The bitter final showdown over British coal, as sun sets on ‘dirtiest fuel’

Whitehaven, Cumbria, northern England – “We were five miles (8km) out from here, 2,000 feet (609 metres) underground.”

David Cradduck, 77, used to be one of many men who would line up to begin their descent each morning through a vast network of mining shafts and subterranean tunnels that took them deep under the Irish Sea.

Hundreds like him flowed in and out of the Haig Pit deep mine until this colliery, like many other coaling sites in the area, shut in the mid-1980s. Now, pointing to the marine expanse before us, Cradduck proudly recounts the exploits of these men’s craft and labour.

“The coal in that shaft is about 600 feet (183 metres) deep,” he says. “We went through the coal and then dug tunnels out until we met the coal seams.

“Then we followed the coal seams – they dipped to the southwest. It’s amazing to think, really. Every day down there for 20 years of my life.”

The sprawling, rugged Cumbrian coastline is where Cradduck and thousands of others used to start work at all hours of the day and night. Built around coal and iron ore mining, in particular, the economy of the West Coast spiralled into progressive decline when its heavy industry began to be decommissioned and shut down in the second half of the 20th century.

But the coal seams here were still thought to be viable when the area’s pits suffered a series of sudden closures during this time.

Cumberland’s coalfield is vast. Larger in surface area than British territories such as Jersey or Guernsey, it is estimated to cover between 150 square km (58sqm) and 200 square km (77sqm) along roughly 40km (25 miles) of coastline. Narrowing further up the coast, Whitehaven is the point at which the reserves extend out furthest to sea.

Attempts to tap into these deposits once again have threatened to dig up ghosts of a painful struggle over the future of British coal. It is a battle that many thought had been settled decisively four decades ago.

Around the height of the most intense period of industrial action in recent British history between 1984 and 1985, as mining unions were locked in battle with Margaret Thatcher’s government over the sector’s future, Haig Pit was reportedly recording losses of several million pounds sterling per year. Despite the Haig miners having voted against industrial action in 1984, the mine was ordered shut by the United Kingdom’s now-defunct National Coal Board less than two years later.

The local effect was devastating, adding insult to injury for these “black-legging” workers who, as the only colliers in Cumbria to work through the strike, had been branded traitors by striking miners elsewhere in the region. More than 600 jobs went with the eventual scrapping of the Haig Colliery, bringing 70 years of operation to a close.

“We were on notice to quit,” Cradduck says of the bitterly divisive 1984-85 strike. Some of his colleagues initially joined “flying picketers” who had arrived from Durham and Northumberland in the northeast of England to support this ferocious confrontation with the state. But many Haig employees soon returned to full-time work before the Coal Board decided to cut its losses.

Cradduck’s memories of this acrimonious time remain vivid, as they do for those in many ex-mining communities whose lives were largely structured around coal. He says he still recalls speaking with local power station managers stockpiling this “black gold” as “Thatcher was preparing the ground” for her assault on organised labour.

But the defeats of the 1980s were not to prove the final episode of this area’s long coaling history.

For those like Cradduck who are attempting to keep this declining industry’s flame alive, plans for a new deep mine near the old Haig site have generated considerable enthusiasm. These new designs on the area’s coal reserves have, however, exposed novel fissures.

‘We’re the dirty carbuncle here’

When proposals for the new mine, which would be just a stone’s throw from where Cradduck is standing, were first floated nearly a decade ago, they seemed to offer new hope for some living in this former mining heartland.

Whitehaven was once a large port town from which huge amounts of coal were exported from the 17th century onwards – mainly to Ireland. “This whole area was built on mining and seafaring,” says Cradduck. “It was mining that allowed my father to move away from seafaring. The networks of support it created were strong and remain to this day.”

At a service marking the former Haig Pit’s closure in 1986, a local vicar noted that the dangers of deep mining “had bonded together the hearts and minds of those who worked within it and in a way which had knit the community into loving fellowship”. These social bonds have not disappeared, Cradduck says, even though there has been no coal extraction here for decades and many living in the area are not old enough to remember its heyday.

Visible in the distance from the old industrial towns of Barrow-in-Furness, Millom, Workington and Whitehaven is the scenic topography of northern England’s Lake District. Its picturesque landscapes – just five to six miles (8 to 10 km) away as the crow flies – draw in nearly 20 million visitors and billions of dollars in tourism revenue per year to the National Park area.

