UK moves toward nationalizing last steel plant, owned by Chinese company
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ER Editor: The UK’s LAST steel plant is being nationalized after being owned by … wait for it … a private Chinese national. Aren’t steel plants ‘strategic‘ industries? Isn’t steel a foundational material for the manufacture of other needed items? Isn’t steel as basic to a country as, say, food production? (Ben Habib addresses this in a tweet below.)
What was something so important and basic to a developed country doing in a) private hands, and b) a foreign national’s hands? Oh wait, that’s globalization for you.
This past Saturday, Parliament had a special session to pass legislation opening the way for nationalization of its last plant. According to the narrative we’re watching, pressure is now on the British govt. to save the day and the industry.
Meanwhile, we’re all getting a valuable lesson on what unfettered globalized trade PLUS globalist net zero policies do to sovereign countries.
Don’t forget unfettered immigration behind all that.
Some tweets —
WORTH WATCHING!
‘British Steel is a fantastic case study of how global trade has gone wrong’ – Ben Habib on the CONFLICT OF INTEREST in China owning a British steel company that it is motivated to see FAIL because China can scoop up that business. Habib refers to it as an ‘accident’ that this state of affairs came about. (Wrong, there are no accidents.) And then there’s net zero, anti-industrial nonsense (UK govt policy), which China was never bound by. Steel production needs COAL, which the UK has STOPPED mining, relying instead on OVERSEAS COAL at Scunthorpe. ‘You couldn’t make this up’ he says … He also makes a useful argument against privatization of such industries in any case. Costs as a result of bad management get sloughed off onto the taxpayer, which is what is happening now. Overall, he equates mindless, unfettered free trade with that of immigration. Wow.
British Steel was never theirs to sell.
Our leaders privatised it, handed it to the CCP, and now pretend to care about sovereignty.
Globalism is killing Britain — and this is how they did it. #TheNewsAtBen pic.twitter.com/V1Gkybr8Ov
— Ben Habib (@BackBrexitBen) April 13, 2025
Thought: given the political smarts of those in power behind the ecology nonsense, can these people be classified as actual traitors to their country? Because the UK has been sold out to China and Germany and any other country that can do its key manufacturing for it, and lost its economy and self-defence capabilities as a result.
The Daily Mail on the madness of net zero policies, making the UK economically dependent on foreign countries and industries —
Millions on coal from Japan to save our steel: Net zero ‘madness’ as taxpayers foot the bill to keep furnaces burning
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More on privatization of key, strategic industries —
British taxpayers are now subsidising Chinese steel. We’re not saving Scunthorpe — we’re funding our own industrial collapse. They shut down British coal. Now they import it from Japan. They shut down North Sea gas. Now they import it from the US. Who exactly is this government… pic.twitter.com/2AlBKw2l2r
— Ben Habib (@BackBrexitBen) April 11, 2025
The final days of British Steel.
Chinese owners are preparing for its closure.Britain invented the steel industry. But sadly, Britain’s industries have been sold off & communities left to rot. British Steel should be British owned, not Chinese owned. pic.twitter.com/PRuT4bCeoA
— James Melville 🚜 (@JamesMelville) April 8, 2025
This is why British Steel cannot survive. The explanation is Net Zero madness pic.twitter.com/yNVsTXHSkW
— David Vance (@DVATW) April 12, 2025
British Steel ought to be a turning point.
No more net zero unilateralism.
No more self-indulgence on coking coal.
No more naivety on Chinese trade.
No more critical infrastructure in Chinese hands.
But Labour want to let Chinese firms control our wind turbines. pic.twitter.com/i7nOu6Bjwc
— Nick Timothy MP (@NJ_Timothy) April 12, 2025
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ER: Politico also ran this – UK parliament to debate emergency British Steel rescue plan Saturday
Parliament To Debate Taking Control of British Steel
The move, with potential nationalisation on the horizon, would stop the currently Chinese-owned steel plant from closing permanently.
