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 )
