Port Talbot

[Patrick Thistle]

3000 jobs to go as Tata Steel confirm they are shutting the two blast furnaces in Port Talbot. By September.

It's a death knell for the town.

I've driven past those furnaces so many times with the flames going off like LA in Blade Runner.

Feeling a mix of anger and grief at the moment.

[Logan Mountstuart]

Every time I went to Gower as a kid I drove past them and was in awe. Same with the cellophane works in Bridgewater, although more from the pure stink. I couldn't get my childish head around the difference from the places I was passing to the places I was going. Things like that can form your political values.

As long as we've wanted to live like we do, we've needed shitty places, and we've always needed people to work in them, for years and years, to their detriment in terms of health and family. And then we just fuck them over when we don't need them anymore.

[slackster]

The steelworks are certainly a sight/site to behold as you head along the M4, especially at night.

Mrs Slacks uncle lives in Margam, backing onto the mainline railway and works beyond, so I know it well enough. He never worked at the plant, though (he was a Rhondda miner until those jobs all went with minimal transitional assistance and devastated the dependent towns in The Valleys).

[Antepli Ejderha]

https://twitter.com/OwsWills/status/1748089547118854458?t=SdqdUiAB4EsaKxvkmPPyVQ&s=19

[steveeeeeeeee]

Other than the lives destroyed by its closure, it seems the key argument for maintaining the plant in its current form is related to the UK being a country that can produce its own steel. I imagine that's quite important based on recent events related to inflation based on the dependency on fuel that other countries provide the UK. What's to stop less friendly countries hiking up the price of their steel? Also, will there be a knock-on effect to the handful of coal mines left in the UK? Or is British coal too expensive to use for steel production?

[Snake Plissken]

Just out of interest, I assume this is referring to a different Port Talbot. Must be.

https://twitter.com/RishiSunak/status/1702714390519181548

[George C.]

Great find...

[Duncan Gardner]

Rishi Sunak man of steel

[George C.]

Was...

[Paul S]

It's a change in steel making from making the raw material to recycling steel. In many ways this is the future, when you think about the millions of tonnes of steel that have been cast over the last 150 years or so, we should be able to re-use some of it. On the other hand I don't like the idea of us not being able to cast the stuff ourselves. I think it will leave Scunthorpe as the only place left that is able to cast raw steel.

[Greenlander]

There's plenty of stuff bubbling in the background around port development in and around Port Talbot linked with the Green Futures project. I've no idea if there is any crossover between this and the steel works closure. I do know my employer has invested heavily but we are at least three years from anything meaningful happening that might actually give any crossover benefits.

[E10 Rifle]

It's all sad and maddening really. It's incredibly important that the green transition doesn't mean the wholesale destruction of an area's jobs - even a temporary one - if we're to develop public and political momentum for the necessary changes. But then the idea of an industrial strategy for any kind of manufacturing has been anathema to government in the UK for decades now so you can only fear the worst.

[Bored Of Education]

It’s an odd one really. I grew up next to Port Talbot and, indeed, my Dad worked at the steelworks. Like the coal mining that was also around where we grew up, it was inevitable that these industries would become redundant due to climate change. However, both industries have been fucked over by Tory governments before their decline. This has led to the absolute ripping the heart out of the communities surrounding them. Even living in a seaside town that thrived on miners fortnight, we saw this.

We know about Thatcher with coal but what this cohort of Tories did was removed subsidies from the manufacture of green technologies. Ok, I’m not expert enough to know whether the manufacture of solar panels could have been done in South Wales but we could’ve been replacing increasingly redundant energy production with renewable energy production (or, at least, the hard technology).

[Patrick Thistle]

I'm not sure we can have a "green" steel industry. But I think we will always need steel. Not sure how to square that circle. Maybe by making other parts of our economy less wasteful to offset the damage caused by making steel.

[Antepli Ejderha]

https://twitter.com/BylineTV/status/1748453201471230357?t=jDpAqo47d8K1T7_mNLRdAw&s=19

Time and time again the working class are fooled by the business interests of the Tories. Of course I've got sympathy for them but they were warned.

[Bored Of Education]

I'm not sure we can have a "green" steel industry. But I think we will always need steel. Not sure how to square that circle. Maybe by making other parts of our economy less wasteful to offset the damage caused by making steel.

We certainly need steel, not least for the renewable energy technology I mention. Tara’s decision obviously isn’t about banishing steel, it’s about “greening” their steel making (with the result of fewer jobs). Well, that’s what they say, I am not clever enough to know whether it’s true enough.

[Antepli Ejderha]

https://twitter.com/EdConwaySky/status/1770533829494636927?t=K7Ov8kwShcsqLmtYGcTejg&s=19

It's done, isn't it?

[Patrick Thistle]

Yep

[Nefertiti2]

https://twitter.com/EdConwaySky/status/1770533829494636927?t=K7Ov8kwShcsqLmtYGcTejg&s=19

It's done, isn't it?

Tara, Tata