THE remaining Yorkshire miners will be all too familiar with the plight of Welsh steelworkers today. The miners will recognise and respect the work ethic that made British steelworks among the most productive in the world.

And they know about the difference between working for a large, nationalised industry and a smaller, privatised one. Our miners are very familiar with the grim reality of living under a constant cloud of uncertainty, morale battered by workplace rumour and management silence.

The uncertainty in the steel industry finally ended today. Corus managers have announced that they are axing thousands of jobs.

This is perhaps the most stark example yet of the helplessness of the British Government in the face of global corporatism. Despite increasingly frantic pleas by ministers, and even the Prime Minister, Corus bosses have refused to discuss their plans. That is their right. They are running a private company.

Post-Thatcherism, Britain's industrial policy has been to let the free market do its worst. As a result the entire heavy manufacturing sector has been exposed to the whims of multi-national conglomerates.

Corus can make more money by shutting up shop and moving abroad. So the lives of Welsh workers do not enter the equation.

This leaves supposedly non-interventionist politicians desperate to intervene. Yet there is no longer anything they can do. The impotence of the Labour Party to save even a single job will hit its support in the Welsh heartlands three months before an election.

One of the benefits of privatisation, we were told, was that tax-payers' money would no longer be spent on large subsidies to heavy industry. And yet the Government today is paying out millions of pounds to bribe car manufacturers to stay in Britain, and even more to help Railtrack. Despite these investments, ministers have no direct say in the way the companies are run.

Now, the State will have to pay out more to keep once-productive Welsh steelworkers idle. It may be time we reassessed our industrial policy.

Updated: 10:36 Thursday, February 01, 2001