For Cradduck, this may as well be “another world”. The deindustrialised West Coast sits adjacent to the Lake District, but does not enjoy anything like the same degree of connectivity or positive press as its neighbour. Opposition to the new mine within Cumbria has been concentrated within the relatively affluent South Lakes, which has opened up local rifts and some long-held grievances.

In stark contrast with its better-known counterpart in the Lake District, which is closer to the M6 motorway and urban centres, this part of the county is out on a limb – remote and cut-off. “West Cumbria is where it is, at the end of a 45-mile (72km) cul-de-sac,” says John Greasly, a former publican who relocated to the area and who joins Cradduck.

“We’re the dirty carbuncle here, on the edge of the Lake District. They wish we didn’t exist,” he says, referring to the region’s wealthier residents in the South Lakes – where many of the politicians and environmental groups objecting to the new mining project are based.

Opposition to the mine, which has been mired in legal disputes for the past 10 years, is powerful and may have gained further traction with the Labour Party’s landslide election in July this year.

Keir Starmer’s new Labour government withdrew its support for a High Court legal challenge the previous Conservative government had been defending over the validity of the scheme’s planning permission.

In September, the High Court found that the planning approval for the mine granted by the previous Conservative administration had been unlawful. It followed a separate landmark decision in a case mounted by an environmentalist in southern England just weeks before, which ruled that “downstream” greenhouse gas emissions – here, the emissions from burning and transporting the coal, rather than extraction alone – of a fossil fuel scheme needed to be assessed before planning consents could be awarded.

These decisions are the latest in a series of court challenges from environmental campaigners, including Friends of the Earth and South Lakes Action on Climate Change, that have accumulated around this project. Some are concerned about what the project would mean for the UK’s pledges to wind down its fossil fuel dependency. Other challenges have come from groups worried about the mine’s potential to trigger subsidence in areas of the Irish Sea bed where radioactive material has been found. In total, it has been more than five years of wrangling over the scheme.

Until now, the mining company putting forward these heavily-disputed plans, West Cumbria Mining Ltd (WCM), has shown every willingness to fight this battle until the bitter end. But campaigners say it has now missed its deadline to appeal the ruling that struck down its planning consents, apparently leaving the firm with few options to resurrect the project in the  immediate term.

The mining company has remained tight-lipped about future plans to pursue the project as environmental groups urged it to “break its silence” during the UN COP29 climate talks held last month in Azerbaijan.

While many of the other commercial outfits seeking to make a final stand for British coal in former mining heartlands have been local firms, such as the family-owned Banks Group in the northeast of England, WCM is surrounded by a complex set of financial vehicles. It is ultimately owned by EMR Capital Resources, a Singapore-based private equity management firm with tax operations in the Cayman Islands.

Al Jazeera approached WCM for comment concerning any possible appeal, but the firm did not respond.

A setting sun?

Some of England’s most deprived wards can be found in the housing estates adjacent to the mining site.

The new mine’s backers believe that this project would represent vital inward investment for the area, including the creation of hundreds of jobs.

This part of Cumbria appeared to have seen the end of its coaling days when, in 1993, Greasly purchased the site for its last operational colliery at the Haig Pit for the grand sum of one British pound sterling ($1.29), he says. Greasly helped turn it into a heritage mining museum which later became offices for WCM and was the location from which the firm presented its plans for the new mine to the local community in 2016.

Greasly says the museum was shut down by the local council over asbestos and other health risks, while WCM vacated the premises on the eve of a 2021 public inquiry into the firm’s coaling plans.

“I want to see the company fight this. I really hope they dig in,” Greasly adds. “Although I’m sure they’re in disbelief at all of the obstacles thrown in their way at this point.”

He and Cradduck speak wistfully of recent approvals for new underground mines in Australia tied to a company with the name Whitehaven Coal.

Supporters of the new Cumbrian coal mine proposal have been buoyed, however, by the announcement that Chinese-owned British Steel (the UK’s biggest remaining steelmaker after Indian-owned Tata) will keep its coal-fired blast furnaces at Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire, running past Christmas amid talks over state aid for transitioning to less-polluting production methods. They feel the domestic market for metallurgical coal may yet have more life in it than some predict.

“They’re just prolonging having to dig up this coal,” Cradduck says of the prospective site WCM has been straining to open up.

But he is among a dwindling number who predict any sort of full-scale return to these deposits in the near future.

The UK’s last coal-fired power station in Ratcliffe-on-Soar, Nottinghamshire, closed in September this year. And other niche uses for British coal, such as heritage steam trains, will not come near the necessary levels of domestic demand for a mine proposing to operate until 2049. But changes in steel production methods have delivered the most forceful argument against digging up this formerly-prized commodity, marketed by WCM as “Indigenous coal” for British industry.

