Coal mines aren’t the answer – but workers need a job they’re proud of

It’s not a name that trips off the tongue. Cumbrians Opposed to a Radioactive Environment or Core (geddit?).

Even its repetition conjures up an image in my mind of a few desultory souls holding placards outside the gates of Sellafield. Indeed, that’s pretty much what Core amounted to. This, despite Cumbria, where I grew up, being the centre of all things nuclear.

In my hometown of Barrow-in-Furness, the main – make that only – large-scale employer is engaged in the building of Trident nuclear submarines. These are nuclear-powered and designed to carry nuclear missiles. And they are being assembled in the shipyard right in the centre of the town.

Across Morecambe Bay are the two nuclear power stations at Heysham. Up the coast, is the vast Sellafield complex.

We would watch ships from Japan dock and unload spent nuclear fuel onto specially-designed trains for transporting to Sellafield and reprocessing. My father, a school teacher, would borrow the Geiger counter from the school laboratories and take it down to the beach. Frequently, when it neared a clump of washed-up seaweed the machine would erupt in a frenzy of beeping.

Occasionally, Core would be joined by protestors from Greenpeace and the like, but the backlash was thin and certainly did not involve many locals. There was no mass outcry from Cumbrians protesting that their county was a nuclear engineering and dumping ground. There still isn’t. Jobs mattered and matter to them more than environmental concerns.

So it is again with the go-ahead for a new coal mine at Whitehaven, also in Cumbria. It’s the first mine to be built in Britain in 30 years. When completed it will produce 2.8 million tonnes of coking coal for use in steelmaking. Emissions from burning this coal will add 8.4 million tonnes of Co2 into the atmosphere every year.

So much for the government’s climate crisis policies and “net zero” targets. The national outcry against the mine has been loud and long. But not in Cumbria. There, the focus is on the 500 jobs that will be created.

Pancho Lewis, a researcher at Lancaster University, has studied the local response. The media has homed in on the area’s deprivation but he says, the picture is more complicated than that. Many of those in Whitehaven supporting the mine are retired and comfortably well-off.

There is an element of nostalgia – this part of Cumbria was once home to many pits, with the coal being shipped around the world from Whitehaven harbour. The last plant closed only in the mid-1980s.

What Lewis found, however, was not so much fond memories for the old mines but rather harking back to an era when the town and district was a hive of economic activity. It was a bustling place, quite unlike today. As well as coal mines, Whitehaven was home to a large chemical factory, Marchon, which employed thousands. Marchon shut in 2005 and the site lies empty.

There was a buzz and pride, too, in the fact the mines made the inhabitants feel they were part of the modern, global economy, that their coal was being exported and used abroad.

Lewis identifies another reason why the mines were welcomed. The working-class community understood and valued manual labour. They could also build their lives around it, clocking off on a Friday, have a social weekend, starting again on a Monday.

What service industries there are that have come in and replaced some of the jobs lost are not the same. They’re seven days a week, the shift patterns are socially awkward, they involve sitting behind terminals or working in hairdressers or flipping burgers in fast food outlets. The actual work is far safer and healthier than grafting down a mine but job security can be tenuous and the skills required are less. Miners, in short, took pride in their work; and the town in them.

The mines, too, had their supply chains of other, smaller businesses. Keeping their wheels turning was a collective, joint enterprise. This has not been replicated.

It’s food for thought for those who speak gaily of service jobs pouring into the post-industrial Midlands and North.

There’s been shock that Whitehaven is in favour of a new coal mine. Other parts of the country and politicians at Westminster simply do not get it.

A bit of effort to understand the mentality of the local people could help provide the answer. They are not heads-in-the-sand climate change deniers but they do have other values and priorities.

More creative thinking might, for instance, supply an alternative, sticking to what they did best once and would like to do again. It does not need to be a mine, and can have a current, even future-looking twist. The area could house renewable energy manufacturing projects, constructing wind turbines and solar panels. And as Lewis says, there was talk of building a new steel recycling plant just north of Whitehaven in Workington. “A factory of this nature would resonate with the area’s heritage, and provide a bridge between its past and reimagined green industrial future.”

Concludes Lewis: “Until the political organisation exists to make ideas like this [the recycled steel factory] a reality, the same mistakes will arise, with new fossil fuel projects offering the only investment to communities eager for some alternative to decline.”

I checked, and Core is still alive. But its website does not appear to have been updated since 2019. Meanwhile, the nuclear industry in Cumbria continues to thrive.