Goodbye to ‘King Coal’ in Britain

Once synonymous with British industry, the closure of the Ratcliffe-on-Soar coal power plant represents the end of Britain’s relationship with coal. Find out more on this relationship and what its ending means below:

‘Civilisation is Founded on Coal’:

Opened in 1968 by the Central Electricity Generating Board, Ratcliffe-on-Soar has dominated the local Nottinghamshire skyline for almost 60 years, but on 30th September 2024 it finally closes for good. As the last of the large coal-fired power stations that were built in the late 1960s and 1970s to close its doors, Ratcliffe’s closure represents a symbolic moment in Britain history as it marks the end of its relationship with coal. Once the ruler of British industry, at its peak in the early 20th century, the coal industry produced 287 million tonnes of coal a year and employed 1.25 million people and with nationalisation of the sector in 1947, coal became central to helping power Britain and support the national economy.

As mining heartlands developed across the country, Ratcliffe’s construction represented a swathe of feats in British industry across the late 1960s and 1970s in which multiple large coal-fired power plants were built at scale and with groundbreaking efficiency for their size. At their peak, 250 towers stood over the British landscape and provided the source of many jobs, with 3,000 people employed at Ratcliffe at the height of its operations. This workforce allowed Ratcliffe to generate power to heat and light 2m homes in the Nottinghamshire area and its peak burn 6.5m tonnes of coal of year. The network of power of stations around the country allowed coal to generate around three quarters (70-80%) of UK electricity across the 1970s and 1980s. Coal has continued to play a role in the UK’s generation with as recently as 2012 coal powered 40% of electricity.

However, the overall picture has been one of declining influence for coal, within a century coal went from 95% generation in the early twentieth century to just 1% in 2023, Ratcliffe’s closure will see this figure drop to 0% in coming years. First challenged by the North Sea oil boom in the 1990s and more recently with the introduction of renewable technologies, the writing has been on the wall for coal for many years. The mines which produced the coal that made up the 140,000 deliveries taken by Ratcliffe have now all disappeared, infamously beginning in the 1980s, the last deep coalmine in the UK closed in 2015. Moreover, legislative changes have also accelerated coal’s decline, in 2001 the Large Combustion Plant Directive aimed to reduce carbon emissions throughout Europe, then in 2015 it was announced that the UK would phase out the use of unabated coal power generation with a target of 2025. As part of the UK’s overall target of net zero by 2050, the closure of Britain’s coal industry will be seen as a necessary move to achieve this and avert an environmental disaster of climate catastrophe. Whether this will be enough on a global scale remains to be seen with experts stating that coal power plants need to close at almost five times the present rate to achieve the Paris climate agreement goals.

 

‘They’re just Ordinary Common-or-Garden honest, Decent Human Beings. And Not One of Them with an Ounce of Bloody Hope left’:

Despite the view that the end of Britain’s relationship with coal will be a necessary move in the climate fight, the moment will represent a deeply cultural moment in British history, as well as technological. The coal industry has held a unique place within the British national imagination, as the recent BBC series Sherwood shows, which is set in the Nottinghamshire region where Ratcliffe is based and dramatises the scarring caused by the decline of coal communities and the battle over their memory. For many Ratcliffe’s closure will represent the end of half a century of industrial decline in Britain, encapsulated by the bitter miners’ strikes of the 1980s and the opening of the UK to globalisation and global capital which has broken down the national economy.

Once the home of strong local communities, the UK’s coal mining areas and organised labour more generally, have witnessed devasting changes in which a sense of pride, community and a way of life have been lost and never replaced. These communities have felt a sense of betrayal as they have become dogged by economic, social and health problems, it is not just coal as a fuel which has become marginalised but the people who work with coal that too have been pushed to the margins. This marginalisation has fed into narratives of these communities being ‘left behind’ and crystallised by the Brexit referendum with a strong correlation between leave votes and coal mining areas.

During the 1980s, the Conservatives decisions to shut collieries was justified by the fact that it would be a ‘just transition’ to protect those communities dependent on the mines. However, this was not the case and closures became political, abrupt and bitter. As Ratcliffe closes it doors and the oil and gas industries are scaled back for renewables, there are fears that workers in these industries could become the coal miners of a new generation. Job losses without a ‘just transition’ would further blight these communities and increase levels of inequality. Once again there are fears that those who help power the UK will again be left without ‘an ounce of bloody hope left’.

 

Labour’s Lessons?:

The lessons from the decline of the UK’s coal industry are ones which the new Labour government must learn from. Historically, Labourist politics have been synonymous with mining heartlands but since the decline began there has been a sense that Labour did little to reverse or limit the worst impacts of deindustrialisation under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown between 1997 and 2010. However, Keir Starmer’s recent election victory presents a chance to change this and ensure that Labour has learnt the lessons of the past. Last week the energy secretary Ed Miliband delivered a speech at the Labour party conference which indicated that the rhetoric of the party has shifted. Miliband spoke of the need to generate ‘national energy’ and ‘helping communities locked out of prosperity’, alongside specific reference to coal miners, who Miliband argued that the UK owed ‘the greatest debt’ to. However, rhetoric will soon have to begin turn into a reality as Labour has already inherited a brewing industrial crisis from Port Talbot to Grangemouth and Harland & Wolff.

Central to what Labour wants to become its reality is GB Energy, a publicly owned energy company that will help achieve emissions targets and develop renewable projects. Targets include achieving zero carbon electricity, doubled onshore wind capacity, quadrupled offshore wind capacity and tripled solar capacity by 2030. Crucially, Labour also hopes to develop national renewable economies through a green prosperity plan with the aim of generating 650,000 jobs by 2030. As many have pointed out, the scale of these plans will be very ambitious and perhaps the scale and pace at which Ratcliffe and other coal power-plants were built at presents an opportunity for Labour to study and learn how to implement ambitious plans in a short space of time. Nevertheless, caution must be taken by Labour to avoid implementing transformations that do not place the future of workers in those industries that they will replace at their heart.

Workers in offshore industries and the supply chains that support them onshore will fear that their future will go the same way as the coal industry, with 200,000 job losses already since 2014. Even if Labour is to provide the relevant training programmes for workers to transition to renewable sectors, infrastructure changes will have to be made to transform them into a central part of the national economy. For example, the UK is still a major importer of turbines rather than making them domestically and many wind-farms are state-owned but owned by many other nations. In a recent offshore wind auction 70% of the projects were awarded to Ǿrsted a Danish state-owned company. If Labour is to an implement a transition that ensures that both the climate agenda and workers needs are met, then a stronger industrial strategy is needed which learns the lessons from Britain’s end to its relationship with coal. Learning these lessons would provide Labour with the opportunity to restore a national economy which has energy at its centre and restore some sense of community amongst those areas which are reliant on their development. Reindustrialising Britain and learning the lessons from the coal industry will ensure that Ratcliffe’s closure is not in vain and that its towers do not become of ghost of a lost past whose memory haunts the nation.