLoughlin may now be in the Cabinet. But Neil Greatrex is in prison for truly despicable offences against the mining communities.

And the pit villages for which each, in his own way, at least presumed to speak are as devastated as any others. The Conservatives, whose Chief Whip McLoughlin went on to become, closed those villages' pits, too.

Just as Arthur Scargill, for all his many faults, always said that they had every intention of doing, something that this year has become a matter of public record.

The last deep mine in Nottinghamshire is almost certainly about to close. But there will still be one in South Yorkshire. Only one. But it will be there.

Securing for the workers by hand and by brain the full fruits of their labour, and the most equitable distribution thereof that shall be possible upon the principle of the common ownership of the means of production.

And thus making a contribution, however tiny, to securing the sovereignty and security of the United Kingdom. Of course.