British steel's apocalyptic future

Photo by Christopher Furlong / Getty Images Under a canopy of smog, the Port Talbot steelworks on the South Wales coast is ground zero for Britain's contradictions. It is a smoking, choking aberration in our wipe-clean economy of professional services and retail - and the pride of an industrial Labour heartland that will soon host the Brexiteer utopia of a freeport (an enterprise zone unbound by regulation). Its dirty industry is undergoing an even dirtier journey to clean energy, and losing thousands of jobs along the way. The acrid taste of burning coal tickled the back of my throat as…