BRITAIN’S last deep coalmine is to close days before Christmas — the last wrecking of an industry and culture stretching back centuries.

Miners’ leaders slammed the political vandalism and economic insanity behind the destruction of Britain’s most reliable indigenous source of energy after hearing news that Kellingley colliery’s closure had been set for December 15. 

Kellingley, near Pontefract in Yorkshire, is one of Britain’s most modern and productive coalmines.

Tens of millions of tonnes of coal reserves will be abandoned — in 2014 owner UK Coal estimated that reserves would last until 2030 — while Britain imports more than 50 million tonnes of coal a year from countries around the world including Colombia, where child labour has commonly been used.

More than 200 jobs have already been slashed at Kellingley this year in two tranches of redundancies.

Keith Hartshorne, the pit’s delegate to the Yorkshire area council of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), was made redundant in July.

He told the Star that the remaining 400-or-so miners were being told they must extract a further half a million tonnes of coal from the pit’s last operating face in order to raise the cash for their redundancy payments.

“The mood is very despondent,” he said. “People cannot believe what is happening. The reserves have only been scratched.”

Mr Hartshorne said one unexploited seam at Kellingley contains over 26 million tonnes of coal — and more seams remain to be tapped.

Yorkshire area NUM chairman Chris Skidmore told the Star: “The mood is one of extreme sadness.

“We are victims of political dogma. They would rather waste Britain’s own resources than think of the good of the country.

“They are destroying a way of life. They have made up their minds that we should be consigned to history. They are not fit to govern — they have no mandate to govern, with only 24 per cent of the votes in the general election.

“We should have 30 pits. We are not asking for handouts, just a level playing field. If you think about the subsidies going to wind, solar and nuclear power it is unbelievable.

FROM P1: “I was asked on Swedish TV what I felt, and I thought about the lads doing a job for the country, not just themselves.”

Former Kellingley miner and NUM general secretary Chris Kitchen called it “the end of an era” and slammed the decision as politically motivated.

They are finishing what they started in 1975 with the Tories’ Ridley plan for the coal industry, and to get rid of unions and bring in mass privatisation, he said.

“It has destroyed some industries and left others like privatised energy to thrive on money extorted from the British people.”

But there’s hope yet for the mining industry if Labour leadership favourite Jeremy Corbyn gets his way.

The frontrunner has said Labour should consider reopening deep pits across Britain’s former coalfields using clean-burn technology.