Jobs sacrificed to the Net Zero cult
WELL said, Andrew Neil (Mail). The 2,500 jobs at Port Talbot steelworks are indeed being sacrificed solely for a few politicians to green virtue-signal while spending yet more of our money subsidising a foreign company.
I wonder how all the electricity the new arc furnaces require will be generated. But I fear that Andrew and all other objectors are spitting into a hurricane, never mind the wind.
ANDREW CULLEY, Weymouth, Dorset. The planned replacement of South Wales’s blast furnaces is very green, very noble and utterly hypocritical. The new electric arc furnaces can’t produce quality steel, only a low-grade product from scrap. All quality steel will therefore now come from overseas.
M. COHEN, Huntingdon, Cambs. RAVENSCRAIG, Redcar, Scunthorpe and now Port Talbot. The country that invented blast-furnace steelmaking can no longer make steel in that way. And why? A huge misapprehension that we term Net Zero.
DAVID ELLIS, Milford on Sea, Hants. The news about Port Talbot does not mean the loss of just steelworks jobs. The service industry will be affected, small businesses will close, people will move away, shops will shut and the area will fall into poverty and despair, just like other post-industrial areas.
DAVID CRUMPTON, Liverpool. HAS Mark Drakeford already stepped down as Welsh Labour leader? I ask as there has not been a peep from him now Tata Steel is making workers at Port Talbot and Llanwern redundant. China, the world’s worst polluter, has upped its production of steel, by the way. I wonder who will be buying it. A. E. HAYWOOD, Newport, Gwent.
BESIDES the skilled workers who will lose their livelihoods, what about the loss of taxes to HMRC and the increased cost of paying benefits, not to mention the long-term mental and physical damage. We cannot carry on losing jobs to satisfy the green lobby.
ADRIAN BONE, Leyland, Lancs. SO The Net Zero cult claims another 2,500 victims. But what is the point of this self-sacrifice when the world’s big polluters make little or no effort to do likewise? It’s just virtue-signalling on our part and will make no real difference to the world’s climate. DAVID SALT, Bridgend, Glamorgan.
IT Has not been mentioned that Tata Steel has made a loss in seven of the past ten years. Tata has spent hundreds of millions of pounds trying to convince the Welsh government and the unions that no company can accept such losses or it would go bankrupt. A British company would surely have shut down earlier.
VIPUL THAKORE, Wembley, W. London. The Mail’s stories on Port Talbot reminded me of an article I read in Metal Bulletin about 50 years ago. What would happen, it asked, if a new furnace was produced that needed only half the number of staff to run it? In Britain, we would buy it but the unions would insist we kept the workers. In Germany, they would buy it and sack half the workers.
In Japan, they would buy two and keep all the workers. DAVID APPS, King’s Lynn, Norfolk.