David Toke says Farage and Reform risk ruining Port Talbot and Wales
Nigel Farage’s fantasy promise to bring back steel blast furnaces and coal mining to South Wales is a cover-up for his Reform Party’s policies to slash renewable energy jobs in Wales. In fact, the Reform Party policies would demolish current Government plans to create up to 10,000 jobs in floating offshore wind. The Reform Party has said it would end Government funding for offshore wind and other renewables
The UK Government is in the process of awarding up to 5.4 GW of leases for floating wind projects off the Welsh and south-western seas of the UK. Port Talbot is said to be in the leading position to provide essential port services for the windfarms (See HERE). Floating offshore wind farms put a particular premium on having a relatively local port where most of the construction can be expedited.
Associated British Ports said that a recent Government grant, allied to industrial investment, will begin to unlock a projected £1 billion of investment in Port Talbot and the surrounding area. This will develop a green economic hub supporting and creating nearly 10,000 jobs in South Wales and across the wider UK supply chain.
Remarkably, though, Farage seems to be getting away with burying the fact that this opportunity would be scrapped by a Reform-led Government. They are hiding this fact underneath a fantastical claim that the Port Talbot blast furnaces’ capacity would be reopened alongside the provision of coal to fire them from Welsh coal mines. In fact, the closure of the last blast furnace at Port Talbot was said to be heavily influenced by the post-Brexit trade agreement. This led to tariffs and a quota on British steel exports to the EU.
Farage’s latest claim really takes the biscuit. How can the investment in a new blast furnace plant be justified after an existing plant was forced to close down? Moreover, such a venture would be made even more unlikely by having to use British-mined coal. One of the reasons that the coal mines in Wales closed was that coal imports (which supplied the steelworks at Port Talbot) were much cheaper.
It is absurd to propose to put a lot of resources into assembling new blast furnaces that were already proving to be uneconomic. Plus, add a further layer of loss-making by compelling the venture to pay for domestically produced coal. In its day, the steel plant was buying cheaper coal imports.
It would certainly be a lot more practical to have floating offshore wind. That will be funded by a contract from the Government to supply electricity, and more jobs would likely be created. See my post “Floating wind can power UK to net zero”.
And yet, it seems, people are being fooled (again). Farage fooled a lot of people in South Wales, first to vote against the EU, to the detriment of their interests. Now he is going to sucker them again with a promise to revive coal that will never happen. In doing so, he will actually scupper the real possibilities of jobs in green energy via Floating Offshore Wind. Farage’s tactics echo those of Donald Trump and other so-called populists. Inasmuch as Farage’s policies look rational as opposed to made-on-the-hoof statements to distract public attention, they are backwards-looking, harking back to an earlier disappearing age.
Reform Party Steam Engine Plan
I can reveal that I have come across (by accident) a draft of a policy plan by Reform UK. It was sent to me by a contact in a railway preservation society. This is evidently an interest group which probably does not support Reform’s atavistic ideology as much as they think.
The Reform document acknowledges the great importance of railway preservation societies in the UK. I am told we have a lot more of them in the UK than in the whole of the rest of Europe combined! To connect with this tradition, Reform is proposing a radical new policy to confront university wokery.
Reform would propose legislation that would ensure that all Universities introduce study and research programmes on steam engines. All universities must offer at least one course in each Faculty on steam engines. Sociology courses would still be allowed, but they should include some aspects of the steam engine and related industries. Steam engine research would be made one of the top grant awarding priorities for the Government’s research grant awarding body, United Kingdom Research and Innovation (UKRI).
The Reform report also laments the fact that, as yet, they do not have as snappy a sounding acronym as MAGA, as used by their American cousins in the Republicans. So someone has suggested that in the next English local elections, Reform could use the acronym “MESA – Make England Steamy Again”.