Miners defied government inaction yesterday to step in with a £4 million loan to save one of Britain’s last deep coalmines.

The National Union of Mineworkers has fronted the cash to help the 500 miners at worker-owned Hatfield colliery in South Yorkshire to open new faces and secure the pit’s future.

The worker-owners called on the government and energy companies to “step up to the mark” yesterday to secure the future of Britain’s indigenous coal supplies.

Britain’s other two deep coalmines — Kellingley in Yorkshire and Thoresby in Nottinghamshire — are earmarked for closure.

Hatfield miners launched the Hatfield Colliery Partnership (HCP), a trust which owns the pit on their behalf, after a string of failed private owners.

Ministers have refused to invest money for new seams at the site, despite allowing coal imports to rise to more than 50 million tonnes a year.

NUM national secretary Chris Kitchen said the loan was “an unprecedented step” that reinforced its commitment to the British deep coalmining industry.

As well as butchering the British coal industry in the 1980s and ’90s, the Tories also cut short Britain’s world-leading role in developing clean coal technology, scrapping the research centre at Yorkshire’s Grimethorpe colliery — the setting of 1996 film Brassed Off, part of which was filmed at Hatfield.

Mr Kitchen insisted there is a future for clean coal in British-produced energy “for years to come.”

He said: “The coal burnt should be UK-mined coal securing employment for miners in the UK, not imported from Russia and Colombia or anywhere else.”

HCP chairman John Grogan said the union’s decision was “a vote of confidence in the mine and the 500-strong workforce.

“It is also an important boost to the 220 companies in our supply chain who supply goods and services to Hatfield,” he said.

“What we need now is for the coal-fired power generators and the government to step up to the mark too.”

TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady said the loan — made on commercial terms — was “great news for workers at the mine.

“The investment will help protect hundreds of jobs and offers British energy companies a secure domestic supply, which we hope they will see the merits of investing in at a time of so much global uncertainty.”

Britain sits on at least 300 years of coal reserves abandoned by the Tories in their determination to destroy the NUM and organised labour.