Port Talbot and the suicide of Wales Dejection and despair now hang over the Valleys

The first was the Treaty of Versailles, whose terms required a defeated Germany to supply cheap coal to Europe as part of its reparations. As the British representative on the Council of Four, the Welshman David Lloyd George was thus a signatory to a settlement that effectively pulled the rug of profitability from under the South Wales coalfields: the price of Welsh coal fell by nearly 50%. The second was a turn in the United States to more exploitable markets for energy in the Southern Hemisphere. By the time the Wall Street Crash had bankers and investors jumping from buildings in 1929, the Valleys of South Wales already had 45% of its workforce conscripted into the army of the unemployed.

The use of the military metaphor is not unintentional. As some 241 pits closed by 1936, resulting in the now familiar pattern of outward migration form the region of the fit and able, the only moment of reprieve would be the outbreak of the Second World War, resulting in the need once again for the region’s coal to help motor to machineries of warfare. What must it do to the psychology of a people knowing the survival of their own communities was tied to the continuation of a war as local boys and men continued to fight and dig for yards back home?

If the Valleys were subject to abandonment and social neglect in the decades that followed, by the end of the Eighties and the defeat of the miners, it was clear the industrious way of life which once sustained these communities had been largely destroyed. Port Talbot was in many ways an exception to this, though it should be added that many of its workers were descendants of miners from nearby collieries and still tried to carry the socialist spirit of defiance, which was somewhat captured in Michael Sheen’s The Way.

Abjection would soon become a defining term, which could be routinely applied across the entire coal-face region. The figure of the hardened miner was replaced by the steroid-using gym worker, a grim contrast to the emaciated bodies seeking quiet refuge as they administered heroin into their dejected veins. Stories started to become more commonplace about adults and even teenagers taking their own lives. Soon we all knew of somebody who could no longer face the reality of an abandoned world. Like most things in the Valleys, the more time passes, the greater the problem becomes. And the realisation these towns were facing a suicide epidemic captured international media attention in 2008, as the tragic loss of so many young teens in quick succession within a 10-mile radius of Bridgend led many to question the causes and possible solutions.

Government statistics continue to document rising numbers of suicide, with Wales home to the highest percentage of any region in the United Kingdom. While the most convenient explanation for this often focuses upon the mental health of the afflicted, and invariably advocates more therapy and intervention at an individual level, less attention has been given to the idea that depression should first and foremost be seen as a social phenomenon — that is also inseparable from the lived conditions, the ecologies and atmospheres, into which a community is thrown.

Having said this, what is also peculiar about the Valleys is how the exponential rise in suicide corresponds to the regreening of the landscape, posing a direct challenge to those who primarily correlate wellbeing with environmental recovery. Recovery means nothing if people feel like they have no value or purpose to their existence, regardless of how many daffodils are growing.

While suicides among young girls (as in Bridgend) have become a growing problem — indeed I have lost two cousins this way — it is the vast rise in young male suicides that registers as the most pressing of concerns. Again, while there are many explanations offered for this, given how the figures compare to other social groups (notably black and Asian), surely such a phenomenon can only be properly explained by attending to the crisis of white male subjectivity.

Today, what we look upon are social systems in which young white men are struggling to find any meaning let alone political agency. As other groups are being encouraged to find a sense of purpose and belonging through a shared sense of historical outrage, such an identity has been denied them. The same men have also been thrown into a cultural milieu in which they are being asked to embrace their vulnerabilities, while stripping them of the very qualities of passion and fight that might allow them to deal with difficult times. Should they have the gall to question the status quo, often they are accused of exhibiting white male fragility, which is a rather peculiar way of defaulting back to a desired framing of brokenness.

Because people are not born vulnerable. Systems produce them that way. And if there is a violence to speak of today in places like the Valleys, it’s not one of masculine hardness — it’s a violence of the vulnerable.

Young white men are continually being told they should aspire to whatever the new digital world has to offer, knowing full well to be born in the Valleys means the chances of escape are less with each rotation of the clock. This reminds of how static the empty time of social depression can truly be. Yet still some have the temerity to call them privileged. If such a word has any meaning, it should be linked to the luxury of time — or to properly separate those who inhabit a dead time that has no prospect versus those with the luxury of time to fire off social-media missives, day after day, without it having any impact on their material welfare.

Back in Port Talbot, meanwhile, as the spring rains fall and the furnaces that give life to the town are slowly doused, it’s hard not to be pessimistic. If a century of mass industrial closure has seen very little to replace it, the speeding up of automation and artificial intelligence promises to leave farther behind those who weren’t even at the starting line to begin with. Faced with these conditions of social depression, should we be surprised when desperate young men try to find a lasting way out? I know personally what it’s like to live through seasons marked by the weight of absence. It’s suffocating. It’s debilitating. And it’s soul-destroying.

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