Priorities

Deep in the heart of North Lincolnshire stands an enormous steelworks that provides 5000 good local jobs, as well as a further 20,000 in the supply chain. Tonight the company is in liquidation, desperately seeking a buyer. We can but hope that buyer steps forward, and soon, because livelihoods and, god forbid, lives are at risk. Scunthorpe would be devastated by its closure. Meanwhile, the main party of government in Westminster, the Conservative and Unionist party, concentrates on the only thing that matters to its MPs: saving their own jobs.

This is the same Tory party that has brought about the conditions for British Steel’s demise through its chaotic handling of Brexit. A long succession of Tory guests on BBC Radio Five Live’s ‘Drive’ show have not once even mentioned British Steel. The talk is all about who will succeed Theresa May as prime minister.

It can only be that the Tory party truly doesn’t give a damn about the workers in Scunthorpe. The young, setting off on their journey in life, seeing their dreams about to die. The middle aged, far from retirement, in an area where good jobs are in short supply, fearing the consequences of losing their job and not finding another one. Your Boris Johnsons, raking in the millions, have no idea how ordinary people live their lives and even less interest in finding out.

I hear the interviews with these workers, shell-shocked and fearful. Meanwhile, the 1922 committee meets behind closed doors, planning and plotting about the succession, before they slope off to their gentlemen’s clubs for haute cuisine.

There are few good jobs in Scunthorpe away from the Steelworks. The community knows that and the workers fear it. Like everywhere else, their is a surfeit of minimum wage, zero hours employment, but nothing to help pay, or even acquire, a mortgage. The young will doubtless move away in search of some kind of future. Scunthorpe’s steelworks will gradually become a museum piece.

It gives me no pleasure to see so many jobs lost in an area that was persuaded by charlatans like Farage and Johnson to vote for a Brexit that would have profound and damaging consequences to their own lives. And this, without actually having left Europe. You can only imagine the grim reality of what comes next.

Ambitious and arrogant politicians squabbling over internal matters when the country is on the cliff edge to disaster.

Now we know that Project Fear was Project Reality, the reality that Brexit would be a catastrophic act of self-harm and not a smooth trip to the sunlit uplands of prosperity and joy.

When May has gone, what will change? What will Boris Johnson bring that May couldn’t? Competence? Good judgement? Loyalty? Don’t make me laugh.

The destruction of the manufacturing industry that was started by Thatcher is ending under Brexit. And people, as ever, will pay the price with their jobs. And all the Tories care about is who will be in Number 10 by the end of May.