Government decision is the pits

THE UK has just approved a new coal mine.

That’s one of those sentences you just assume can’t be true, a headline more at home in Private Eye than the Times.

“Cheese a cure for Covid”, “Being tall now illegal”, “Coal mining now fine, Government says”.

But for the team that brought you “Driving to Barnard Castle is allowed if you’re blind”, the gap between their narrative and absurdist satire is narrowing.

A side point, but this tends to happen when one party wins too many elections in a row.

Leaders develop an infallibility delusion, and get more and more brazen both in the dodgy actions they think we’ll go along with and the mistruths they expect us to believe.

Poll tax and the Iraq War are two obvious examples.

Why else do you think Tories are handing out PPE contracts to their mates with impunity?

But back to the subject, and how we’re planning to become world beating at coal mining.

That headline was not, sadly, a made-up one.

I kid you not, the Government has – literally – just approved the first deep coal mine for 30 years.

It’s going to be in Cumbria, just near the Lake District, where fortunately there’s no natural beauty to disturb.

It turns out David Attenbrough and, well, all of science, were wrong, and climate change is not really a thing after all. Such a relief.

So in light of this development, the county council there decided this was a belter of an idea, and gave it a seal of approval.

The Government had the power to – and was expected to – block it, but Robert Jenrick has said “to Hell with the polar bears, let’s dig up more coal”.

Rather embarrassingly, the UK is due to hold the next round of the COP26 climate talks in Glasgow this year.

That’s the next step after the Paris Agreement five years ago, when world leaders agreed to limit emissions, before Donald Trump got his tanning salon paper pants in a twist and decided to withdraw.

Alok Sharma, who’s leading the UK’S efforts at the talks, is said to be “apoplectic” about the coal mining decision, and fair enough, because his negotiating position is now about as strong as that of a chicken on an abattoir production line.

Politicians have long talked the talk when it comes to climate change. Who can forget “Call me Dave” Cameron with the huskies at the North Pole (which he flew to, by the way).

But ropey decisions like this show that, when it comes to actual action, their morals are as fragile as polar ice caps.