Rebekah Diski

The steelworks at Port Talbot was once the largest in Europe, employing 18,000 people at its peak in the 1960s. While British steel production has fallen as part of the wider trend of deindustrialisation, the Welsh plant still employs 4000 of the town’s 32,000 residents and supports many more in the supply chain and the wider local economy. Last week, the Indian conglomerate Tata, which took over the works in 2007, announced plans to shut down Port Talbot’s two coal-fired blast furnaces and replace them with an electric arc furnace, cutting 2500 jobs within eighteen months.

To distract us from the government’s deliberate despoliation of our social infrastructure, we are told – in increasingly dehumanising language – that migrants ‘drain’ public services or that they threaten the vulnerable (for whom they happen to be caring). The strategy relies on the constant reinforcement of difference between ‘migrants’ and ‘ordinary working people’, as if there were no overlap between these groups.