More than 3,000 jobs are set to be lost at the U.K.’s biggest steelworks as the U.K.’s Net Zero deindustrialisation strategy sees it set to become the only country in the G20 unable to make its own steel from scratch. The Mirror has the story.
The devastating blow was confirmed by Tata Steel following crisis talks with unions, who have not ruled out strikes in protest. The company has rejected an alternative plan put forward aimed at saving jobs.
The move has been described as a “crushing blow” for U.K. manufacturing and for the region’s economy. Last year Tory ministers agreed to plough £500 million into the plant to help fund a transition to cleaner steel production – but they have been accused of overseeing “managed decline”. Tata estimates the plant is losing around £1 million a day.
This morning Stephen Kinnock, Labour MP for Aberavon, home of the Port Talbot steelworks, called for more talks to bring the steelworks “back from the brink”. He said every home in the town is affected by the facility, and warned the job losses would be “devastating”. He said: “The multi unions have come together and put a plan on the table, which would actually be much more of a bridge rather than a cliff edge to the changes that we know that have to take place within our steel industry.
“But instead of that, we’ve got a plan which has been cobbled together between Tata Steel and the U.K. Government, which is going to use £500 million of taxpayers’ money to make 3,000 men and women redundant and is also going to remove the British capability to make its own steel from scratch.
“We will become the only country in the G20 that is no longer able to do that. So that’s not the right way to go.”
The Mirror understands Wales’s Economy Minister Vaughan Gething approached Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch for an urgent call on the decision on Tuesday. But the department delegated the call to junior Minister Nusrat Ghani, who offered Mr. Gething 15 minutes next Tuesday.
The Indian firm will press ahead with their plan to close the last two blast furnaces at the plant, replacing them with an Electric Arc Furnace (EAC). That would mean thousands of job losses by 2027.
And EACs alone cannot make high quality virgin steel from iron ore, meaning the plant would be reliant on cheap scrap metal from overseas as raw materials.
If Stephen Kinnock thinks this is bad, wait till he sees what his own party has planned for the deindustrialisation of the U.K. under the guise of Net Zero. And note that Kinnock is only actually calling for the change to be done more slowly, not to be reversed: he and his party still support the idea of deindustrialisation. Sheer lunacy.
Worth reading in full.
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