While the UK's own production of coal fell by 27% from January to March, owing mainly to controversial colliery closures, the amount of coal imported from Russia rose by 21%.
John Mann, Labour MP for Bassetlaw, thinks long-term mismanagement is responsible for many of the colliery closures and that the company, privatised by the Thatcher government, is completely compromised by its new-found interest in land redevelopment.
By 1924 the Bolton arm had experienced a significant fall in traffic, although until the 1930s, when colliery closures reduced traffic even further, coal trade remained brisk.
It grew out of the former Coalfield Communities Campaign, formed to highlight the plight of pit communities in a colliery closure programme in which over 200,000 jobs disappeared through the 1980s, 1990s and beyond, leaving Britain a heavy importer of coal.
His father worked down the local Fishburn colliery before pit closures swept through the country, and he attended a secondary modern.
John Cuningham Acting secretary, Spanish Miners' Solidarity Committee, and ex-miner, Dinnington Colliery, South Yorkshire, Carrie Hedderwick Sheffield Women Against Pit Closures, Ian Isaac Executive committee, South Wales NUM, 1982-87, and ex-miner, St John's Colliery, Steve Brunt Ex-miner, Arkwright Colliery, Doncaster.
The government is also paying out £350m to help former mining areas recover from pit closures, another £20m to clean up former colliery spoil heaps and £60m a year in pensions to older miners who lost out when pension terms were improved in the mid-1970s.
In his view, the government had an essential ally in Scargill, president of the NUM from 1982, who rejected a compromise deal put forward by the colliery union Nacods, involving an independent review body for pit closures.
When the miners went on strike in 1984 over pit closures, Harpham joined the fight and manned a picket line for a year at Clipstone colliery, while many in Nottinghamshire worked on in protest against Arthur Scargill's refusal to call a national ballot.
As the colliery band leader Danny in Mark Herman's Brassed Off (1996), Postlethwaite's face is a joy as he conducts a quietly passionate rendering of Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez in a montage-sequence showing the dark backroom deals over pit closures that will affect everyone's future.
The 1984-5 strike, called in an attempt to halt pit closures and the rundown of the industry at a time when there were more than 180,000 miners working in 170 collieries, was the most important industrial dispute in Britain since the General Strike of 1926.
