I missed this news a couple of days back, but it's quite an interesting as a demonstration of the results of the Climate Change Act and the duplicity of the political classes:
Yorkshire’s coal mine to close
More than 400 people are expected to lose their jobs due to the closure of the Hatfield Colliery in South Yorkshire.
It is closing 14 months earlier than scheduled.
According to trade union Prospect, 420 “high-skilled” jobs and further jobs in the supply chain will be lost.
The left-wing media are blaming the government of course. Here's the BBC, leading unsurprisingly on the thoughts of Ed Miliband:
Ed Miliband has said the government's failure to provide more funding for a South Yorkshire colliery is "wrong".
Of course Ed Miliband's Climate Change Act must go down as one of the principal reasons for the failure of the mine, alongside the EU's Large Combustion Plant Directive, so one can be sickened by his hypocrisy, while noting that the Conservative government's position on the Act and the EU are largely indistinguishable so to hold them at least partly to blame is not unreasonable.
Meanwhile, we can only wonder at the Labour Party's enthusiasm for keeping dying Northern industries alive, while trying to strangle new ones at birth. What has the party got against the North?