Steelmakers in the UK and Europe said a number of years ago that they would only be able to use about 15 percent of the coal extracted at the proposed West Cumbria site, as they move towards lower-carbon production methods that require just a fraction of the coking coal used in blast furnaces. Senior industry figures have also poured cold water on supporters’ claims that the mine would replace imported coal from places as far away as Australia and Colombia for steelmaking, affording the mine “net zero” status, according to WCM, and boosting the UK’s energy security.

But the “net zero” claim relies on a “substitution” argument – the idea that extracting this domestic coal reduces greenhouse gas emissions from imported coal – which was described by the High Court judge in September’s ruling as “legally flawed”.

Those opposed to the mining project in the area, like environmentalist Fiona Heslam, believe that a quixotic “nostalgia for more prosperous times” in a region shaped by heavy industry is what has prompted some former miners to believe they could soon be “dusting off their hardhats” and heading back underground. Heslam and others campaigning against the mine have questioned WCM’s promise that 500 well-paid jobs would be created by this project and that about 80 percent of them would go to locals.

West Cumbria should be looking ahead to the lower-carbon energy sectors of the 21st century, Heslam says, not romanticising the fields of yesteryear. For these so-called “green jobs”, she points out, “you need roofers, you need electricians. These are proper jobs.

“If there were a coal mine here, the locals would only be performing ancillary roles, like cleaning and catering.”

The fact is that the sun has been setting for some time on this industry that powered centuries of British expansion and fuelled its military might at the zenith of the empire.

Now a net importer of coal, the UK’s production levels have dropped by about 96 percent in a decade.

The end uses for any remaining coal deposits are also changing. Tata’s steelworks in Port Talbot, south Wales – a major employer in another erstwhile coal heartland – has until recently used coal to fire its production. But as part of an industry-wide shift towards greener production methods, the firm now will rely on steel imports until an electric arc furnace, which melts scrap steel, can be built. It means that about 90 times less coal will be used in its steelmaking sites, and that 2,500 of the 4,000 jobs Port Talbot currently supports will go with it.

A multi-layered dispute

What has become a protracted, bitter dispute over these mining plans has played out at a number of levels: from the hyperlocal to the international stage. It has also brought back painful memories to the community in Whitehaven of the loss of a way of life it suffered back in the 1980s.

First, the plans were approved by local councils over objections from environmentalists, before being waved through by Whitehall ministers. Then, a series of legal challenges appeared to stop them in their tracks.

In late 2021, as the UK hosted the COP26 UN summit in Glasgow, just more than 100 miles (160km) north of where this coal would be mined, these proposals became a flashpoint for the UK’s net zero commitments. Coal topped the summit’s agenda and the UK’s then-prime minister, Boris Johnson, was questioned about it repeatedly. The Conservative government’s decarbonisation agenda did not seem to line up with its pledges to “level up” areas like this one, of which there are many in the north of England.

These fights echoed locally. Although coal has left a deadly legacy – monuments to various pit disasters can be found throughout Whitehaven, with 14 bodies still entombed under the seabed due to one 1928 blast – its extraction is also associated with greater prosperity and connection to a larger national picture in these parts.

Mike Starkie, who was the local mayor during the bulk of this dispute over new coal, believes the wishes of local people – among whom, he says, WCM’s plans are overwhelmingly “popular” – have now been overturned by the courts.

Despite having retired last year, he remains one of the mine’s most vocal supporters and continues to advocate for it regularly in regional and national media. “It leaves us in a really unfortunate position,” Starkie says of the turning tide against this project.

The former borough mayor has challenged arguments advanced for years by environmental NGO and think tanks, who say that creating “thousands of green jobs” should be the focus for West Cumbria rather than digging up new coal.

One report in 2021 by the Cumbria Action for Sustainability charity estimated that some 9,000 jobs could be created through wind turbine installation and “retrofitting” – renovating homes to make them more energy efficient. That same year, the Green New Deal UK nonprofit group found that, provided the right levels of investment were committed, this part of West Cumbria could gain more than 12,000 new jobs in low-carbon sectors over a decade, with more than 8,000 of those in renewable energy.

But Starkie told Al Jazeera these arguments do not wash with residents, who view such jobs as immaterial and something of a chimera.

“The mine would have brought prosperity and it would have brought significant amounts of jobs to the area,” he says.

