It is mere coincidence that the closure of the blast furnace at the Port Talbot steelworks and the shutdown of Britain’s last coal-fired power station at Ratcliffe-on-Soar in Nottinghamshire happened on the same day.
Yet they are freighted with significance. Like in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, they represent the UK’s once world-leading economic past, its struggling present, and the way to a possible industrial renaissance in the future.
