The Tower Colliery in South Wales, one of the last working deep coalmines in Britain, has closed for the last time. The pit was first closed by the Tories during their war against workers - because 'it wasn't economically viable.' Subsequently, 239 miners each pooled £8000 from their redundancy payouts, and raised the funds to reopen the mine in early 1995 as a worker-owned and operated enterprise, which has produced 600,000 tonnes of coal per annum and a £300m turnover.

The coal has finally run out, and Tower workers marched today to mark the closure and celebrate their achievement in keeping the mine open for 13 years when it was supposedly 'too expensive' to run.

With the closure, another part of our industrial and cultural heritage passes into memory, and milieu which nurtured the rich tradition of auto-didactism of industrial workers, miners and agricultural labourers - the antithesis of the credentialism and managerialism of today's faceless bureaucrats - withers just a little more.