Port Talbot rescue sums up Britain's industrial decline

The government has announced a “new improved” arrangement with Tata, the conglomerate that owns the Port Talbot steelworks, confirming a £500m grant that will go towards building a greener electric arc furnace.

- JAMES MOORE

Tata will kick in more than £1bn – but it comes at the expense of some 2,500 jobs.

It has been loudly trumpeted by the business secretary Jonathan Reynolds as positive; an improvement over what the previous government put together – but it still comes at a . huge human cost.

Port Talbot is a steel town. Wedged between the hills and the sea (with the M4 basically running through it) the plant can be seen “from just about any point”, says Tom Hoyles, the GMB’s organiser in Wales. For me, his description of the area has echoes of Stocksbridge in Sheffield where I was born.

You couldn’t see the steelworks from the council estate where we lived at the top of a horribly steep hill. But you could from my grandparents’ place, nearer the centre of the town. And Stocksbridge has suffered from the industry’s woes, too; has had its own painful redundancy programmes to deal with. It also made headlines for the funicular railway, planned as part of its grant from the previous government’s “towns” fund. The latter, now dropped, was a poster child for the failed execution of “levelling up”.

The new government needs to do better. It needs to do something. The GMB and Community – unions which are represented at Port Talbot – have said the new deal is better than what went before but is still “not something to celebrate”. They had put forward a plan which would have kept one of the blast furnaces open until past 2030.