Khoodeelaar! No to “big business agenda crossrail scam” campaign challenging uk Gordon brown: you came across all fake and empty on the day that corus workers grieved for the loss of their community! Big business got you and you caved in. Now, what kind of 'British vah-loo' is that, Gordon? Scrap all big business scam. Scrap Crossrail.

2200 Hrs GMT

London

Friday

19 February 2010

Editor © Muhammad Haque

Khoodeelaar!  No to “big business agenda crossrail scam” campaign challenging uk Gordon brown: you came across all fake and empty on the day that corus workers grieved for the loss of their community! Big business got you and you caved in. Now, what kind of 'British vah-loo' is that, Gordon?  Scrap all big business scam. Scrap Crossrail. Start looking after communities that are being decimated by your empty parades hiding your increased collusion with big business looters of the UK public. Scrap the lies. Scrap the fakery. Scrap the fraudulence by your Blaired regime! Get back to addressing real priorities. Not faked ones. Quit wasting valuable public resources for Big Business.

[To be continued]

From The Times

February 20, 2010

Teesside comes out to grieve as steel production ceases at Redcar

Andrew Norfolk

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(Matt Lloyd/The Times)

Steelworkers outside the Corus plant after the blast furnace was closed down

They came to stand together yesterday, workers, children and their grandparents, bearing witness to the death of steel production in a community that was once the industry’s beating heart. A small brass band braved the chill air outside the entrance to the sprawling Corus steelworks in Redcar, where a blast furnace that fuelled thousands of jobs on Teesside was in its final hours of operation.

Members of the band had played as each of Co Durham’s coalmines — Horden, Shotton, Easington, Blackhall — closed down. Here, their hymns were an elegy for another fallen industrial giant. Union banners were held aloft, a few women wept, men stood silently, many gazing at the ground.

In smart black blazers with gleaming brass buttons, hands raw with cold, the band played on.

A commercial decision taken in an Indian boardroom will directly cost 1,600 jobs at Teesside Cast Products. Hundreds of contractors based at the plant will also be out of work. Factor in staff at local companies that exist to supply the steelworks and it has been estimated that 8,000 people may find soon themselves out of work in towns — Redcar, Middlesbrough, Stockton, Hartlepool — already burdened by high unemployment.

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• Strike ballot as Corus steel plant shuts down

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• Teesside shows it has other irons in the fire

When it opened in 1979 the blast furnace was the biggest in Europe. Into it went iron ore, coke and limestone, to be blasted by hot air at 1,000C. Out came a flowing river of molten iron. The liquid metal was fed into a steel furnace, where the iron’s carbon content was reduced and impurities removed, producing raw steel.

At 4pm yesterday, that all came to an end. Big words were being spoken elsewhere. Unions called a national strike ballot. Corus insisted it was still seeking a viable future for the plant and the Government promised to do all it could to find new investment. All of which meant little to most of those gathered outside an entrance gate whose logo, “Passionate About Steel”, had never rung more hollow.

It used to be very different. Middlesbrough barely existed until 1828 when — after the birth of the railways — a seaport opened to take coal carried from the Durham collieries. The discovery in 1850 of ironstone in the Cleveland hills set in motion northeast England’s version of the California gold rush. Teesside’s first blast furnace opened in 1851; by 1860 it had 32 and Middlesbrough’s population had soared to 19,000. Two years later William Gladstone visited this “youngest child of England’s enterprise” and christened it “an infant Hercules”.

By 1930 the town’s population was 138,000 and Teesside’s iron and steel industry was the biggest in Britain, employing 33,000 workers. Great structures across the world, from the Sydney Harbour Bridge to Canary Wharf in London and the World Trade Centre in New York, were built with Teesside iron and steel.

Outsiders scoffed at the “Smoggies” who lived and worked on land scarred and polluted by the heavy industrial processes of shipbuilding, chemicals and steel.

Local people were quietly proud to live in a town where the smoke from its furnaces often blotted out the sun. Now? Before yesterday, Ironopolis had been reduced to a workforce of 3,200, which has been halved at a stroke.

Blame the consortium that pulled out of a ten-year contract last April to buy 80 per cent of the Corus plant’s steel. Blame an overcapacity in the global steel market. Blame the recession.

Amid the anger, the tears and a general mood of helplessness were hundreds of personal stories. The memories stretch back generations. Janet Coulson, 52, and her friend Linda McPhillip left school at 16 to join the steelworks. Mrs Coulson’s brother, her father, her mother and her grandfather all worked at the plant and she can trace back her family’s links with Teesside iron and steel to the 1850s.

“When we were at school everyone worked for British Steel or ICI,” she said. “Redcar High Street was already becoming a ghost town and this will kill a lot of local shops. The Government bailed out the banks. Why can’t they help us?”

Among the 1,600 people destined to lose their jobs is Andrew Barnett, 48, a training facilitator who has worked in the steel industry for 32 years, all but the first two of them at the Redcar plant. “I started at the Consett steelworks and moved here as an apprentice when they shut that down (3,700 jobs were lost in the County Durham town) in 1980.

“I walked round the steel plant yesterday, probably for the last time. It was hard, because we all grew up together and it’s always felt like one big family.”

Richard Wynn, 30, a fitter, and his father, Dennis, 57, an engineer, have worked at the plant for 10 and more than 30 years respectively. Both fear that they are about to be made redundant. Richard Wynn said: “I’m gutted. I don’t think Tata [Corus’s Indian parent company] are serious about selling it and the Government hasn’t exactly helped us, has it? I’m married with two young kids and I’ve got no idea what I’m going to do.”

Watching the proceedings with sad eyes was Peter Fulton, 73, who worked at the Redcar plant for 46 years, retiring in 2000. “I’ve never felt as emotional in my life as I did when I heard that they were going to mothball the blast furnace,” he said. “When it was opened in 1979, 26,000 people worked here. What’s left now?

"I wanted to be here today to show solidarity with these lads. In the old days, the people who made the decisions lived in this community. Now it’s all gone global and decisions about Teessiders’ lives are taken in Mumbai. Without the blast furnace, you have nothing.”

The Business Secretary, Lord Mandelson, was irritated by suggestions that a death warrant had been signed for steel production in Redcar when he visited the plant on Thursday. “It is not yet a tragedy because it is not yet a closure of the plant,” he said, echoing Corus’s pledge that by mothballing the blast furnace it would ensure that production could be resumed “relatively quickly” if circumstances changed.

Those words fell on deaf ears among the workers outside the gates, who seemed convinced that their fate had been terminally signed. A river of iron and steel has flowed on Teesside for 150 years. It ran dry yesterday. When the brass band stopped playing, the crowd fell silent as a lone trumpeter stood to sound the Last Post. It felt appropriate.

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docherty lawson wrote: Another nail in the coffin for the British steelworker. And Mandy, nobody takes you seriously. You have no clout, (per Cadbury's fiasco),and to show your face when the backbone of our manufacturing is being destroyed is an insult to those working people who have kept Labour politicians in "easy street " for generations. All you parasites and your business and banking cronies can carry on sipping Chardonney while the ones who actually created the wealth sign on and lose hope. February 19, 2010 9:33 PM GMT RECOMMEND? (1)

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