Return to Llanwern

You get an impression of the scale of Llanwern steelworks when you enter Newport by train. It begins soon after you emerge from the Severn Tunnel and continues to the edge of Newport – miles of tangled, starkly beautiful concrete and metal. Llanwern says welcome to Wales, with all its industrial pride – and pain. For, after yesterday’s announcement by the Anglo-Dutch conglomerate Corus, it is to be reduced to a shell, steel making is to end, and generations of endeavour will be laid to rest.

The closure of a factory is just a statistic, unless you have lived with it all your life. All through my childhood, I could see the blast furnaces of Llanwern from my bedroom window. We used to fish in a stream that ran on to the land it occupies. Amazingly, it was crystal clear. Somebody was taking care. My father – and the fathers of most of my friends – worked at Llanwern, which kept the town afloat, was its beating heart.

The factory was completed in 1961 and almost my first memory is of the Queen coming to pronounce it open a year or so later. The whole town turned out to cheer her as the procession crawled along the high street. She was young and hopeful then, and so were we. Llanwern symbolised the future and ushered in a period of prosperity and self-confidence. Large estates were built to house the families of the 10,000-plus men employed there; young families in decent, well-planned houses buying their first washing machines and Ford Cortinas.

We took it all for granted at the time, but now it seems a period of extraordinary optimism and self-belief. Crime was low; drugs barely heard of; and people had jobs. My secondary school, Hartridge, was less than a mile from Llanwern, on the other side of the London to Swansea railway line; watching the trains and the smoke belching from the giant blast furnaces was a welcome distraction from conjugating German verbs.

I think of the school now, a comprehensive whose intake was drawn mainly from the huge working class estate of Ringland, as having achieved something almost miraculous. It had 2,000 pupils, making it one of the largest schools in the country; covered 44 acres; and taught everything from Oxbridge entrance to forestry. It had a large, buoyant sixth form, as well as several villains who were definitely not there to conjugate German verbs. Yet this amazing educational enterprise succeeded. The teachers inspired and the pupils aspired. Somewhere down the line, something has been lost.

The school worked because the people worked. Llanwern supplied the money, the belief, the vision of the future – 10,000 men in steady, stable, decently paid employment meant 25,000 children getting by and getting on. Many other thousands of jobs in factories and shops and the busy port fed Llanwern, which in turn fed them. In the white-hot Wilsonian 60s, all that was taken as read. There was such a thing as society, and it was pretty good.

In Newport yesterday, nothing was taken as read. The young men who work there – most of the older ones took early retirement long ago – were still absorbing the news. They knew it was coming, but they seemed, to the last, to believe it could be averted. They earned good money at Llanwern, they said, £22,000 basic – enough to feed a family, run a car, buy a house. Now what: become a security guard for £4 an hour, drive a minicab, sign on the dole? A steelworker’s skills are not transferable.

Mostly, they worried about their children, who henceforth would not be able to have the things they were used to: computer games, football kits, proper holidays. These men are mostly in their 30s and 40s, the prime of life. Or not, given yesterday’s news. The picture is just as bleak in Ebbw Vale, where the closure of the tinplate works and the loss of 800 jobs is a crushing blow for the town, whose factory once employed 13,000 people.

Metropolitan politicians and New Labour lawyers should spend more time in the industrial constituencies to understand the extent to which life here has always revolved around work. Not content with spending most of their waking hours at work (my father used to more or less live there, working endless double shifts and weeks of night shifts), they then drink together in works-based pubs and clubs. Work provided not just the means to live, but the mode of life: a shared experience and identity.

I left all this behind in 1975 to go to university, so perhaps it is hypocritical for me to laud the culture now, but it had a strength and vitality, a belief in the power of collective action, and a commitment to progress that we appear to have lost. As the men gathered in the pubs on the Ringland estate yesterday recognised, Llanwern is being sacrificed at the altar of market forces, the victim of an overvalued pound and a distant management that does not give a damn about the workforce, that did not even have the courtesy to tell them before it told the media.

