NOTHING must be allowed to stand in the way of decisive action to defend steelmaking in Britain, especially the massive Tata Steel plant in Port Talbot.

When Britain’s private banking network went belly up because of its own reckless greed, New Labour, backed by Tories, Liberal Democrats and nationalists, took the banks under the public wing.

No expense was spared to save the network, nurse it back to health through liberal injections of public finance and prepare it for a speedy return to being milked once more by the private sector.

Steel is far more important than banks to build a modern economy, with state-of-the-art infrastructure, including high-quality transport links.

It is a foundation industry that is literally at the heart of the economy, from the framework of all major construction projects to railway tracks and manufactured goods.

Every major industrialised country has its own steel industry, understanding that it is vital not to rely totally on supplies from other countries at prices beyond control.

If the private banks had been allowed to go to the wall, it would have caused a certain amount of hardship and dislocation, but they would have been replaced by new competitors entering the finance market.

Steel is not like that. If anything, it resembles the coal industry that was allowed to slip out of existence despite ongoing huge demand for coal.

Just as it is financially prohibitive for a decommissioned deep pit to be returned to production, so it is with steel plant once their furnaces have been allowed to cool.

Tata’s decision to turn its back on steel production in Britain, either by sale or closure of existing facilities, emphasises the urgency of the situation.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is correct to demand that David Cameron recalls the Westminster Parliament to debate the imminent threat to Port Talbot and to the wider steel industry.

Welsh First Minister Carwyn Jones has already taken the lead in calling for the Senedd to reconvene.

While the Welsh government can take important decisions that may assist Port Talbot’s survival, it lacks the financial capacity and the geographical authority to make a crucial difference to the industry.

Steel’s collapse would signal the immediate loss of thousands of jobs, a knock-on effect on several times more that number and a potential knockout blow for manufacturing as a whole.

Despite this, Cameron’s refusal to recall Parliament, together with Business Secretary and ex-banker Sajid Javid’s successive decisions to travel to Australia rather than speak to Tata officials in Mumbai and to rule out steel nationalisation without discussion, illustrates Tory indifference to steel.

Steel unions Unite and GMB have embraced the need to bring the steel industry into public ownership, as have Corbyn and Communist Party leader Robert Griffiths.

The short-term-profit mentality that dominates the City is utterly inappropriate for the steel industry, which requires long-term stability and investment.

Instead, it has worn high energy costs and green taxes around its neck like an albatross, putting it on a weak competitive footing against Britain’s main competitors in the EU that account for about 80 per cent of imports.

This is despite media concentration on the relatively low level of Chinese steel sales in Britain.

Sales is the operative word. Contractors in Britain choose to buy foreign steel because there is no government guidance or compulsion to buy British even for projects benefiting from state support.

The character and level of government backing that steel in Britain requires is banned by EU competition rules.

This provides another argument supporting the need to left-exit this free-marketeers’ club.