Newport is used to job losses: first came the steep decline of the town as a coal-exporting port, next came the partial closure of the nearby steelworks at Llanwern

Newport is used to job losses. First came the steep decline of the town as a coal-exporting port, next came the partial closure of the nearby steelworks at Llanwern.
But never has there been such a vivid contrast between the hopes engendered by LG’s relocation to Newport and the grim reality.Yesterday the people of the town in south-east Wales looked back with bitter irony at the words of the politicians. Victoria Evans, 31, a teacher, said many people came to the area just to work for LG and thought they were in good secure jobs that would see them through to retirement age. “There are now 900 people flooding onto the job market at once.

It’s especially bad because there aren’t enough manufacturing jobs to go around already,” she said.”A lot of public money was spent on this and it has just gone down the drain. A lot of people feel conned – not just those who work at the plant.”There was shock at the scale of the job losses. Eddie English, 60, a railway worker, said: “It is really rough for the people affected. I can’t imagine there being any replacement jobs – no other companies seem to want to invest in Newport.”Other manufacturing industries like steelworks are also cutting back on jobs There’s nowhere for these workers to go. A lot of families are very worried about the future,” he said.Alun Radcliffe, 25, a technical support manager from Ystrad Mynach, Caerphilly, said: “I know exactly how these workers feel – I was a steelworker and it was frightening when jobs started going.”I decided to get out and take an office job instead.

Things have only got worse since, so I feel as if I made the right decision.”Sue Scott, a 58-year-old housekeeper, called on the principality’s politicians to be more vigilant: “It is incredible they spent all this public money just for this to happen. Millions of pounds has just disappeared into nothing and the Welsh Assembly really needs to look at what it should be doing to stop this happening again. It’s unbelievable that no lessons have been learned from what happened in the Llanwern steelworks. Yet again hundreds of people are out of work.”For some it was hard to believe the company was not aware of the problems ahead.