Back To Black

Jeremy Corbyn's call for a return to the British coal industry makes perfect economic and strategic sense.

On the latter score, it is vastly more important than staying in NATO, which is the real throwback to the world before the 1980s.

It is not as if we no longer burned coal. Just not our own, of which we have enormous reserves. Energy independence is central to national sovereignty and to national security. It is hardly as if we are unblessed with the resources.

Coal and nuclear (which is strongly advocated by Unite, and which was promoted by the previous Labour Government when David Cameron was calling it "a last resort") are the core around which to build an "all of the above" energy policy that combines high-wage, high-skilled, high-status, unionised jobs at home, with independence from Arab oil, from Russian gas, and from coal imported from the ends of the earth, where it has often been dug by child or slave labour.

We have a responsibility to employ our own people first, even at higher cost, and certainly to do so rather than to import from child or slave labour, or from parts of the world involvement in which imperils our own security.

Ask the Greens whether they regret the defeat of the miners in 1985. For exposing the fact that they are not left-wing at all, that one works every time. They are not the only people on whom it can be used.