Don’t blame Thatcher for the death of mining

Labour closed more pits under Wilson, while Thatcher built a greener competitive energy market

Boris Johnson was wrong to say, on a visit to a wind farm in the Moray Firth on Thursday, that Margaret Thatcher had made an “early start” on tackling climate change by “closing coal mines across the country”.

The credit belongs less to the Iron Lady than to the prime ministers who came before her, particularly Harold Wilson. Much as the Left still likes to condemn Thatcher for destroying the miners, she merely continued to manage the decline of a coal industry which had already been in retrenchment since the 1920s.

Wilson’s “white heat of technology” didn’t leave much room for dirty black coal. During his eight years in charge, in the 1960s and 1970s, Britain lost 253 coal mines, as steam trains gave way to diesel and electric, and coal fires were replaced by oil and gas central heating.

Thatcher, by contrast, oversaw 115 pit closures over 11 years. UK coal production stood at 280million tonnes in 1923. By the time Mrs Thatcher came to office in 1979 that had already more than halved to 122million tonnes. Employment was down from 1.15million in 1923 to around 242,000 in 1979.

It is true that the Thatcher government put too little thought into the effect on mining communities of losing their only significant employer. The enterprise zones should have been there in 1984, not years later after a sense of hopelessness had set in. But the charge that Thatcher was somehow motivated by callousness is a gross slur. She was guided by the same economic forces and technological developments as were her predecessors. In addition, by 1979 large quantities of much cleaner natural gas were coming on-stream from the North Sea.

Thatcher was not anti-coal, but she did create an energy market which very soon came to favour gas over coal. Not only did that mean lower bills for consumers, it also meant fewer carbon emissions as, kilowatt-hour for kilowatt-hour, gas-fired power stations emit about half as much carbon.

The switch from coal to gas would have happened under any prime minister, but it was far nastier than it needed to be thanks to the behaviour of the National Union of Mineworkers, dominated by the radical Left, which was determined to exploit the closure of any coal mine for political purposes.

The Left, of course, has now flipped and regards any coal-burning as environmental vandalism, bitterly opposing the Government’s plan for a new coal mine in Cumbria, even though the coal is intended for the steel industry, not electricity generation. Many Labour figures have rejected any suggestion that Thatcher consciously wound down the coal industry in order to reduce carbon emissions.

Yet she was the first world leader to address climate change, and switching Britain’s energy supply away from dirty coal and towards zero-carbon nuclear energy was very much part of her plan for tackling it.

Thatcher’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly in November 1989 kicked off the global effort to reduce emissions. “What we are now doing to the world, by degrading the land surfaces, by polluting the waters and by adding greenhouse gases to the air at an unprecedented rate – all this is new in the experience of the Earth,” she said.

As to how carbon emissions might be cut, she said: “I am thinking of the use of nuclear power which – despite the attitude of so-called greens – is the most environmentally safe form of energy.”

Remarkably, Mrs Thatcher was onto this at the same time as Labour was still pleading for Britain’s coal industry to be preserved, if not expanded. In 1992, the year of the Rio Earth Summit, at which Britain formally committed to cutting carbon emissions, the then shadow secretary of state for trade and industry, Robin Cook, told the House of Commons that coal should be the future of electricity generation in Britain, and – wrongly – that gas-fired power stations would mean higher bills.

Boris Johnson is politically naive not to realise how deeply emotions still run in former mining areas – many of them “red wall” seats to which he owed his general election and which he will need to win again if he is to stay in power beyond 2024.

But the Conservatives do not need to feel embarrassed that Thatcher closed coal pits. On the contrary, she was the visionary – while Labour were the dinosaurs.