ED MILIBAND shamed Business Minister Anna Soubry yesterday after she condemned Hatfield coalmine to closure, saying that her decision to cut off cash was “not just, fair or right.”

The former Labour leader confronted Ms Soubry in a Commons debate that he had secured just two days after she pulled the plug on the pit’s emergency funding.

He paid tribute to the “hard work solidarity and comradeship” of workers at Hatfield, which is in Mr Miliband’s Doncaster North constituency and one of just three deep pits left in Britain.

“The miners feel they’ve had the rug pulled from under them,” he said.

“I do not believe this decision makes economic sense, industrial sense or is morally right.

“I do believe the minister should look again.”

Mr Miliband revealed that there was a company willing to buy at least half the coal that the mine could produce until its scheduled closure next August.

But he explained that there was a “chicken and egg” situation where the miners needed the extra funding to be able to secure the contract.

Ms Soubry insisted, however, that it was the mine’s directors, not her, who took “the honourable and the right decision” to close the pit in nine weeks’ time.

She also said that she had never understood the “over sentimental attachment to working underground.”

Mr Miliband hit back, suggesting that Ms Soubry had made her decision based on “ideology about the narrow view of faith in the market.”

He demanded that the government look again at its decision and at least top-up the 400 miners’ meagre £450-a-month pension.