A red dragon is the symbol of Wales and, with a little imagination and seen from the road in the twilight, it would seem that it lives in Port Talbot, and from its mouth emerges at night the fire that comes out of the Tata Steel blast furnaces . But this will soon no longer be the case since the Indian giant has announced the closure of these facilities with the loss of 2,800 jobs.
For Port Talbot it is a great tragedy, similar to those suffered by Bridgend, Merthyr Tydfil, Llanelli and other towns in the south Wales valleys when Margaret Thatcher decided to put the brakes on coal mining. What followed were four decades of deindustrialization and decline that have not yet ended, and that have turned the region into one of the poorest in Europe (until Brexit it was one of the regions that received the most funds from the EU).
Of the 32,000 inhabitants of Port Talbot (and 140,000 in the metropolitan area), a third work in the blast furnaces of Tata Steel, which it bought from Corus (formerly British Steel) in 2007. There are entire generations who have made a living doing steel, and even today it is rare to find someone who does not have a cousin, a nephew or a friend in the factory. The impact on the community is going to be terrible, not only for those who are going to be unemployed, but for the cafes, restaurants, shops… If today 16% of children already live in almost Third World poverty, soon it will be worse.
The pretext that Tata Steel has clung to is the need to adapt to new environmental precepts and the obligations imposed by both London and the Cardiff regional government, controlled by Labour, in order to decarbonise the country by 2050 ( the plant emits 2% of all its CO2). But unions and workers complain that the multinational had promised a transition, and has acted ruthlessly.
The economic background is inescapable, since Tata Steel has lost 150 million euros from its operations in Port Talbot in the last quarter, almost two million euros a day. In fact, it has always been in the red, and numerous experts questioned the point of acquiring what were then the Corus blast furnaces. Its executives explain that unviable improvements were necessary in the current framework (although the parent company has distributed 1.65 billion euros in dividends since 2019).
Tata’s option is to close the blast furnaces and replace them – with a subsidy of 600 million euros – with an electric arc furnace that does not need to burn coal and is therefore more hygienic, but that will not produce the top quality virgin steel that it requires. the automotive industry, and clients such as BMW and Nissan. For them – say the unions – they will have to import it from China, India or Japan, transporting it on ships powered by diesel engines and ultimately polluting more.
The British steel industry has actually been dying in slow motion for a long time under the weight of competition, it produces less than France and Germany and, apart from the Port Talbot blast furnaces, it has only two others in Scunthorpe (northern England). ). Stephen Kinnock, the Labor MP who represents the town in the Commons, says that “this is a disaster not only economically but also national security, increasing the country’s energy dependence just when the war in Ukraine seems to recommend the opposite. ”.
Port Talbot is going to become a ghost town. The steel will be greener, but the red dragon of Wales will be very wounded.
