MINISTERS lent Hatfield colliery £8 million yesterday to pay for the final nail in the coffin of Britain’s deep coal industry.

The commercial-rates loan will keep the mine running to its closure plan to May 2016.

Five hundred jobs will go when the South Yorkshire pit shuts down.

The two other remaining deep coalmines in Britain, Kellingley in Yorkshire and Thoresby in Nottinghamshire, are to close in October.

Taxpayers’ cash will still be pumped into development of clean coal technology but British power stations will have to source the fuel to use it from Russia, Colombia and even Australia.

Britain already imports more than 40 million tonns of coal every year — the equivalent to 20 deep coalmines and at least 10,000 mining jobs.

National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) general secretary Chris Kitchen condemned the economic and environmental madness of transporting coal thousands of miles to Britain, while at least 200 years of British coal reserves lie untouched.

“The next elected government will oversee the completion of what Margaret Thatcher started 30 years ago — the destruction of Britain’s deep coalmining industry,” he said.

The closure of Kellingley, Thoresby, and finally Hatfield brings to an end two millennia of coalmining in Britain that dates back to Roman times.

The government loan will be made to the Hatfield Colliery Partnership, the co-operative which took over the colliery when privateer owners failed to keep it viable.

The NUM lent the co-operative £4m to help it keep running last year.

“We have got three pits but we cannot get the investment to keep them open,” Mr Kitchen said.

“It makes no sense — no economic sense, no environmental sense, no common sense.

“Clean coal technology will go ahead but it will not be British coal which is being burned.

“Now the Tories are prepared to finance the closure of our last deep coalmines, but they are not prepared to finance keeping them open. It is madness.”