The 40th anniversary of the miners’ strike, an immense year in the life of the British coal mining industry, has again brought issues of inequality and the conditions of everyday life in the old industrial areas into sharp focus. Questions about the need for energy security and the strategic aim to replace coal, oil and gas with a green alternative remain significant.
A lot has happened since we finished writing The Shadow of the Mine in 2019. Behind the headlines, though, the main themes – of coal and the end of industrial Britain – remain significant and shape what it might mean to achieve the ‘just transition to a low carbon economy’ envisaged in discussions at the COP26 climate change conference in Glasgow.
At that conference coal was seen as the most polluting of the carbon fuels and as such the future of the planet depended upon its eradication. Cast in this way, the miners’ strike could be seen as wrongheaded, a strike against the future. But that wasn’t how it was then. In the 1970s and 80s coal was viewed rather benignly by environmentalists, and often contrasted with the dangerous experiment of nuclear power. The miners’ union leader Arthur Scargill joined forces with Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth in opposition to the expansion of nuclear power stations at Sellafield and Sizewell. In the prelude to the strike in 1984, the union’s ‘Campaign for Coal’ highlighted the many societal advantages offered by the mining of coal, focusing on the advantages of a domestically produced energy supply and the threat posed by nuclear power.
There was certainly no concern for a ‘just transition’ away from coal, which now accompanies discussions of decarbonisation and the move to a greener economy around the world. Our account of the closure of the British coal mines emphasised that ‘justice’ had very little to do with it, and issues of the environment weren’t centrally involved either. Although the coal mines were closed there was no dramatic decarbonisation of the economy, nor were there plans to achieve such an outcome. Oil and gas were to benefit from the closure of coal and, of course, oil played a big part in the miners’ defeat.
Oil’s ascendency
The fact of oil’s ascendancy was made clear when the executives of BP and Shell were brought in to advise on the government’s response to the strike. Clear, too, when Thatcher thanked the oil industry for the ‘vital part’ it played in the miners’ defeat (oil made up 38 per cent of the burn in the power stations during the strike, compared with 3 per cent in the previous year). None of this was a coincidence. One of the great and fortuitous assets of the Thatcher governments lay in the discovery of oil and gas reserves in the North Sea, with the oil being particularly light and low in sulphur. In time ‘Brent crude’ became synonymous with this ‘sweet’ easily refinable product, and the benchmark in the global oil markets, with two thirds of world oil prices linked to its futures.
This considerable economic and political clout was inherited by Thatcher along with the British National Oil Corporation (BNOC), which had been set up as a buyer of the produce of the major private oil companies. This contrasted with the approach developed in Norway. The state corporation there was also an oil producer, and oil and gas revenues became the basis for a national economic and social development fund.
In the UK, ‘our oil’ was ‘ours’ only insofar as the BNOC had the right to buy it at market prices, establishing a distinctive model of national resource governance and one of the enduring cornerstones of Blatcherism. Guiliano Garavini, the author of The Rise and Fall of OPEC, has documented how this led to the UK and the EU becoming not greener but ‘highly dependent on oil and gas organised through an oligopoly of giant private companies’. This created, as we have seen with the Ukraine war, an unanticipated degree of vulnerability for states and consumers.
Issues of the environment or ‘justice’ had very little to do with the closure of the British coal mines
But coal was not pushed out entirely. The ‘dash for gas’ was to an extent supported by a less well reported ‘rush for coal’ through imports, many of them from Russia, as was the case when Kellingley (the last of the National Coal Board’s mines) closed in 2015. Its deliveries to the Drax power station were replaced with coal from Russian mines. This was on top of the half a trillion tonnes of coal imported since 1997, the year of the Kyoto COP summit, which really set the alarm bells ringing on climate change.
Annual coal imports have now reduced to six million tonnes, and the last two coal-fired power stations are due to cease generation this year. But gas still accounted for 34 per cent of the UK’s energy burn in the last quarter of 2022, up by 16 per cent from the previous year, lending weight to Cambridge political economy professor Helen Thompson’s argument that we face an energy crisis in which ‘little can be done that would immediately accelerate the transition from fossil fuels’.
A greener future?
But what of renewables? The ‘good early start’ hailed by Boris Johnson toward making Britain the ‘Saudi Arabia of wind’ has so far also proved fanciful, along with the ‘hundreds of thousands, if not millions of green jobs’ he promised. The future for UK electricity supply may well involve offshore wind power. But there remains a question mark over the production of the huge turbines as no British company has the expertise that Vestas and Siemens-Gamesa have accumulated in this area over the last decades.
Indeed, this question of productive capacity is of general concern in debates over the green transition, as is clear in the critical case of the automobile industry. Critical, because with its reliance on the internal combustion engine (ICE) it was (alongside coal) a central part of the carbon economy. Its dismantling could prove equally tortuous. Currently the plan is for all sales of new ICE vehicles to cease by 2030 – a boldness matched only by a remarkable lack of preparedness, or of any clear strategy for the industry that recognises the rapid changes that have taken place since 2000.
Electrical vehicles (EVs) differ significantly from those powered by ICE. With 90 per cent fewer moving parts, they are simpler to make, leading the Ford company to question whether existing workers could be moved into the new production system. The locomotive power of EVs comes from the rechargeable battery for which nickel and lithium are key components. Many of the critical materials are located in South America and Africa, particularly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Many of them have already been acquired by Chinese companies.
Ed Miliband’s talk of a ‘green prosperity plan’ to deliver a multi-billion investment by government and businesses always sounded hollow and, with the ditching of the plan, even more so now
Andy Palmer, the man who brought Nissan’s LEAF EV into production in the UK explained the significance of all this when he said that ‘China owns that supply chain’. China now overwhelmingly dominates the manufacture of batteries and recently of EVs too. In this, one company, BYD (‘Build Your Dreams’), is dominant. Set up as a battery producer in 1995, it expanded rapidly and with government support has emerged as the world leader, outselling Tesla in China and fully prepared for a major export drive. In the face of this the interventions by the British government seem pathetic, with the British Volt saga standing out as an example of what not to do. There seems little awareness of the scale of the threat. This was amplified when BYD announced that it had no plans to manufacture batteries in the UK.
Forty years ago, the Ford Motor Company in the UK introduced a new calendar called AJ – After Japan – based on the threat it faced from companies such as Toyota. Today, another change would be in order to AC – After China. Nissan seems to have already accepted this in reaching a partnership deal with Chinese battery producer Envision, which will provide batteries for 100,000 more EVs a year. BMW has announced that it will be making the Mini EV in China (while also undertaking some production in the UK to circumvent tariffs for the US market).
A similar transition in the US led the Biden administration to consider ways of bolstering domestic manufacture to be implemented though its oddly named Inflation Reduction Act. The Tories have no credible plan but what of a Labour government? In 2023, Ed Miliband endorsed a weak form of the US approach and talked of a ‘green prosperity plan’ to deliver a multi-billion investment by government and businesses. He said, ‘Joe Biden wants the future Made in America. We want the future Made in Britain.’ It sounded hollow then and with the ditching of the plan, more so now.
The coal industry was dismantled with abrupt haste and little concern for the people or their futures: this was left in the hands of the market and hopes of inward investment. There was no serious strategy for a meaningful transition to a new kind of green economy. Today, facing a further change of epic proportions we are no better prepared. It is the problem of our age.
