Health and Safety

I can't stop thinking about those miners trapped two hundred feet underground and knowing that they were going to die.  What a dreadful fate.  But why do we still have to send men down mines to bring the coal in the ground to the surface?  Surely we have the technology to devise some sort of robot that will do the job for us.  This is just the sort of research and development that the Government should be sponsoring. The fact is that no one cares about coal any more now that we are all excited by the prospect of scattering useless wind farms all over the country.  And where do the Health and Safety busybodies come into this?  They are the organisation that has stopped firemen from climbing up ladders and a policeman from going to the rescue of a drowning boy.  From their point of view no one should ever go down a mine again and that is all right by me.  We should leave it to machinery and start at once to develop anything we want. 
Nobody wants to go down a mine and I remember my friends in the army - especially the Welsh ones who would sign on forever rather that be demobilized and go home to the villages where the only work was underground. I hope they all lived to a ripe old age.