Star Comment: Connected by network of industry
Salopians will feel great sympathy for the thousands of workers who are losing their jobs through the series of devastating blows to have hit the British steel industry.
Steelmaking is rather like mining once was, at the core of the communities, and providing jobs down the generations.
Take that away and the result is industrial and economic desolation, and a whole load of hardship and heartbreak within those communities.
Get out a map and you will see the plants affected, in the north of England and in Scotland, are a long way away.
But in the markets of the 21st century the miles do not matter.
Everything is interconnected in a network in which the failure of one part of the industrial web affects everyone and everything connected to it.
The point is made forcefully by Paul Forrest, head of research at the West Midlands Economic Forum. He says as many as 11,000 workers in Shropshire could be affected. He is not saying that they will lose their jobs, but that the work that they do is part of that wider steel industry web and that will be on the receiving end of the shockwaves.
If that is going to be the impact on Shropshire, just imagine what the totality of the impact is going to be like across the entire nation. Those places which are the heartlands of industrial manufacturing are going to be under a great dark cloud.
That is the way of the world these days nationally, and it is the way of the world internationally. In a global market the steel industry in China influences the steel industry in Britain. The particular allegation is that the Chinese are dumping cheap steel on the global market.
Whether the British Government is doing enough is a moot point. Its general argument is that it is all down to the markets, and that governments cannot do much about that.
However, while the Chinese have no reason to feel sentimental about the fate of the British steel industry, the British Government is charged with upholding British interests and the survival of the steel industry is surely of strategic importance for Britain, as the alternative is to see an entire skill base destroyed and for this country to be entirely dependent on imports.
And China will have won. But in a global market, we're not supposed to think like that, are we?