“For all the talk of ‘green jobs’ among the opponents, no one has been able to articulate exactly what these green jobs are or who will fund them. And, in the seven-to-eight years that this mine has been on the anvil, not one of these green jobs has emerged.”

‘Allowing children to eat plutonium’

Retired health and social care worker Yve Hansen, 61, is on the other side of the debate.

Walking up the old wagon road that connects the Haig Pit entrance to the prospective site for WCM’s mine, she recalls what it was like growing up in the nearby Kells housing estate built for miners and other industrial labourers.

“All along this bay here, we used to get sea foam from the outlet pipe,” she says of the coastal stretch during the 1960s and right up to the 1990s. “It was chemicals. You get sea foam when the sea churns things up, and it can be everything. But we used to have that 24/7.

“And if the wind caught it and it got on your face, it would burn you – it was the phosphates and the chemicals coming out of the site.”

The fields by this cliffside pathway are now green and have been recolonised by a variety of native flora. But Hansen says they would frequently be “set on fire” by passing steam engines before those were phased out.

She remembers the old wagons “thundering past the junior school there, the infants’ school here, full of phosphate and all this dust going everywhere. The chimneys would push out this acrid smell, [of] sulphur, all the time. When the filters failed, it choked you.”

The proposed entrance to the new mine would be adjacent to what was the old Marchon chemical works premises, where an on-shore processing facility for the coal will also be built if the plans come to fruition. At ground-level here, a series of large, square concrete slabs cover what was described by Greenpeace as “England’s most contaminated site” during the 1990s. Aged, fading skull-and-crossbones warning signs multiply the closer you get to the planned entrance site.

But these days, people walk their dogs here. Retired Cumbria County Council planning officer Maggie Mason says she, for one, wants the site to be “left alone” and “rewilded” rather than redeveloped. She believes “no intrusive testing” has been carried out to determine the risks of disturbing the contaminants and hazardous substances buried underground here.

Hansen puts the apparent lack of trust and goodwill between the opposing sides down, in part, to the influence exerted on the area by the nearby Sellafield nuclear complex. Europe’s biggest nuclear site, just a few kilometres along the coastline at Windscale, has loomed in the background of this toxic dispute. Never far away in conversation, it casts a long shadow as a quasi-monopoly employer in this part of West Cumbria.

She is not the first to note the grip this facility has had on the area. In American novelist Marylinne Robinson’s Mother Country – a non-fiction polemical work – the Pulitzer Prize winner argues that, through Sellafield, the collective health and wellbeing of areas like this were sacrificed in the name of gross domestic product and the UK’s military-industrial complex.

In a memorable line, Robinson describes this dynamic’s institutionalisation in the local area as “allowing the children to eat plutonium”. She sees Sellafield’s development as an extension of the centuries-old Poor Law, a system of poor relief that saw many sent to workhouses, which she considers to be deeply embedded within the British psyche – or, in her words, nothing less than “the core of British culture”.

It is this exploitative legacy that locals opposed to the new mine believe is being stirred up by distant venture capitalists.

A battle for the soul of post-Brexit UK

For others, however, this battle tells a larger story about the post-Brexit UK’s attempts to reorient itself in a volatile world in which its influence is waning.

This, according to the former special representative for climate change at the UK’s Foreign Office, John Ashton, partially explains the “Brexit within a Brexit” dynamic that has marked some of the charged and divisive language around the disputed plans for this mine.

A number of the mine’s supporters who spoke to Al Jazeera used the word “treason” to describe those responsible for the decline of this area’s industry, echoing language used by some local politicians referring to opposition to the mine. They also talked of the UK becoming “a laughing stock” in domains where it once held international clout and prestige, such as engineering.

Heslam, for her part, believes the mining plans have proven a rich seam for “politicians looking for a wedge issue” in an area that overwhelmingly voted to leave the European Union just more than eight years ago.

But, as former Labour Party councillor Karl Connor says, there is something substantive that has been driving this local discontent. He points out that a number of vacant lots earmarked for redevelopment in Whitehaven town in recent years, along with smaller-scale job creation projects, have failed to get off the ground. This illustrates the difficulty in attracting employers to the area, Connor says. Most recent developments, he adds, are connected in some way to Sellafield, where he himself used to work.

Meanwhile, Rebecca Willis, professor of energy and climate governance at Lancaster University, is “baffled” as to why WCM has contested setbacks to its plans for so long in a climate which is increasingly unfavourable for coal.

There may be a longer game involving the company’s funders, she speculates, as further obstacles stack up and as a number of insurers rule out underwriting the project.

