2 January 1980: National steel strike

(Image credit: Teesside Archive/Mirrorpix/Getty Images)

In 1967, the Iron and Steel Act nationalised Britain's steelmaking industry, leading to the formation of the British Steel Corporation (BSC), with some 268,500 employees. But by the end of the 1970s, the industry was making a loss, and plans were in hand to close plants and make large scale redundancies.

Workers had been offered a pay rise of 2%. The unions wanted 20%. Talks quickly broke down. And so, for the first time in over 50 years, the steelworkers began a national strike.

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But by the end of the year, the Consett Works in County Durham closed and steelmaking operations stopped at the Shotton works in North Wales.

Eventually, however, the restructuring bore fruit, and the BSC returned to profit. In 1988, it was privatised, and in 1999, it merged with Dutch steel producer Koninklijke Hoogovens to form Corus Group, to become the world's third-largest steel producer.

In March 2007, Corus was taken over by India's Tata Steel in a deal worth $13bn, and became Tata Steel Europe, with plants in Scunthorpe, Port Talbot, and Ijmuiden. Tata sold its Scunthorpe plant to Greybull Capital, which rebranded it as British Steel. It was placed into insolvency in 2019 and was bought up by China's Jingye Group in 2020.