West Cumbria Mining Pay £1 to Acquire £1.6 Million of Heritage Lottery Funded Mine Museum and Lands

While the entertaining distraction of the ‘Climate and Jobs’ Punch and Judy show rages very publicly over the Cumbrian Coal Mine – important burning issues are buried. Nuclear issues such as the fact that the subsidence inducing mine would be under decades of Sellafield’s discharged ‘low level’ wastes. Nuclear issues such as that at least two executives, including the existing CEO of the coal mine, have been appointed by Government to public bodies pushing for deep dumping of high and intermediate level nuclear wastes. The Irish Sea area, adjacent to the coal mine plan, is in the frame. The CEO of the coal mine in his government appointed role will be talking about this diabolic plan on the 15th March with the Science Discovery Group.

The Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy are only too delighted for NGOs, Talking Heads and the media to keep the focus sharply on climate and jobs (of which there are no guarantees made that there would be an optimistic 500). Government would rather not publicise the fact that BEIS (through the Coal Authority) gave the developers conditional license to drill “exploratory boreholes” under the Irish Sea eight years ago (over the heads of the public and councillors) . BEIS also appoint the Committee on Climate Change who have unsurprisingly studiously avoided berating BEIS. BEIS also appointed the CEO of West Cumbria Mining, Mark Kirkbride, to the Committee on Radioactive Waste Management. Here is BEIS minister Anne-Marie Trevalyan supporting the coal mine whose CEO is in the pay of BEIS.

While much has been enthusiastically made by the mine’s supporters of what a financial boon the development would be, the reality is that the developers have effectively already stolen substantial funds from the public purse.

A Freedom of Information question has just been asked regarding liquidation of the Haig Mining Museum (despite visitor numbers far exceeding expectations the Museum went into liquidation).

Haig Mining Museum – Was £1.6 Million of Heritage Lottery Money returned ?

“To The National Lottery Heritage Fund,

In 2019 you put in a claim for repayment of £1.6 Million in respect of liquidation of the Haig Mining Museum.

Was the £1.6 Million returned ?

If not, what was the explanation ?

(the Museum, Buildings and Land were subsequently bought for just £1 by West Cumbria Mining in what looks like a closed agreement between WCM, the liquidators and Copeland Borough Council ).”

Interestingly according to the Liquidators, West Cumbria Mining were not at all keen to make their £1 purchase of the Haig Museum, Buildings and Land until they were assured that they had planning permission. This prevarication cost the creditors over £12,000. This is what the Liquidators said : “We now consider that the fee estimate we previously provided for the liquidation is insufficient to complete our duties as a result of : The Company’s asset realisations have proved more protracted than was initially anticipated. This is due to the sale to WCM taking significantly longer than anticipated. This has happened as they did not wish to complete the transaction (£1) whilst there was still uncertainty for them as to whether they would achieve the full planning permission required to run their operations. …”

Having paid their £1 for the Haig, Museum and Land the developers West Cumbria Mining immediately proceeded to make sure that their newly acquired assets (of Cumbria’s heritage), in the event of some planned administrative ‘bankruptcy’ or ‘take over’, would not go to creditors but to WCM’s backers EMR Capital, to persons hidden from view in the Cayman Islands. It is pretty clear that WCM’s eye is on the glittering prize – and that glittering prize is not coking coal but Governmental contracts into the most diabolic plan for heat generating nuclear wastes – a plan that would involve eye watering amounts of public money over decades, contracts to drill become contracts to kill, to dump heat generating nuclear wastes under the Irish Sea. They call it Geological Disposal of Nuclear Wastes in the UK. Not one country has done this and the countries that are trying to do it have not returned to areas previously ruled out (as Cumbria has been at least three times) as being too geologically complex and unstable.

Whats not to like? Everything! To focus myopically on climate aspects of this coal mine, as is playing out courtesy of pusillanimous NGOs and the Media right now, is to play right into the hands of a Dorian Gray like nuclear corruption. A corruption that includes protection of the diabolic agenda of the nuclear industry at all, literally ALL costs.