Britain kept on using coal post strike and pit closures, it just bought foreign coal (not even necessarily cheaper) instead.
The Dash for Gas is what killed the use of coal for generation.
The decline in home coal use was directly correlated to the strike - and the decline in imported coal use is as much old plant and expensive marginal costs as the shift to gas.
At some point replacing the coal fired infrastructure stopped making economic sense - and with no political leverage the whole thing collapsed really quickly.
Something we might be happy to learn when looking at oil and gas generation - once solar prices and volume are there the industry just vanishes.
Also, the union density in mining in the US is not as high as it used to be (don't know what the exact figures are).
Yes Clinton won the popular vote. No unions are ridiculously under represented in the States (you need to fix that BTW)
But in the end seem from this side of the pond this was a political message - coal mining was a proxy for "proper American jobs for proper Americans without all this economics and climate change nonsense"
And that has a fairly sizeable base.
Whether trump will find that same base happy to swallow a similar message now he is the incumbent remains to be seen.
This is of course a positive thing, but it was arrived at by the politically motivated near-total destruction of UK's mining industry in the 1980s (the then right wing Tory government wanted to destroy the heartland support of its left wing Labour opponents).
What was a socially divisive, bitter class struggle for years and years, that nearly brought down the government, is now a strategic masterstroke of climate change planning.
Life is odd.
[#] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_miners%27_strike_(1984%E2%8...