Port Talbot has been sacrificed to the angry god of net zero

How to murder a town. The Port Talbot steelworks is not part of Port Talbot, the steelworks is Port Talbot. They say 12 per cent of the residents work at the plant but, if you only count those of working age, it’s more like a third. Tthe Indian owners Tata Steel announced the loss of up to 2,500 jobs, many of them the main breadwinner in their families.

The knock-on effects on the delicate ecosystem of the wider community – on the cafes, the hairdressers, the corner shops, the gym, the pubs where the men get a beer after a long, thirsty shift – will be as devastating as they are inevitable. It is a knockout blow for South Wales which has had to soak up so much punishment over the years.

Everyone who cares about that small corner of our country is enraged, sorrowful. My Welsh barrister friend sent a one-word text: “Democide”.

During the Seventies, my family used to drive through Port Talbot at night as we neared the end of the long journey to visit my grandparents.

What a thrill it was to see that great castle etched on the skyline, a Hogwarts of industry with a solitary gas flame flickering atop a thin tower. As a child, I imagined a fire-breathing dragon lived in the steelworks, but it must have been the red glow of the two blast furnaces. As part of a transition to “greener, cheaper” steelmaking operations, we learnt they would be closed. That mighty Welsh dragon was slain.

Why? The high price of UK energy makes Port Talbot uncompetitive but other countries heavily subsidise their steelworks.

Ultimately, this human catastrophe is a political choice. Make no mistake; some 141,931 people (the population of greater Neath Port Talbot) have been sacrificed on the altar of net zero. That absurd and misanthropic creed which calls British workers losing their jobs “progress” while their carbon will now be emitted in India and China.

Never mind that Nato has just warned there will be a war with Russia “in the next 20 years”. Clearly, this is the ideal moment for the UK to shut one of the best steel-making furnaces in the world, start producing “net zero steel” out of Steptoe and Son scrap, while importing the higher quality steel needed to make weapons from – Oh, dear! – our enemies and competitors. The only G7 nation with no first-class steel manufacturing – are they serious? You might almost get the impression the nation was run by a fifth column plotting its downfall.

Unfortunately for Port Talbot, those who should be defending the plant against the green globalists are heavily-compromised hypocrites. Little relief is to be expected from Wales’s First Minister Mark Drakeford and his fatuous 20mph speed limit. “For lower emissions” as a sign on the M4 which runs above the town boasts. (Driving slower can actually produce more emissions, but science must never get in the way of virtue signalling.)

Stephen Kinnock, Labour MP for Aberavon, did attack the decision to “follow the Conservative business model of managed decline for British steelmaking” which would destroy the jobs of thousands of people, “each of whom have dedicated their lives to an industry which underpins Britain’s automotive industry, railways, defence sector, consumer goods, construction, wind turbines and so much more.”

Stirring words, although Stephen has somehow forgotten that the policies of his own eco-zealot party are entirely in tune with the annihilation of Port Talbot. When Sir Keir Starmer promises “thousands of green jobs”, he leaves out the part about the destruction of nearly all our remaining manufacturing jobs to appease that angry god, net zero.

The Tory government, too, is complicit in this vast act of national self-harm. Euthanising Port Talbot steelworks will make diddly squat difference to the UK’s relatively low CO2 emissions while causing incalculable human suffering. Still, looking on the bright side, something to boast about at the next Cop summit, eh Rishi?

When I was in Port Talbot before Christmas for a party, people I met from the plant were cautiously optimistic. They still had good jobs with good wages. They still had hopes and plans. “We can manage if we have to go down to a four-day week,” one said, reassuring himself.  After the announcement, I’m told the mood in the plant staffroom was “funereal, throwing up with fear”.

Obviously, I feel this keenly because Port Talbot is in my beloved homeland, but the place that you love is next. The Welsh are generally rather a mild, gently humorous people. They often conclude a dispute by saying, “Fair play to him.”

This is not fair play. Even with its steelworks still alive, Port Talbot was ailing. To close the plant is to switch off life support. A friend who grew up there, now a Home Counties matriarch, emailed me in distress when it was first mooted that Tata would shut the plant. “The town is already a distressing basket case,” she wrote, “and the people look so old, tired and ill. It’s shocking.”

It is shocking. Sixteen per cent of Port Talbot’s children live in dire poverty. Not genteel, cost-of-living poverty, but scary, damp, asthmatic, food-bank, lucky-to-get-to-adulthood poverty. The kind of poverty we should be ashamed to have in one of the wealthiest countries in the world. The kind of poverty the UK spends billions in foreign aid to relieve in “poor countries”.

So this is my question. Why are our people treated like this? How many livelihoods have to be lost to achieve that crazy 2050 goal? We need more energy security, more steel security, yet generations of skills, passed down from father to son, are about to be lost in Port Talbot. Once British steel-making has stopped, it won’t be easy to revive.

China opens new coal-powered power stations and thousands of Welsh working-class people have to take the hit for the obsessions of a millenarian cult. There may be other words for it, but mad and disgusting come to mind.

Correction. The population of greater Neath Port Talbot sacrificed on the altar of net zero is not 141,931 people. It’s 141,932 if you count my cousin’s beautiful new baby daughter.

And she should count, I think. Her future, her life chances blighted on the whim of Indian billionaires in another continent. The life support plant of her community switched off to make the planet cleaner. The humans poorer and sadder. That lovely baby girl; the apple of her steelworker daddy’s eye.

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