Dig Deeper

I have known Jonathan Ashworth for more than 20 years, and I find it wildly improbable that he had not heard about the new deep coal mine at Whitehaven.

That development is excellent news, not least because it brings home the fact that renewable energy, being dependent on steel, is dependent on coal. Where did anyone think that wind turbines came from? It is a Yes-No question, “Do you regret the defeat of the miners in 1985?” The correct answer is, “Yes.”

I strongly support the exploitation of the vast reserves of coal in this country and in this county. That, and the extension of civil nuclear power, are the backbone of an all-of-the-above energy policy, and they are the means of delivering highly paid, highly skilled, high status, unionised jobs while securing independence from Arab oil, from Russian gas, and from coal that has been mined using child and slave labour. 

From Venezuela, Donald Trump intends his dynasty to supply a dependent world with oil deep into the twenty-second century. And from North Korea, Trump intends his dynasty to supply a dependent world with the coal of the Kim dynasty deep into the twenty-second century. Yet we have our own coal, right here under our feet. 

Britain was the world leader in clean coal technology until the Miners’ Strike. Britain can and must be that world leader again. Horror stories about how coal was burned or mined in the Britain of the twentieth century have no relevance to the Britain of the twenty-first. At the same time, I am totally opposed both to open-casting and to fracking, which extract hardly anything while employing hardly anyone. 

We need an approach to climate change which protected and extended secure employment with civilised wages and working conditions, which encouraged economic development around the world, which upheld the right of the working classes and of non-white people to have children, which held down and as far as practicable reduced the fuel prices that always hit the poor hardest, and which refused to restrict travel opportunities or a full diet to the rich. 

Pace John Rhys-Davies, the problem with the world is not that it has people in it. Which people, exactly? We must celebrate the full compatibility between the highest view of human demographic, economic, intellectual and cultural expansion and development, and the most active concern for the conservation of the natural world and of the treasures bequeathed by such expansion and development in the past. That expansion and development must now include space exploration, fuelled by, and fuelling, fusion power.

Another hung Parliament is coming, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. It has become a local commonplace that I am on 30-30-30 with Labour and the Conservatives here at North West Durham, so that any one of us could be the First Past the Post. I will stand for this seat, if I can raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.