Laura McAllister is Professor of Governance in the University of Liverpool’s Management School. Laura grew up close to the threatened Port Talbot steelworks and has links across Welsh sport and politics.
“This crisis has been a long time coming but has the potential for gargantuan reverberations across the Welsh, UK and world economy. It is inconceivable that the UK will not have a steel production element to its manufacturing base and rather makes a mockery of the celebrations around attracting large motor industry giants, like Aston Martin into Wales in recent times.
The semantics and ideological arguments about nationalisation should not be allowed to get in the way of a rescue package until a sale can be secured.
Maybe we should think of it more as a form of temporary public stewardship, as happened in Scotland where SG intervention was the shortest ever ‘nationalisation’.
The reality is that there are more imaginative options now, such as the Public-private-co-op joint venture that Plaid Cymru’s Adam Price discussed in The Guardian last week – a triple alliance of government, investors and workers. It has happened in Scandinavia already.
The impact on jobs in a region where 4,000 are employed would be immense, but modest estimates suggest another 10,000 jobs are dependent on the steel plant’s future. And that’s in a nation whose net fiscal balance was a deficit of £14.7 billion in the last financial year – equivalent to around a quarter of GDP. That’s why a ‘keep the lights on’ policy is such a sensible one.”
