Tata Steel has announced a plan to close the blast furnaces at its Port Talbot plant in South Wales and instead concentrate production based on electric arc furnaces. The company plan will end the production of new steel at the plant and in the UK, and, with the loss of nearly 2,000 relatively well-paid jobs, will devastate the local economy and communities. In most of the South Wales region, these were built around coal and steel production. As British industry has declined those communities have been abandoned to their fate, condemned to high poverty and social decline.
The partial closure of the Port Talbot steelworks would feel like the final few nails in the coffin of Welsh industrial employment. The local community is united in fighting for the plant because it can see its possible future in the Rhondda and valley towns in the coalfields where jobs were wiped out by the Thatcher government, creating all the social problems associated with that.
Read more