Power Stations and Populism: How Closing Coal Mines Feeds Farage
While the move to green sustainable energy may be in the country's best interest, it is hard to convince industrial workers and towns of this as their livelihoods are being stripped away from them.
by Jack Peirce, MA Middle Eastern Studies 09/12/2024
Humming music plays all too quietly in the background, muzzled by the roar of cheaply laid tarmac. I can make out the bopping synth cadences of the ‘This Is The Day’ playing through the car speakers—a great song undone by the road work of a skint and wallet-tight council. I’m banned by my 50-year-old mother from turning the track up. (Is it a universal experience that parents can’t enjoy music at the appropriate volume?)
The view fills with flat, open farmland to the left, and rolling hills of pastured green to the right. Beyond the pastures and dotted sheep, the sky is a resonant blue and even bearing the odd wispy cloud. The landscape, however, is without a crucial feature. There are no streams of smoke choking the air above the hills. This seemingly idyllic, picturesque British scene was as shocking to me as it would be to any native of South Nottingham. The sight of thick, grey gas ascending from the Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station is an image that inspires as much romantic pride of place in me as Blake’s green and pleasant lands.
As we roll on further down the A road that takes you out of Clifton and on towards the M1, the usual source of the guttural fumes comes into sight. The station’s coal storage site, which had been filled to the brim throughout my entire childhood, is barren except for a small heap of crumbling ash and a pair of JCB trucks. The station’s cooling towers lie similarly inactive and empty. (They were recently labelled ‘concrete cathedrals’ by TV-writer James Graham, such is their significance to the local populace.) I turn to my mother in confusion. She reveals that the plant is set to close permanently in around a month’s time.
On 30th September, the towers were shut down for the final time. This was met, ostensibly, by applause from the workers present; I can’t imagine this applause to be anything but hollow. I don’t doubt that the workers were showing earnest gratitude to the station which had provided them decades of livelihood, but people do not normally greet forced redundancy with glee, irrespective of its environmental benefits.
Here is yet another example of Britain’s working class being forced to grin and bear it as their government tells them green, clean, and progressive is the way of the future.
It might seem difficult to draw the lines between the closure of Britain’s last working coal power station and the rise of Reform and Nigel Farage. The political success of Farage’s populism, which recently garnered nearly 15% of the popular vote and five seats in the House of Commons, can trace its roots back to the first closures of coal mines under Clement Attlee’s Labour government of the late 1940s. Between 1947 and 1994, 950 mines were closed by the various governments of the day, with Harold Wilson’s and Margaret Thatcher’s topping the list. They closed 246 and 115 pits respectively. Employment in coal mines in 1920 stood at 1,191,000. In 2022 this number was 360. This decimation of industry has manifested itself, particularly since Thatcher, in an escalating sense of betrayal amongst our working class.
While the move to green sustainable energy may be in the country's best interest, it is hard to convince industrial workers and towns of this as their livelihoods are being stripped away from them. Though Thatcher’s mine closures were largely profit driven, the strikes that dominated our national headlines during the mid-1980s demonstrated how forcefully industrial communities can react towards political decisions. The forced closures felt like government betrayal then, and, despite the peaceful nature of the Ratcliffe-on-Soar shutdown, that sentiment endures.
Whilst the summer riots were inexcusable in their violence, there exists always a root cause—real or imagined. The clashes we saw in our streets were the result of this grander narrative of government betrayal. Recent governments have allowed record levels of net migration, creating an environment in which those suffering from the dire economic effects of deindustrialisation and the cost-of-living crisis have an easy target on which to cast the blame.
Farage—indeed, the entire wave of populism that is presently encapsulating Western politics—lives and thrives off the reality that large portions of our country feel that their government does not care about them. It’s hard to disagree with them, or at least not find empathy with their position, when one takes stock of the figures.
The Guardian reported in 2023 on the discrepancy in life expectancy that exists between the North and South of England. The largest contrast lies between the North East of England, historically one of the country’s industrial powerhouses, and the South East, best known for housing strawberries and retired men in finance. Men live three years longer in the latter. The story carries on in much the same tone when we turn to income, overall health, and education. In the case of education, children in London and the South East are 57% more likely to go to university than students in the North.
Those living in our most deprived areas understandably struggle to reconcile the government of Sunak, which celebrated annual net migration of 685,000 in 2023, rising energy costs and the winter fuel cuts under Starmer. Supposedly these are governments that are interested in looking after them, or at least helping, instead many are being deprived of their basic necessities.
It is not only, however, that these communities feel that their government doesn’t care for them or that they live under significantly more deprived conditions than others in their country. The rotting core of this issue is the loss of identity that deindustrialisation has brought about.
It is no surprise at all that towns whose entire existence originates in and was dependent on their industry feel not only without a livelihood but also without a sense of self in the time of renewables. Green energy, often demanding high levels of technical education from its workers, does not provide an obvious solution to this problem. The question then becomes ‘who does?’
Reform offers the classical and ambiguous nationalist promise of restoration. A cynic might rightly argue that this is nostalgia for a bygone era. After all, do the victims in Britain’s old mining communities really want a return to early deaths and emphysema? Probably not. But a return to what made them who they are, a restored sense of self? Of course. Only the most cold-hearted critics would fail to see this.
This story is playing out throughout the Global North. In Germany the right-wing populist party AfD finds its strongest support in the deprived former East Germany, where nostalgia for the communist era is so prevalent it has its own word: Ostalgie. In the US Donald Trump and his recent electoral victory needs no explanation. It’s a depressing indictment of our traditional political elements that the only movements so far capable of finding a ‘solution’ to this issue are of a radical populist nature.
Farage’s rhetorical take on MAGA falls welcomely on the ears of those in Britain who, rightfully, have felt ignored and belittled by the country’s ruling elite. Labour, Reform, and the Lib Dems all profited off the back of the Tory catastrophe to address this disparity. The closure of Ratcliffe-on-Soar is a stark reminder as to how many individuals have lost their jobs and their identities in the process of deindustrialising Britain. Whilst the era of coal has come to its end, government betrayal can manifest and alienate in a multitude of ways. Starmer's early failure to satisfy public opinion regarding cost-of-living, paves the way for a potential boom in popularity for Reform come the next election.
