Through the mill

PORT TALBOT in South Wales is known for producing two things: stardust and steel. Its dazzling crop of home-grown film stars stretch back for generations, including Richard Burton, Sir Anthony Hopkins and Michael Sheen. So do its steelworking families. Christian Reed, a project manager, has worked at the Tata Steel plant—Britain’s biggest—for 11 years. His father worked in the local steel industry for 40 years, and his grandfather was a foundry worker. “It’s very difficult to contemplate losing the plant,” he says. “It would be like losing a member of the family.”

The fate of his job and those of about 4,300 other Port Talbot steelworkers, as well as Britain’s loss-making steel industry in general, have become the most poignant part of the political row that has erupted in Britain since Tata Steel, Britain’s biggest producer, said in late March that it planned to sell or close its operations in the country. Opposition politicians have demanded that the government engineer a rescue, either by erecting high tariff walls against cheap steel imports, as America has done (see article), or by going for some sort of nationalisation, as Italy has attempted with the ill-starred Ilva plant in the heel of the country. On April 5th a potential rescuer, Sanjeev Gupta of Liberty House, a commodity-trading company, said he was interested in buying the Port Talbot business, though he wants plenty of government sweeteners before doing so. He has called Britain’s steel industry “probably the worst in the world.”