“There’s a ‘discourses of delay’ argument – that, as long as you keep the argument [for new coal] alive, it means that people can keep making profits from coal mining elsewhere in the world and continue that. So I don’t know whether the backers are saying something like, ‘We really need to keep money in coal – we can’t pull out of this just now.’”

The area has had its hopes dashed a number of times in recent years over new job creation schemes, she adds, noting the lack of any concrete proposals for a region whose identity is largely bound up with a long history of heavy industry.

Other proposals for this remote part of northern England include the creation of a geological disposal facility for the long-term burial of the UK’s most radioactive waste – the majority of which is currently stored at Sellafield. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these plans are also controversial and have faced opposition of various kinds for decades.

Renewed calls for a nuclear power plant at Moorside, near Sellafield, have also gained momentum. Given attempts to develop the site for this purpose stalled for nearly two decades, locals fear the area may now lose out on the thousands of jobs promised by the UK’s push for new nuclear power. Whitehall is aiming to increase energy production from nuclear power – in what it is describing as the “biggest expansion” of the sector for 70 years – by up to four times between now and 2050.

“There is now a yawning void in West Cumbria,” says Professor Willis. “There was the proposed nuclear station – that’s dead. There’s the coal mine – that’s almost dead. There was the radioactive waste disposal facility, which I don’t think is being taken forward at the moment. So there’s a whole load of things that aren’t happening.”

A ‘political headache’

Willis says a political headache for the newly-elected Labour government is brewing here. It recently pledged to invest 22 billion pounds ($28.5bn) in carbon capture technology, potentially bringing tens of thousands of jobs to other former industrial areas scarred by pit closures in the north of England.

But nothing has as yet materialised for Cumbria, she points out. With the help of electoral boundary changes, Labour won the seat back in July’s snap general election after its historic 2019 loss. It is noteworthy, she says, that the new MP, Josh MacAlister, has avoided mention of climate concerns when carefully voicing his opposition to the coal mine.

Al Jazeera approached MacAlister for comment via email, telephone and social media several times. But he had not responded by the time of publication.

Pancho Lewis, a researcher looking at the emotional and political ties to industry during the net-zero transition, argues West Cumbria could yet prove to be a place where green and productive industries can flourish.

Unlike other deindustrialised parts of the UK “which were left with nothing”, he says, Sellafield’s presence here means “pockets of deprivation” sit alongside “well-paid jobs in the nuclear industry”.

However, he adds that a “lack of diversity” in the area’s industry – in other words, an absence of thriving sectors beyond nuclear – has meant “the coal mine has been stepping into that vacuum and providing people with an imagined alternative.

“And that’s why it was experienced as something that signals a desirable future. The challenge that now lies with government is to deliver an alternative to the mine that pays as well as fossil fuels or nuclear.”

Wind energy production is not embedded in the social and cultural fabric of West Cumbria. But, while it may alienate some residents, Lewis sees potential for the area to redefine its industrial profile and identity through a planned community-owned wind farm project currently on the table, which would be worth an estimated 3 billion pounds ($3.9bn).

This scheme, named “Project Collette”, proposes to build up to 100 wind turbines at a number of sites along this stretch of the Cumbrian coast. It has been described by one of the green finance groups involved as “groundbreaking”, representing the UK’s first large-scale wind farm that would be “part-owned” by the local community. Those behind the project say it could generate enough energy to power about 1 million homes.

Given the successive disappointments that have accompanied job creation promises in recent years, however, Lewis says, all of these new projects – including the mine – are likely to be viewed with a certain suspicion and jaded cynicism.

Coal and other industries competing for Cumbria’s future have a richer heritage story to tap into for their respective pitches, he notes, adding: “Trust in politicians is very low and for good reason – we haven’t had a decent industrial strategy in a long time and they’ve just let jobs accumulate in the southeast of England.”

But, even if the jobs created through this wind farm project “wouldn’t be as well-paid as they typically are in other industries”, Lewis says, the tangible benefits and degree of democratic control it could create locally may prove to be a game-changer.

“If it’s community-owned, if people cannot just see it, looking out from Whitehaven, but also have a sense of ownership with it, they are also likely to have a sense of the benefits that the wind farm is accruing for the area.

“I think that’s the golden opportunity. The thing is until people see it and see it’s delivering, people are going to continue wanting a coal mine because there’s no proof in the pudding.

“Everyone loves talking about the ‘Green Industrial Revolution’ – Boris Johnson did it, Keir Starmer is doing it. But until we actually deliver these jobs, until we deliver industry that benefits communities, nobody is going to trust that this is actually going to happen.”

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