It’s a snip. For about four million quid – not much more than you’d pay for a
broom cupboard in Hampstead or a couple of sessions with a private dentist –
you can acquire 56 acres of land in some of Britain’s most glorious
countryside. Plus one of the most evocative names in our industrial history.
Oh, and 2.5 million tonnes of top-quality coal, worth about £400 million at
today’s prices.
Of course, there is a minor complication. The coal is buried rather
inconveniently a long way underground. Even so, the lucky people who snap up
the disused but still potentially usable Whittle Colliery in Northumberland
when it comes up for auction, probably next week, will have acquired the
bargain of the century. Won’t they?
If I say I hope so, you will dismiss me as a dreamer. Not true. My mother’s
family lived around the coalfields of South Yorkshire – in communities all
but destroyed, economically and spiritually, by the 20 pit closures and
20,000 redundancies imposed in 1984 by Thatcher’s Government. Some of my
great-uncles died from coal-dust in their lungs. Some of their friends were
among the 100,000 miners killed in pit accidents in the century before 1984.
I have no illusions about the hellish nature of mining, at least in the bad
old days.
Yet you won’t find many veterans of the pits who don’t have intensely mixed
emotions about the demise of the deep mines. The comradeship was legendary.
The work brought a sense of purpose and self-worth to regions that otherwise
might have had little of either. And what’s happened since to those
communities has often been shameful. Fancy regeneration schemes – all mouth
and no trousers, as my granny would have said – have delivered neither jobs
nor prospects nor pride. Many former pit villages, especially in the North
East of England, are riddled with long-term unemployment, endemic
drug-dependency, and a pervading desolation. The pit disasters of the old
days were terrible tragedies. But as many lives are now being crushed by
hopelessness.
Seen in that context, the closure of the pits was arguably the most inhumane
catastrophe that any British government has inflicted on British people. But
was it necessary, as hard-nosed economists argued then, and still argue now?
The extraordinary saga of pluck and resolve that came to an end last month
in Hirwaun, South Wales, suggests that the answer may always have been no.
Thirteen years ago the Tower Colliery was written off as uneconomic. The
workforce and the local community begged to differ. They were ignored. The
pit seemed doomed.
Then strange things started to happen. First the feisty local MP, Ann Clywd,
went down the mine and refused to emerge until Government and pit-owners
changed their minds. After 27 hours without food or drink, she won a
reprieve. Then, inspired by a charismatic local socialist firebrand, Tyrone
O’Sullivan, 239 of the laid-off miners each put £8,000 of their redundancy
money into a bid to buy the pit and keep it open. As O’Sullivan put it: “We
were ordinary men, we wanted jobs, we bought a colliery.”
This act of faith – led by a man who had lost his own father in a pit accident
– struck a chord round the world. Donations flooded in. The pit did remain
open. It kept 400 miners in work, and supplied a further £300 million worth
of coal. Only when every last seam of the black stuff was exhausted, on
January 24 this year, was Tower finally closed. “We have got to the end with
pride and dignity intact,” one miner told reporters. An eminent Welsh
composer, Alun Hoddinott, has already turned the story into an opera, and
there’s talk of a movie – perhaps with Brad Pitt living up to his name in a
leading role. I hope it happens. It’s an inspirational tale of what a
stricken community can do to help itself.
Might the same thing now happen at Whittle? God knows, northeast England could
use an economic miracle in the wake of the “Northern Wreck” debacle.
Unfortunately, the odds are stacked against anyone wanting to reopen Whittle
for mining. It’s deep, whereas the modern trend is for open-cast mining
(even though the latter is more destructive of the landscape). It hasn’t
been used since 1997, so its tunnels and shafts may be compressed. And the
local authority would much rather see it developed into something green and
pleasant, such as a landscaped holiday-chalet complex.
Then there’s the knotty question of employee insurance. We live in such a
cotton-wool age now. If firefighters can’t retrieve carnival bunting from
lampposts without contravening health and safety laws, who will risk
insuring men digging out coal hundreds of feet below ground?
Yet the world has changed in another way too. From China to the US, coal is in
demand as never before – particularly since converting coal to petrol
becomes more and more attractive as the oil price goes stratospheric. (South
Africa already uses coal to supply 30 per cent of its petrol needs.) Far
from being exhausted, Britain’s coal seams are 85 per cent intact, and new
techniques make mining far safer and more eco-friendly. It’s perverse to
ignore this huge asset just because, 25 years ago, Mrs Thatcher decreed that
we should. Especially if we put ourselves even more at the mercy of dodgy
oligarchs in Russia and the Middle East.
Reopening mines may strike some fastidious souls in the plush South East as a
ludicrous 19th-century answer to 21st-century Britain’s needs. They feel we
should be above that sort of thing – whizzing along the high-tech
superhighway, keeping our fingernails clean in service industries and
leaving the dirty stuff to the Third World. The trouble is that in some
abandoned regions of Britain the high-tech revolution hasn’t happened. Yet
people need jobs and a sense of pride as much there as anywhere else. Old
King Coal, prematurely dethroned a generation ago, could yet provide both.
Fancy a dip? That’ll be £214m, please
If you can buy a giant colliery for £4 million, how much would you be prepared
to pay for a swimming pool? After all, it’s just a big hole in the ground
filled with water. £5 million? £10 million? OK, let’s go for diamond-studded
plug’oles and say £50 million.
Dream on. For the 2012 Olympics, London is about to build a swimming pool that
will cost £214 million. Or £254 million. Or £280 million. It depends on whom
you ask. All I know is that the original budget was £75 million. Just to put
the astounding new figure in context, £214 million would pay the wages of
1,000 ambulance drivers for ten years.
Pardon me for raising an embarrassing matter, but isn’t this the same swimming
pool that Tessa Jowell, the Olympics Minister, sent back to the drawing
board two years ago, because the cost had then spiralled to £150 million?
Perhaps she forgot to tell the designers that the idea was to make it
cheaper. Or perhaps the truth is that the Government is being held to ransom
by an army of architects, consultants and builders who know that they can
sting British taxpayers for billions in extra costs, because time is running
out to get the wretched stadiums built for 2012.
What a nightmare! Can’t the swimmers use the Serpentine? That would be more in
the spirit of the original Olympic Games.
A law to themselves
The Archbishop of Canterbury’s suggestion that certain elements of Islamic law
be incorporated into the British legal system has surprised nobody more than
faithful members of his own Church of England. Here in the Edmonton area of
the Diocese of London – a vast enclave of more than 100 North London
parishes, in which not a single woman priest has yet been appointed as a
vicar – many worshippers had the impression that a Sharia regime was already
in force.
