The BBC headline is “1,700 jobs to go as Corus mothballs plant...Steelmaker Corus has confirmed it will curtail production at its Teesside Cast Products factory, putting 1,700 people out of work”.Although there has been many thousands of job losses already announced in the last year or so and I am currently trying to argue against possible redundancies at my own employer, the prospect of a whole steel factory closing down immediately brings back very dark memories from my childhood.
In March 1980 I was 17 and I remember the devastation of my local community when the local steel works at Shotton was closed down with 6,500 jobs lost. The North-East Wales local economy was sent reeling. The misery was not helped by the closure of textile mills and the early 1980’s recession. At one point there was 33% local male unemployment. My parents were not employed at Shotton but most of my friends had one or more of their parents or older siblings working there. It was a desperate time for individual families and for the region. It took a long time to recover. These are the things that I remember the most from that really horrible time:-
While it would be somewhat unfair to say that that nothing was done by the Tories at the time to tackle mass unemployment but it was very little and totally inadequate. There was also no confidence or belief that the state could make a difference. Good people were simply left to rot on the dole. The Tories then (and now) fundamentally do not believe in interfering in the market. They thought (by and large) that mass unemployment was just a price worth paying and its real solution was pay cuts and job insecurity.
I joined the Labour Party in 1978 and I can remember clearly members arguing that it would not matter if the Labour government lost the next General Election – if fact it would do the Party "good" to have 4 or 5 years of opposition to revitalise itself. Even at the time I thought this attitude was rather weird?
It was self evidently not worth me leaving school to try find an apprenticeship (the only realistic expectation for male working class kids at the time) so I took the easier option to stay at school and take my A levels and then apply to university. The first member ever of my family to do so.
I hope and pray (agnostically of course) that the Steel unions and the local Teesside community can defeat this plan to mothball the plant. But if this does happen then let us hope that a Labour government is re-elected next year and not “do nothing” Tories who will ideologically condemn those unemployed steel workers to become a future lost generation. Not that this lets the current Labour government off the hook since many people will compare rightly or wrongly how it deals with this crisis with the massive intervention to save the banks.
Finally I looked at the "comments" on this local North East Wales BBC website about the Shotton closure and two things strike me. Firstly how many of the commentators have emigrated aboard since the plant closed and secondly the often heart breaking requests for further information from family members about how their fathers or husbands had been killed while at work.
(Picture of work at Shotton, mass meetings and going to lobby Parliament over closure. Many thanks to Col. Roi )
2 comments:
It reminds me as well, my folks were looking to get back up to North Wales (my mum's family's from the Maelor) and we'd arranged a council house exchange to Shotton, I was seven at the time.
I remember the house being quite nice, it must have been around Ash Grove as I remember Health Street being a very odd name for a road. My dad had got himself a job up there with Chester City Transport, all looked good.
Then the hammerblow of the steel works closing. Even though I was young, it was clear that it wasn't good and at the last minute my parents decided to stay put. Even when we eventually made it back home a little further along the coast seven years later, Shotton was still suffering the effects.
You're absolutely right John, the Tories returning like nothing's changed is not what Teeside or any where else needs. We know what the Tories will be like and we all need to work together to stop them throwing another generation on the scrapheap.
That's why the Labour Party needs to extend the hand of friendship back to the unions who don't affiliate and the hundreds of thousands of members who have quit the party. It took a broad coalition to achieve Blair's landslides of 1997 and 2001, we can do it again.
Hi Andy
What is your mum’s family name? My Mum was Matthews! Who know perhaps we are long lost cousins! Seriously, it is hard to remember with the passage of time how bloody awful mass unemployment actually is – you are right that it completely blights the community. I should have mentioned that at its height Shotton (John Summers as it was then) employed over 13,000 people.
Yes, the Party must reconnect with our natural supporters and I hope the government will stop managing and start acting politically.
Yet, I also think that we need to stop and think hard about how we go about trying to influence the Government and its consequences. We must not apt the language of the ultra left and their “betrayal politics”.
Yes, we are disappointed some aspects of the Labour Government and wish they would have acted differently. But we are not Turkeys voting for Christmas and we need to be mindful that if we stand back and stick the knife in then we only be pandering to our real natural enemy who is not of course the lost deposit Ultras but the Ultra Tories who will utterly destroy the union if they can. We must never, ever forget who are real enemies are.
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