Essentially the fate of the mine, near Whitehaven, has been elevated into an exhibition match between The Past and The Future. Local jobs versus global climate.

In the incandescent blue corner — Mark Jenkinson, Tory MP for Workington. He angrily deplores the call-in as a “capitulation to climate alarmists”, which at least drags conservative thought into the 1990s. In the acid green corner, environmentalists wonder if it’s really such a great idea to go rummaging underneath a local landscape rich with tonnes of radioactive shit excreted by Sellafield nuclear power station.

Fossil fuel. Clue’s in the name. Sorry, coal. Even if you win this battle you’ve lost the fight. Leave it mate, the future’s not worth it.

Honestly boomerphobes, there are many things I can’t quite believe I’ve outlived. Britain in Europe. The modem. Woolworths. The concept of shame in political life. Watching live television. Dictionaries. Normal weather. All of the Ramones. Tolerance. Newspapers. Yet the overthrow of coal feels like the last definitive unmooring from a whole epoch of British self-narrative.

Let’s face it, one of the very few positive things to have emerged from The Current Strangeness is cleaner air. This new, puritan climate is a clean break with the dirtiest of all centuries, the 20th. In those days you burned coal in the grate, smoked fags indoors, burned your rubbish in the garden. That’s just how we used to do things, back in the Smoke Age.

Not any more. The phased de-filthification of energy begins this year. Pretty soon you won’t be able to buy bags of house coal from garages and supermarkets and coal will disappear as a domestic fuel by 2023.

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In defence of working-class conservatism

By Peter Franklin

It’s odd now to recall those 1970s TV ads urging us to “come home to a real fire”. It all seemed so cosy, and safe. “Coal supplies will last for over 300 years,” the baritone voiceover assured us. The Three-Hundred Year Carbon Reich — what happened to that? “Coal. The fuel for today that won’t run out tomorrow”. It feels like yesterday. Yeah, I know it’s half a century ago but time’s gone weird. Sometimes the 1970s feel more believable than Crazy Frog, say. Or loom bands. Or Gordon Brown’s spell as prime minister.

Banning house coal would surely have been unthinkable even at the start of the millennium. Nutty Slack, like the Cutty Sark, had always symbolised Britain’s glorious, non-negotiable heroic past, when home fires were burning and we ruled the waves, our ships full of precious cargo, never mind what exactly.

Obviously the ban will be a massive inconvenience for people in the country, who have been burning wet wood, peat, lost ramblers and coal since the Bronze Age. “This typically ill-thought-out policy is clearly concocted by metropolitan flat-dwelling elitists,” gargled one rural correspondent in the Telegraph. Always had a lot of respect for the Telegraph. Specifically, its size. Proper old-school broadsheet. Big enough to take the contents of an ash pan; ideal under kindling.

And I do love a coal fire, who doesn’t? Well, my environmentally-literate grandchildren. And they’re just the tip of the Thunberg. An entire generation now stands akimbo, aghast that “grown-ups” have been cheerfully poisoning the air since Stephenson’s Rocket. How feeble we sound when they ask how we’re tackling the earth’s new violent horrorweather: “Well, you see, we’ve started giving the big storms names…”

Hail coal, and farewell. Another smoke gone the way of tobacco. Typical. Plume by plume, how this dull, scoured 21st Century robs us of our romantic past. Those old black-and-white photos of Routemasters, bomb rubble and St Paul’s, all sexy and grainy with airborne particulates. You knew where you were in the 20th Century. Coal smoke in the streets, cigarette smoke in the sheets. Alas, I also know where I am in the 21st Century. Bafflement in the mind and COPD in the lungs, a microcosm of our stupid world.

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Why the North East of England is different

By Dan Jackson

Coal ran like a black thread through the post-war yarn we spun ourselves. Empire may have slipped to Commonwealth. We may have been broke after World War Two, but we were still a proud nation forging our destiny under Young Queen Elizabeth and Old King Coal. My very first home assignment as a child was to count the sacks being emptied into our coal-hole, to make sure the coalman wasn’t diddling us. The Two Commandments of our household: trust no-one ever and always count your change.

In the 1950s coal was Britain’s main energy source. More than a thousand deep mines. Over 200 million tonnes of it hauled up and burned every year. We loved it. Coal was as cheap as fags. People had real patriotism in those days and no wonder. Britain had invented smog in the 19th century — creating both Cabman’s Emphysema and French Impressionism — and we were determined to stay world champions. If you want to know what post-war London air tasted like, lick some barbecue charcoal.

In the 1960s my family had joined the Great Essexodus from London and settled near Basildon. The new commuter cult quickly fell under the spell of sinister “Mr Therm” and switched to gas, but every house still had an open fire and a bunker out the back. If all else failed, reckoned post-war Britons, there was always Spam and coal. Britain had a Ministry of Power and a National Coal Board then, monoliths of non-accountability.

