THE end of production at Thoresby Colliery yesterday, ending 800 years of coalmining in Nottinghamshire, is not just a tragedy for its 400-strong workforce and their families.

It is a signal of the irresponsibility and spite of a posh-boy Cabinet with no link to the working people of this country.

Following so soon after the closure of Hatfield Colliery last month and preceding the scheduled shutdown of Kellingley at the end of the year, the destruction of Britain’s deep mining industry could have been timed as a final insult 30 years on from the great strike.

Despite having taken hundreds of millions of pounds out of miners’ pension funds over the years, the government has refused to spend a minuscule fraction of that on securing our coal industry’s future.

This has nothing to do with protecting the environment. The Conservatives are cutting renewable energy subsidies and promoting the highly polluting and dangerous use of hydraulic fracturing to extract shale gas, even altering the law so that transnational fracking companies can drill under people’s homes.

Carbon capture and storage technology being primed for use with other fossil fuels could equally have been used to slash emissions from coal-fired power stations.

In any case, Britain has not stopped burning coal. We get through 60 million tons of it every year. But five-sixths of it is now lower-quality imports, mostly from Colombia, Russia and the United States.

Our true reliance on coal is even greater, since almost four decades of neoliberalism have wrecked British manufacturing.

Once the workshop of the world, we now depend on goods produced elsewhere — in countries such as China where coal continues to dominate the energy sector.

We have simply swapped a world-leading home-grown coal industry, employing 150,000 people and supporting hundreds of communities, for reliance on coal dug abroad, often in dangerous conditions by miners without the security and solidarity of a strong trade union.

How powerful that solidarity remains could not be better demonstrated than by today’s Durham Miners’ Gala. Every year the Big Meeting shows that the unshakeable spirit of our mining communities lives on.

The miners’ strike is not merely the stuff of history. It was the high water mark of industrial militancy in the postwar age, and the closest working people got to defeating Margaret Thatcher.

The revelations over the years, in Cabinet ministers’ memoirs and in gradually declassified documents, show with crystal clarity the depths to which the state sank to beat the miners — the militarisation of police forces, the shameless lies about how many pits were to close, the cynical reversal of footage on BBC broadcasts of the Battle of Orgreave to cover up an unprovoked police assault on miners.

It represented a monumental conspiracy against what was then Britain’s strongest trade union by a vicious and corrupt Establishment that we now know was stuffed with crooks and paedophiles. The aim was not just to close the mines, but to break trade unionism itself.

The miners’ defeat segued naturally into the legalised theft of our energy and water by privateers, the “big bang” of financial deregulation in the City, the free rein given to newspaper tycoons to smear and intimidate following Rupert Murdoch’s victory over responsible journalism at Wapping.

All fed directly into the bankers’ crash of 2008 and the full-throated assault on working people’s living standards pursued since.

A change in direction is long overdue. The heroism of the miners must inspire today’s young people to build a labour movement able to take the fight to the Tories — and win.