Ewan Gibbs

BORIS Johnson provoked derision as he laughed in the face of a Scottish journalist whilst stating that the UK’s progress towards cleaner energy was "thanks" to Margaret Thatcher closing coal mines.

IN March 2002, miners surfaced from their final shift following the flooding of Scotland’s last deep mine at the Longannet complex. They brought the curtain down on a centuries-long historical saga. My new book tells the story of the end of Scottish coal mining. There were more than 100,000 workers in the coal sector alone at the industry’s peak employment during the early 1920s and still around 80,000 in the late 1950s. Whilst deindustrialisation was often a disorientating experience, in th