I was 13 when, in 1966, Aberfan happened; 116 children and 28 adults killed by an avalanche of slurry. Unprocessable horror. The shock of it, the news trickling through our school. The aftershock, too,  when a public inquiry, after months and months in smoke-filled rooms with their beer and sandwiches and cliches, found the NCB squarely at fault. Nobody — not one single scuttling negligible bastard — was ever charged.

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Why did a rundown mining town become a safe Tory seat?

By James Bloodworth

Economic downturn followed a few years later. I lived in County Durham in the early 70s, where the Great Dismantling of coal had begun amid poverty and desolation. My wife and I bought our first house — for £500 — in one of several “Category D” pit villages abandoned to die. People were being encouraged to move to Peterlee “new town”. The very poor couldn’t. We lived in First Street. They were numbered up to Eighteenth Street, followed by Shop Street, Office Street and Corporation Street. All curved round the historic heart of the place, the pit.

But every last trace of the colliery had gone, replaced with a large, flat, bleak field. Done. Over. The neighbours were all miners’s families. Laid-off, ignored. On one side, an early-retirement pitman sang opera in the outside khazi. On the other, a lonely widower whose pit mates had all died young. None of the abandoned poor had much of an education but everybody could spell “pneumoconiosis”.

In 1974, the Oil Crisis and a miners’s strike put pressure on Ted Heath’s government to impose a three-day week. It sounds catastrophic but if you were young, lazy and in love then less work and candlelit pubs weren’t too bad. A general election was called. “Who Governs Britain?” barked the Tories, as if the miners had neglected to take off their boots in the pantry. Heath got his answer: NOT YOU, you prancing bollock.

It was the last proper victory for the NUM. Rickety Labour governments lasted a few more years, then in 1979 — SMASH! Through the plate glass in her brown Ford Consul GT came the Conservative Sweeney. Thatcher had sworn to crush the unions, especially the miners, and Lady Handbag had the perfect alignment of popular support, a militarised police force and substantial stockpiles of coal. It was horrible to watch. The miners beaten, physically and politically, then the programme of pit closures rolling over them like fresh turf.

In the end it had always contained its own paradox, mining. Today, it feels like a lost cause — the fight for a lethal livelihood beneath the earth. And now we read that the world’s carbon emissions are falling and we’re glad. The forgettable Not-King Coal. Let’s get on with the future, whenever it arrives. The sun and the wind and the tide.

Once, the economic arguments — working class jobs — would have been enough to wave a new coalmine through. Now? Supporting it feels like putting two kilos of anthracite in a child’s school rucksack.

I sometimes think that the North, where I live, is a bit like the bandar-log: we are certain that if only London would give us the things that make London successful, then we’d be successful too. You know: a fast train, a tram system, a big concert hall, relocate a government department or a TV channel.

Perhaps it’s time we changed our tune, though; perhaps the North needs to stop trying to be something it’s not. Giving the bandar-log fire meant they would be monkeys with fire — it wouldn’t automatically make them humans. Likewise, lavishing the North with the trappings of our capital, which is pretty much the greatest city in the world, won’t turn it into London.

In any case, deep down, the North doesn’t really want to be London. It just wants to be a happier, healthier, wealthier version of itself. So I’d suggest its leaders stopped banging on about the capital sending up some fire and, instead, started asking what is different and special about the North of England.

Part of the trouble is that the North is stuck in the Heseltine Model of regional development. It’s a model focused on the city, not small towns, suburbs or rural places. And it’s an approach which relies on the property developer, on shiny regeneration with offices, city squares and urban living. This is a big city solution in a region with a population density below 1,000 per square mile compared with London’s population density of 15,000 per square mile.

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Where's our ambition for the North?

By Phillip Blond

Leaders up here are kidding themselves that central government cash, plus developer chutzpah and strong local leadership, will birth an economic powerhouse — despite 40 years and counting of it not working. We even use the phrase, The Northern Powerhouse, as if our repeating it again and again will make it come true.

The American urbanist, Aaron Renn, understands the idea of a city’s identity and individuality. He speaks compellingly about how a place must embrace its uniqueness, drawing on Oriana Schwindt’s research about how cities in the Mid-West were all trying to be like somewhere else — New York, Boston, San Francisco or LA – and so were losing any sense of their own identity. Renn’s characterisation immediately sounds familiar:

“The imagery is so similar, pictures of the hip creative class, some start-ups, something about the local fashion and food scene, some people on bicycles going through the center of the city. I love all of these things and I would argue that you have to have them in order to make a city competitive in today’s marketplace. But they are not things that set a city apart.”

The same goes for the North, where our focus on the “powerhouse” myth means regeneration and regional development are about increasing productivity rather than improving lifestyle. This isn’t to dismiss the importance economic growth, but to observe that the strategy for economic development — regenerate, invest for growth — hasn’t changed for decades, yet the blame for its failure is put down to not enough cash from London. Nobody questions whether the strategy might be part of the problem.

