LETTER TO THE EDITOR: Consigning coal to history means a new deep mine!

THE latest news for our nation is that our  Conservative government of Great Britain has for the first time in 30 years given the go-ahead for a new deep coal mine.

It is reported that the coal is to be used to provide coke for steelmaking, 15 per cent in Britain and the rest abroad, though who the customers will be is unspecified and puzzling, since the world’s main steel producers, China and USA, have ample of their own, and Germany, by the time the mine starts production, will have switched totally to hydrogen and EAF steel production, so will avoid the high import penalty they would be paying if they bought coal from us.

We are “promised” by the Government that production will cease before 2050, by which date we are committed to zero emission levels, though by that date it will have added 400,000 tons of atmospheric pollution per year to our already over polluted air, and 220 million tons of CO2 to our atmosphere in its lifetime.

Still, whether successful or white elephant, the owners of the new mine will be well satisfied, as their headquarters are in the Cayman tax haven so not a penny of their profits will be reimbursed to the British taxpayer, who will have paid for its construction.

All this from a government whose Prime Minister in Glasgow last year urged the world to “consign coal to history”, and in Egypt this year to “embrace renewable energy entirely”. All that we have to do now is allow them to impose the revised ECT upon our country and our already established reputation as the hypocrites of the world will be complete.

This month also, with the NHS in crisis from decades of cuts and underfunding, with A and E waiting times soaring, with seven million long waiting lists, many on them waiting over a year for operations or treatment, and with medical and nursing staff sick and tired of working on chronically understaffed wards in outdated and neglected premises, our underpaid and undervalued NHS staff have for the first time in almost a 100 years decided to go on strike. But when approached on the subject our Conservative Party chairman, Nadhim Zahawi, is reported to have had the impudence to state that “NHS strikes help Putin”; this from the Chairman of a party whose trade with Russia has throughout the entire Ukraine conflict continued unabated, and when a scheme to house Ukrainian refugees was oversubscribed his Home Office staff were so obstructive it took almost a year to fill just half of them.

And to think we still have a further two years of this before we can vote in a British government,

Charles David Foulstone, Rotherham Green Party