MORE than 100 protesters gathered on the National Assembly of Wales steps yesterday to demand a moratorium on new opencast coalmining developments.

Led by the United Valleys Action Group and Friends of the Earth Cymru, they were supporting the call by an all-party group of AMs for better environmental and financial safeguards.

There are plans for fresh or extended workings in at least four locations across the south Wales valleys.

“We’ve put up with dirt and despoilation long enough,” action group chairman Terry Evans told the cheering crowd.

He contrasted the wealth dug out of the ground over generations with the high levels of poverty and deprivation in those same communities.

“What have we got out of it, except what we have fought for and created ourselves?”

Communist Party general election candidate for Merthyr Tydfil & Rhymney Rob Griffiths said the National Assembly had to decide whether it represents the interests of working-class people or “swallows the PR guff of the big-business mining corporations.”