This is all compounded by a continuing emphasis on how the North is hard done by, with a focus on the worst parts of the North — its failures not its successes. On Question Time the other week, film-maker Ken Loach described, without being challenged, the North East of England as “desolate”. A region containing Durham Cathedral, the Newcastle riverside, Northumberland’s coast and the Upper Tees Valley. Desolate?

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Why the North East of England is different

By Dan Jackson

Most of the North is not urban, is not in a state of seemingly terminal decline and is not remotely desolate except in a “Cathy running across the moor shouting Heathcliffe” way. Speak to a Northerner about the North, and they will talk about moors and mountains, lakes and rivers, market towns and stately homes, woods and rolling acres.

Yet our blinkered economic development approach completely ignores this in favour of linking together five or six city centres with speedy trains and filling those centres with shiny offices.

It’s time to turn all this on its head. Leave behind those dreams of past industrial might and talk, instead, about what makes the North special. Let’s talk about what makes it unique: its environment. And in doing this, we can build on the back of good things that have happened already to make that environment even better. The South Yorkshire Forest has planted trees on former mine workings and slag heaps; Pennine Prospects are developing the idea of a regional park in the South Pennines, and the Environment Agency is using flood control funding to plant new woods and natural water traps in the upper Aire and Calder catchments.

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Why wilding should make our hearts sing

By Amy-Jane Beer

So instead of looking South, or to past glories, let’s take a leaf out of the Ruhr’s book and concentrate on making the North cleaner, greener and open. Evidence tells us that how people feel about where they live makes a big difference to local economic success. In the Ruhr the starting point was cleaning the rivers and greening an environment damaged by a century of coal mining and steel making. It meant that the inhabitants realised that leisure — what people do when they’re not working — is of equal importance to new industry and the grand infrastructure of commerce.

Instead of trying to build gritty urban living in the centres of Bradford, Oldham and Sunderland, let’s turn these places’ unused, derelict industrial sites into country parks — let’s rewild the towns and cities of the industrial North. Let’s learn from the late, great Will Alsop, whose Bradford Masterplan invoked the city to bulldoze the mostly empty, 1970s city centre buildings, and replace them with a park. Note, too, his M62 corridor “super city” showed connection isn’t just about road and rail but about topography and history too.

In greening the inner city, we also improve air quality, get less car-dominated places and begin to transform the relationship old industrial communities have with where they live. We reconnect them with the original environment of the North, with the hills and valleys, the rivers and the woods.

So let’s have a South Pennines National Park between Barnsley and Bolton, Burnley and Keighley — a beautiful place where, more than anywhere, the industrial revolution was born. Let’s make England’s spine — the Pennines —a place of leisure and pleasure running from Derbyshire to the Scottish border. Let’s focus on the North as a fantastic place to live, a great place to set up a business, and a brilliant place to visit. All, with or without fast railways, just a few hours from the world’s greatest city.

The best thing about this is that the North doesn’t need permission from London to do all this. And probably needs a lot less money to do it than it will cost to build a fast railway from Leeds to Manchester.

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Can Manchester unite the country?

By Jonn Elledge

And instead of moaning about how everything goes to London, the North should also remember that we all benefit from London being the world’s greatest city – the wealth, power and influence of that place makes Britain so much richer than we’d be without it. We don’t make the North successful by making London less successful.

None of this means we should ignore the persistent poverty in some places, the underperforming schools and the brain drain the North suffers from — but, by focusing on the environment and on the idea of leisure and pleasure, we change the way people feel about where they live. And by doing so, we can reduce that temptation to head off to greener pastures. There is clear evidence to show that the biggest problem with poorer communities — wherever they are — is that anyone with get up and go, gets up and goes. The evaluation of the New Deal for Communities Programme observes how this entrenches disadvantage as the best and brightest leave to be replaced by new residents, always poor and often new immigrants.

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Brexit has exposed our education apartheid

By Matthew Goodwin

If there is central government funding to be had, perhaps it should be used to make sure the per pupil funding in schools is equal to that received by pupils in London.

The North-South divide is real — culturally, economically and socially. There are stark imbalances in funding and Whitehall has a slightly colonial attitude towards far away places. That’s why the North has to turn off the Powerhouse nonsense and look, instead, to its own assets.

When Arup prepared a masterplan for Airedale (the towns of Shipley, Bingley and Keighley and surrounding communities), one of its conclusions was that these places had their backs turned to their greatest treasures — the amazing South Pennines countryside, the river and the canal.

If we want to make a real change, we Northerners have to turn our backs on the few city centres and look up at what we all really know is the North’s uniqueness — something millions saw when the Tour de France visited Yorkshire — those hills, rivers, moors, market towns, lakes, country towns and parks. That’s where our future success lies.