Another 1,340 people on the dole (plus contract staff), to add to the 7,000 jobs lost at Llanwern since Thatcher came to power. More would-be recruits to the growing army of low-paid shelf stackers and security personnel; more children with disaffected, bored, impoverished parents; more encouragement for alcoholism, drugs, depression and violence; another blow to a community denied a reason for being.

Over the past 20 years, the workforce at Llanwern has been cut and labour systematically casualised. Stable jobs of the 60s and 70s have become contract-based; the sense of purpose of the workforce been lost; the right to a democratic role in the application of its labour has largely been denied. As unemployment in the town has risen – and jobs have become more short-term – Newport has changed in character, with rising crime, a growing drug problem, a reputation for violence, and poor educational performance. Only a fool would say that the two trends – the denial of decent jobs and the rise in social instability – were unrelated.

Communities need to understand what they are. Newport, Ebbw Vale and the towns of the Welsh valleys did once, when mining and steelmaking gave them their raison d’etre. They had enormous pride and passion for the jobs they did, the products they made. Think of the brass bands and the choirs and the great rugby teams produced in South Wales. In 1963 Newport beat the All Blacks, the most powerful rugby nation in the world. That was the town’s field of dreams, and dreams could come true.

Culturally, south-east Wales is a confused place: certainly not English, but highly suspicious of Welsh-speaking Wales. Plaid Cymru hardly registers here (though it might now); the region did not vote for the assembly; the number of Welsh speakers is low. The resurgence of the Welsh language over the past 30 years that has given new strength to west and north-west Wales has let in no light here. All it had was its industrial might; now that has gone too. Llanwern was a symbol as well as a practical provider of jobs, and symbols matter.

It was wet and bleak in Newport yesterday, as it often is. When I first moved away, I could not understand why it no longer rained every day. The older men in the club looked on, believing nothing could be done to save the jobs or the plant. “It’ll be closed in 18 months,” said one. “There’ll be nothing left.” They had seen it all before, lost their jobs or been pensioned off in the Thatcher years. Now their sons were getting the same treatment. “Will you take industrial action?” the young men were asked. “What’s the point?” said one. “That would just be playing into their hands.”

In 1839, the people of south-east Wales, tired of political marginalisation and economic exploitation, marched on Newport. The aim of what came to be called the Chartist Rising was to seize the town and trigger a series of insurrections across Britain that would result in the implementation of the movement’s demands for democracy. Planning was rudimentary, the dragoons positioned in the Westgate Hotel were ruthless (20 bodies were left in the high street when the marchers were put to flight), and the nascent revolution failed. The marchers were led by John Frost, a former mayor of Newport, who was sentenced to death but ultimately transported for his part in the uprising.

The main square in the town centre is today named after Frost, but it is a fair bet that not one in a hundred of the shoppers in the square who hurry past the town’s museum on their way to the discount shops in the John Frost Centre know who he was, or why civic leaders once thought that his protest should be remembered so publicly.

A more appropriate target for anyone who might wish to raise a squeak of protest on this occasion would be the monstrously ugly 400-room Celtic Manor Hotel, with its three championship golf courses and £10m luxury clubhouse. Presumably, the dragoons would this time be strategically positioned to guard the impeccably kept greens. Sadly, I do not think they will be needed: there is no Frost to lead, and no apparent will to follow. The fight went out of the town in 1981, when the long steel strike in opposition to job cuts finally crumbled.

The Labour MP for Newport East is Alan Howarth, who became the Conservative MP for Stratford-on-Avon in the Thatcher landslide of 1983 and served the Tories for 12 years before crossing the floor in 1995. Newport, a Labour pocket borough for 60 years, was his reward for having defected. Perhaps at the next election his constituents will wish to pass comment on his support for Lady Thatcher and her New Labour offspring. It isn’t insurrection, but it’s a start.

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