And then there were none. On Friday, the last remaining colliery – Kellingley in Yorkshire – will close. With some poignancy, the end will come just days after the signing of a legally binding climate change deal.

Those who say the two weeks of talks in Paris mark the end of the fossil fuel era are being a tad premature. Coal is plentiful and cheap, which is the reason Kellingley will shortly be part of a closed chapter in economic history. Deep-mined coal was central to the Industrial Revolution and when production peaked just before the first world war, more than a million men were employed in Britain’s pits.



Even after the industry was decimated after the year-long miners’ strike in 1984-5, few would have seen this day coming. The assumption was that the closure of the less productive pits would pave the way for a new generation of highly efficient mines that would be able to hold their own against global competition.

Kellingley was one of the super pits, but has faced the same pressure as the UK steel industry: a glut of cheap imports that has priced domestic coal out of the market. The US shale revolution has prompted a collapse in the price of oil, gas and coal alike.



From an environmental perspective, the death of the coal industry reduces the reliance on fossil fuels and so should help the UK meet its targets for cutting carbon emissions. What’s left of Britain’s coal will be left in the ground, something for which the Guardian has been campaigning.

It’s easy to romanticise an industry that was hard on the environment and hard on the people who worked in it. Life down the pits was unpleasant and dangerous. A visit down a mine in the north-east was part of the training for journalists in the 1970s, a decade that saw the National Union of Mineworkers frequently on strike for better pay. Having made the soft graduates crawl through some particularly dark and narrow passages, the trip ended with a collier asking each would-be reporter in turn: “Would you do this for £40 a week.” We got the message.

Researchers at Sheffield Hallam University have for the past 20 years been documenting trends and conditions in former coalfield communities, not just in South Yorkshire but also in the rest of England, Wales and Scotland. These areas, from the south Wales valleys to Fife are home to 5.5 million people, about 9% of the UK population.

The closure of the pits after the 1984-5 strike had severe economic consequences. There was a sharp fall in employment and the consequent decline in demand had knock-on effects on local businesses that depended on the pits. Unemployment figures did not really reflect the scale of the shock because many miners were classified as long-term sick or disabled rather than as jobless.

Even though the generation of men employed in the pits before the strike has now mostly retired, there is still a much higher incidence of ill-health in the former coalfields than in the rest of the UK. The level of disguised unemployment remains high.

There has also been a brain drain. Schools in the old coalmining areas can boast exam results that match the national average, but the towns and villages around the former pits have workforces with lower levels of qualifications and skills. The reason, according to Prof Steve Fothergill of Sheffield Hallam is simple: the young people go to university and never come back.

But Fothergill says it has not all been bad news. His research shows that there has been “real forward progress in regeneration”, measured by new job creation. “The extensive efforts by coalfield local authorities, supported from time to time by Westminster, the devolved administrations and the EU, have delivered positive results. Very roughly, half the overall job shortfall in the former coalfields has been eliminated.”

The improvement has to be put into perspective. New jobs tends to be found in one of two places: in a distribution centre such as the one Sports Direct has at Shirebrook, or in a call centre. There is work, but opportunities are harder to come by than they are in the more prosperous parts of the country, and they tend to be low skill and poorly paid.

Yorkshire has proved pretty successful at attracting distribution centres, because it has good motorway links to the rest of the country and has a big population to draw upon. But few companies want to set up a warehouse in the Welsh valleys, which are much less accessible and where the population is less concentrated.

Across the coalfields as a whole, there are 50 jobs for every 100 residents of working age, which results in commuting to neighbouring areas, outward migration and higher than average levels of deprivation. One in seven of all adults of working age are in receipt of benefits.

There were 170 pits when the miners went back to work in 1985. As the last of them closes, it is clear that regeneration is a long way from being completed. Many of the communities are at the sharp end of austerity: local authorities are having their budgets squeezed; community organisations operating in the coalfields are facing financial pressures; government incentive schemes for business are a lot less generous than they were.

In retrospect, the miners’ strike marked the end of a 12-year period that fundamentally changed Britain. Between 1973 and 1985, full employment was replaced by control of inflation as the main objective of economic policy; the power of the trade unions was smashed; manufacturing was supplanted by finance as the key industry; and the centre of gravity moved decisively from north to south.

Fothergill says the coalfield communities still require support and he is clearly right about that. The closure of Kellingley highlights the many facets of Britain’s warped economy. It is commonplace these days to bemoan the imbalance between what’s left of manufacturing and the thriving City. But that is just one of the imbalances. The imbalances caused by geography and by the decline of organised labour are, if anything, even more serious.

That something has been lost with the winding down of this great industry was obvious from last week’s revelations about the way Sports Direct treats its workers at its giant warehouse on the site of the former Shirebrook pit, a place where local men represented by a trade union once earned a decent wage.

Today, in Britain’s postindustrial economy the workers at Sports Direct, many of them Polish, are paid less than the minimum wage and are so frightened of getting a black mark from their employer that they leave sick children at school rather than ask for time off work to look after them. Reading Simon Goodley’s account, it was sometimes hard to believe this is 2015 rather than 1815.