Nigel Farage said he was concerned he would be “lampooned” for suggesting the re-opening of blast furnaces and coal pits in Wales if his party wins Senedd elections next May.
That worry was well placed. As the Reform UK leader set out a multi-billion-pound unfunded “ambition” without any detailed costings, he also backed himself into a corner.
The Government’s environmental targets are set to ban licences for new coal mines. Asked how he would navigate this legal bar, Farage suggested: “We can always have a fight, can’t we? And who knows, there may be situations where we just do things.”
Which conjures up the absurd image of Farage hoisting himself into the cab of a JCB digger to break ground on his own coal seam in South Wales and consequently face prison for it. His supporters should get the poster paint ready: “Free the Port Talbot One”.
The Reform leader was in Port Talbot on Monday to invite candidates to sign up to stand for his party at the Senedd election next year. He pledged to “reindustralise Wales”, open new steel blast furnaces, reopen some of South Wales’s coal mines, and keep more “factory floor” jobs by channelling subsidies to traditional industries.
“I am not standing here and – no doubt some will lampoon this – I am not saying let’s open up all the pits,” Farage said. “What I am saying is there is coal, specific types of coal for certain uses, that we still need in this country and we certainly will need for the blast furnaces here that we should produce ourselves rather than importing it.”
Port Talbot was the largest steelmaking plant in the UK until its two blast furnaces were closed last September, with the loss of 2,800 jobs as part of the transition to greener production methods. Replacement electric-arc furnaces are set to be operational by the early 2028, but they will not make the virgin steel necessary for Britain’s increased arms production outlined by the Government in its defence review last week.
There are several sticking points. Firstly, the Senedd doesn’t have the resources or capability to reopen the blast furnaces. At a cost of billions of pounds, it would have to be a decision made in Westminster, particularly as Farage said he was keen to save public money by cutting waste in Wales, rather than raising taxes.
Secondly, the structure,s containing hundreds of tonnes of solidified molten iron, can’t just be switched on again. They are gone for good.
Thirdly, even if you start afresh, you would need privat- sector investment. Even Tata, a massive and experienced multinational owner of Port Talbot steelworks, was losing up to £2m a day ahead of its closure last autumn. Who would enter that market now?
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“The only prospect of it working is if we effectively became North Korea, because then you could completely halt the import of less expensive steel or coal, and you could direct people to work in horrific jobs where they are required to engage in really dangerous practices that they haven’t wanted to do for a long time,” economist Calvin Jones, who has studied Wales for over 30 years, told The i Paper.
“All the coal in Wales is gone, and that’s why the coal mines closed in the 1980s. Whatever you think of Margaret Thatcher, she realised that the coal was becoming much more sparsely distributed and much more expensive to mine. As an economist who’s done a lot of work in the area for a long time, it’s such a non-starter, it makes me angry that it’s even a thing.”
However left-behind voters feel in the South Wales valleys, modern workers don’t want coal dust poisoning their lungs. And even if new pits and blast furnaces were economically viable, automation means very few jobs.
“Yes, it is going to cost in the low billions to do it and I am not even pretending it will be easy,” Farage argued. “But what I am saying is we are going to be using huge amounts of steel over the decades to come. We have to do everything we can to try to start thinking about being more self-sufficient.
“People talk about the cost of these things… what’s the economic cost of people out of work? What’s the social cost of communities being destroyed?”
For Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University in London, Farage’s intervention brought to mind the speech former Conservative prime minister John Major made in 1993, in which he set out a vision of Britain as “the country of long shadows on county cricket grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs and dog lovers.”
Bale told The i Paper: “It’s all about taking us back to our former glories; a vision of the UK which looks much like it did in the 1950s. It’s the cricket speech for the working classes; maybe the rugby speech. How many people in Wales will be impressed by that cliché? Do they really want their sons going back down the pits? But, I guess when unemployment is running at the rate it is in some parts of the valleys, nostalgia is a powerful drug.”
The UK steel industry’s importance to the overall economy has decreased over time. In 1990, it contributed 0.3 per cent of total economic output, while it now contributes less than 0.1 per cent.
Like fish in the Brexit wars, Farage sees steel in Wales is a nostalgic cwtch, a symbol of something lost.
Last month, the first polling for the 2026 Senedd race by YouGov found that Reform was running second in Wales, with 25 per cent of the vote, behind Plaid Cymru on 30 and Labour at 18.
“I note that Farage is saying that his idea of bringing back virgin steelmaking is for the long term,” Plaid Cymru’s Leader Rhun ap Iorwerth told The i Paper. “That’s shorthand for saying, ‘We’re going to say this now, but we’ve got no plan for making it happen.’”
Even so, it’s clear Labour needs to arrest Reform’s surge in popularity. Chancellor Rachel Reeves is likely to use her spending review speech on Wednesday to make a direct attack on Farage, contrasting Labour’s fiscal discipline with Reform’s “fantasy economics”. Reeves is also looking at how to bring down energy bills for industry and low-income households.
Narrowly coming third in the Hamilton by-election, and the resignation and speedy un-resignation of Chairman Zia Yusuf – “an exeat” as Farage had it in the public-school lingo – does not appear to have done much damage to Reform’s momentum.
Farage rejected the suggestion that there was a pattern during his political life of falling out with the people around him, with a marvellously Don Corleone answer.
“People I employed in the City back in the 90s are still personal friends. I am someone that maintains long-term friendships, and I do that, but if ever anybody talks behind my back, or if anybody betrays that trust, then, yeah, I’ll never speak to them again.”
There’s no need to open any new blast furnaces when there’s pure steel like that lying around.
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