It is mere coincidence that the closure of the blast furnace at the Port Talbot steelworks and the shutdown of Britain’s last coal-fired power station at Ratcliffe-on-Soar in Nottinghamshire happened on the same day.
Yet they are freighted with significance. Like in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, they represent the UK’s once world-leading economic past, its struggling present, and the way to a possible industrial renaissance in the future.
Steelmaking at Port Talbot came about not by accident but because of the proximity of abundant supplies of high-grade coal hewn from the pits of the south Wales valleys. When the first coal-fired power station was opened in London in 1882, UK coal production – some for domestic use and some for export – was approaching its peak.
But by the 1880s, Britain’s position as the world’s biggest economy was already under threat from the United States and Germany. Having been the first country to industrialise, Britain was slow to make the transition to the newer industries of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, such as steel and chemicals. The staple industries of the First Industrial Revolution – coal, cotton and shipbuilding – would go into long-term decline.
Employment in the steel industry has shrunk by almost 90% since the early 1970s – from 320,000 to 32,700 – while the last deep coal mine closed in 2015. A century ago well over a million people earned their living down the pits.
The gradual demise of heavy industry has had profound consequences. Britain’s 19th century economic geography – the manufacturing regions of the north were then more prosperous than the largely rural south – has been turned on its head. There have been frequent attempts, dating back to the 1930s, to revive the UK’s old industrial heartlands.
That these attempts have thus far been largely unsuccessful is a measure of the challenge facing the government as it seeks to make the transition to a carbon-free economy. Without question, there is an opportunity to build capacity in energy sectors where Britain has growth potential – solar, wind, tidal and hydrogen. Nor is there any longer any dispute that there is a pressing need for more aggressive action to arrest climate change.
The theory is that old jobs in carbon-intensive industries will be replaced by clean jobs in an expanding green sector. Falling costs of producing renewable energy will mean that the phasing out of coal as an energy source can be followed by the demise of gas.
Both main parties have bought into this vision of the future. Boris Johnson once held out the prospect of Britain becoming the “Saudi Arabia of wind”. Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, said in his speech to Labour’s party conference that Britain could become a clean energy superpower and that there was a chance to “create hundreds of thousands of good jobs and drive investment into all parts of the UK”.
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Given what has happened to the pit villages of the Rhondda, the steelworkers whose roles will be made redundant at Port Talbot have every right to be sceptical. The deep scars left by the closures of factories and pits from the 1970s onwards have never really healed. Promises of high-quality, high-wage jobs to replace those lost have never really materialised. Nearly 2,000 jobs will go at Port Talbot in the coming months, with consequences for other businesses in the area.
Lessons must be learned from the failures of the past. If hundreds of thousands of green jobs are going to be created, the government will need to step up its net zero investment and not flinch from its commitment to reform the planning system to allow for more low-carbon development.
In his speech last week, Miliband said Germany had almost twice as many renewable jobs per capita as Britain, Sweden almost three times as many, and Denmark almost four times as many. “As other countries race ahead to lead in the industries of the future, Britain must not be left behind,” Miliband said.
It is not the first time such a warning has been issued. Michael Heseltine, then environment secretary in John Major’s government, made precisely the same point to a CBI conference in the early 1990s. To little effect.