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tonyav | 12:15 Mon 28th Sep 2015 | News
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Redcar steel plant to be mothballed.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-34377756
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Andy 'If you can produce anything at home, it will be cheaper than importing it - that is a basic fact of economics.'

Coal?
Yes Australian coal from opencast mines is less than 25% of the cost of producing it in the UK! and that is after the cost of transporting it 5,000 miles!
EDDIE I'm only saying that it is going to cost us a fortune anyway and I would rather spend my taxes on keeping it going and people in employment.
I'm not an economist, but you can't calculate the loss in desolation, devastion, demoralisation which this is going to cost the country. There is no calculation possible of the cost of losing self-sufficiency.

I don't know enough to enter into an argument with you. I'm not a rabid socialist (ask mikey!) this just seems very, very wrong and myopic to me.
^^ Sorry meant to say that the bit about the EU is that under their rules the govt. can't invest in the plant as far as I can understand.
What a shame James Wharton MP was unable to be a Northern Powerhouse and save the plant/jobs.
If Thatcher was still alive would she just shrug her shoulders and mutter about "market forces" and "retraining them as something more middle class"?

I agree with your sentiments Jourdain but remember we have no Iron ore in the UK so the raw material has to be imported anyway, we never were and never can be self sufficient in steel production. The coal to fuel the furnaces has to be imported now as well.
Brenda - //To blame market forces for the problem is insulting , to the workforce. In my view problems such as this are caused by the inherent greed of multi - national companies seeking the big dollar. //

Brenda - 'seeking the big dollar' is a definition of market forces!

Companies will buy as cheaply as they can and sell as dearly as they can - that is how business works.

It has nothing to do with 'insulting' anyone - it comes down to where the world can get steel cheaply, and it's not Redcar.
Eddie...the coal to make steel most certainly doesn't need to be imported !

We have ample reserves of coal....its the political will to employ people to dig it out that we lack, not the mineral itself. Successive governments would rather import coal from Perth, Australia and let our own workers languish on the Dole.

We import unemployment, along with the coal, and its a ruddy disgrace !
In the unlikely event that Redcar was full of Tory voters, rather than Labour supporters, I am sure that this Government would have worked considerably harder to save these jobs.
Mikey I know we have the reserves of coal, but as I have told you before it is deep under ground and getting it out costs 4x as much as importing it from Australia.
Thanks Eddie !

I am aware that some of our coal is expensive to bring to the surface, but not all. For example, they have been talking about the Margam Super Pit where I live in South Wales for many years. There are humongous reserves of coal there, and not that far from the surface.

But this argument about the cheapness of foreign coal is not as simple as you make out. One of the reasons that it appears to be cheaper to import coal from the other side of the planet is that the end-users here in Britain don't have to pay the huge cost of the social deprivation that results from importing unemployment.

If the power stations had to pay for all the unemployment benefits of the sacked miners, together with all the other benefits needed to replace the lost wages, perhaps that cheap coal wouldn't be so cheap after all !

The burden on the already overstretched benefits budget has to be paid by someone, and that someone is you and I and every other taxpayer.

But I concede that in the case of Redcar, the Government had its hands tied somewhat. But the repercussions from shutting down the steel works will be felt for generations to come, in an area that already has huge social problems.
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Such a pity that the steel for the new Forth Bridge came from China, Poland and Spain.

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