Nine held by police after blocking entrance to mine on Lord Ridley’s Northumberland estate and forcing operations to shut down

Nine protesters have been arrested after storming a coalmine on land belonging to Matt Ridley, a prominent climate change sceptic and Conservative member of the House of Lords, causing operations to shut down.

The group, called Matt Ridley’s Conscience, raided Lord Ridley’s vast Blagdon family estate in Northumberland, home to England’s largest open-cast coal mine, at dawn on Monday.

Four protesters climbed into the the Shotton mine and fastened themselves to a 500-tonne excavator and holding a banner bearing the slogan “End Coal”, while another group of about 12 blocked the main entrance to the site by lying in front of the gate, handcuffed together inside drainage pipes.

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Miners who turned up to work at 7am were sent home and trucks that arrived at the gate were sent away. The demonstrators were padlocked to the digger and chained together at the entrance for eight hours before peacefully handing themselves over to the police. Banks Mining, which operates the Shotton open-cast mine, confirmed all operations at the mine had been halted for the day.

In the past year, 1m tonnes of coal were extracted from Shotton surface mine, which spans 845 acres (340 hectares). At least 8% of the coal mined across the UK comes from the site.



It was revealed this year that permission had been granted for two more open-cast mines on Ridley’s estate. The Shotton Triangle mine is forecast to produce about 290,000 tonnes of coal; the Shotton South West site has a target of about 250,000 tonnes.

Ridley, a hereditary peer and former boss of Northern Rock before it collapsed in 2007, is a self-professed climate change sceptic and has written about the “immense economic, environmental and moral benefits” of fossil fuels, arguing that the evidence they are destroying the planet is overblown. His latest column for the Times argued for the benefits of an increase in manmade carbon dioxide.

Guy Shrubsole, 30, one of the protesters padlocked to the diggers who was later arrested, said the group hoped the direct action would draw attention to Ridley’s “self-interest” in the coal industry, as well as promoting the environmental importance of keeping fossil fuels in the ground in the runup to UN climate change talks in Paris next month.

“Ridley to us represents the modern face of coal-mining in the UK, an activity that destroys both the local environment and the planet, and does so to benefit who?” Shrubsole said. “Not ordinary workers and miners but millionaires like Matt Ridley, who has a very public platform to say things like ‘climate change is good for the planet’.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Protesters hand themselves in to the police after eight hours handcuffed together at the entrance of Shotton coalmine. Photograph: Hubert Libiszewski

There is mining at two sites on Ridley’s land, at Shotton and Brenkley Lane. Royalties go to the government but the Ridley family will receive a fraction of the profits in the form of a “way leave” payment for allowing access to the coal, a sum he has refused to publicly disclose. DeSmogBlog, a climate change website monitoring Ridley’s actions, estimates the figure is between £3m and £4m.

Shrubsole said Ridley needed to “come clean about his vested interests and how much he earns”. He added: “Overall, open-cast coal mining is something that government should be putting a stop to. We need to be phasing out coal power in the UK in the next decade, we need to be keeping fossil fuel in the ground.”

Shrubsole said the demonstration on Monday was also a protest against plans to open another open-cast mine nearby in Druridge Bay, Northumberland.

“The UK government is performing incredibly badly in terms of its climate change policy. It’s going to be going to the climate change talks in Paris next month with embarrassingly little to show. It’s cut support for renewables and it’s continuing to support coal and gas power to a degree that’s going to cause catastrophic climate change,” he said.

“We want the government to actually take action against fossil fuels and we want people to see the impact this archaic practice of open-cast mining is having on the environment.”

Ridley, the Economist’s science editor in the 1980s, has been vocal about his doubts over climate change science. In an article for the Wall Street Journal, Fossil Fuels will Save the World (Really), he stated: “Although the world has certainly warmed since the 19th century, the rate of warming has been slow and erratic. There has been no increase in the frequency or severity of storms or droughts, no acceleration of sea-level rise. Arctic sea ice has decreased, but Antarctic sea ice has increased. At the same time, scientists are agreed that the extra carbon dioxide in the air has contributed to an improvement in crop yields and a roughly 14% increase in the amount of all types of green vegetation on the planet since 1980.”

In another column in the Times this month, he said the effects of the increase of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere “are still speculative and almost all in the distant future”. He argued: “Impacts from the modest warming we saw in the 1980s and 1990s are also positive: slightly fewer premature deaths, which peak in cold weather more than in hot weather, slightly longer growing seasons and so on.”

Malcolm Reid, 71, who lives in nearby Rising Mill and was among those blocking the gates, disputed Ridley’s claim that the mine was beneficial to the community. “Open-cast mining employs far fewer people than deep coal mining and they have a rolling set of people who work on these mines, so in terms of local jobs it’s a myth,” he said. “But Northumberland is a fantastic place for tourism, and a big chunk of our beautiful coast is being wrecked by these massive coal mines.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lord Ridley, a vocal climate change sceptic. Photograph: Press Association

Mark Dowdall, a spokesman for Banks Mining who was on-site during the protest, said: “We think this protest today is misguided, particularly as it’s aimed at stopping local people from working, providing the much needed coal that we still need on this transition towards a low-carbon economy in the UK.

“The reality is that if you leave this coal in the ground it will be replaced by coal which is imported from overseas. That seems nonsense to us, to be putting local people’s jobs at risk and the economic benefits it can bring to out communities in Northumberland, to the benefit of our overseas competitors.



“We note the points they [the protesters] are making and in many cases we agree with them in that we too believe we need more renewable energy. Where we disagree with them is that we cannot just stop coal mining in the UK and think that will stop burning coal in the UK. At the moment, we do need that investment and we do need that coal to keep homes and businesses, our schools and hospitals, warm and powered with electricity.”