TEC News
The British Government requested that the House of Commons be recalled from its Easter recess on Saturday, April 12th, for a special sitting dedicated to saving British Steel’s plant in Scunthorpe from imminent closure by Chinese owner Jingye.
Saturday’s rare parliamentary session will aim to pass an emergency law aimed at preventing the closure of the Lincolnshire town’s blast furnaces. While there is a local dimension based on saving thousands of jobs, there seems to be a dim recollection of the sovereigntist importance of being able to manufacture ‘virgin’ steel, independent of the fluctuations of global trade—without Scunthorpe, the UK would be the only G7 country to lack this capacity.
For Keir Starmer, the new legislation would allow ministers to “take control” of the loss-making site, although he has stopped short of saying whether this would involve fully nationalising the firm. While Labour has yet to admit it, the move could also defy its (doomed) ‘Net Zero’ orthodoxy, which has a strong preference for electric arc steel production over blast furnaces.
Source
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ER: We’re inclined to suggest that any mention of (recent) tariffs is a distraction from a much bigger problem, which Ben Habib discusses above.
UK moves toward nationalizing last steel plant
Scunthorpe’s Chinese parent company has said the site is hemorrhaging money due to tariffs and rising energy costs
RT
The British government has opened the door to nationalizing the last primary steelmaking plant in the UK in an emergency bid to keep its blast furnaces running.
According to British Steel’s owner, Chinese company Jingye, the Scunthorpe plant has been operating at a loss of some £700,000 ($916,000) a day, affected by President Donald Trump’s 25% tariffs on steel imports into the US, massive CO2 emission fees, and high UK energy prices. The factory’s parent company reportedly turned down a £500 million offer from the British government to keep its blast furnace “virgin steel production” working.
On Saturday, Prime Minister Keir Starmer recalled lawmakers from Easter recess to pass an emergency bill that would allow the UK to step in and take control of any “steel undertaking” at risk of stoppage. Such a recall of parliament has not happened since the Falklands War in 1982.
“The Secretary of State may do anything for the purpose of securing the continued and safe use of the specified assets [of] the steel undertaking” in the event the assets “are at risk of ceasing to be used,” the bill passed on Saturday reads.
Starmer said the government had stepped in to protect UK steel manufacturing.
“All options are on the table to secure the future of the industry,” he said in a statement on X on Saturday.
Jingye retains ownership of the plant as of now, but nationalization is a “likely option,” according to State Secretary for Business and Trade Jonathan Reynolds.
The UK is currently looking for a company to buy and take over British Steel, according to the BBC.
In a statement to the British state broadcaster, Reynolds said that the market value of the business was “effectively zero” and the UK taxpayer would have to shoulder the steel plant’s £700,000 a day losses.
Source
Featured image source, Ed Miliband: https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/british-steel-ed-miliband-green-energy-b2732149.html
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Published to UK Reloaded from Europe Reloaded
See Related Article Below
Has the plight of British steelmaking reawakened Labour to the cause of the nation state?
ANDREW GIMSON
“This is in the national interest,” Sir Keir Starmer declared on his visit to Scunthorpe on Saturday to promote the plan to save the town’s two blast furnaces. Jonathan Reynolds, the Business Secretary, informed the Commons on the same day that the Government’s measures “are unequivocally in our national interest”.
Most Labour MPs who spoke in that debate used the words “the national interest”, as did most of those who tweeted about it. Chris McDonald (Labour, Stockton North), who has the merit of knowing a great amount about steel, said we are going to “take back control of our steel industry”.
Harry Phibbs warned yesterday on ConHome that what is happening is bad economics. But let us look for a moment at the politics.
One of the benefits of Brexit is that we have regained the right to make our own mistakes, and occasionally to learn from them. The buck stops at Westminster, not at Brussels.
What a transformation this has forced the Labour Party to make! It seems only yesterday that Starmer and his friends were desperate to find some way to take us back into the European Union. The answer to every difficult question was, they insisted, more Europe. This was an article of faith with them.
Now they proclaim, with impressive unanimity, the primacy of the national interest. Starmer is a lawyer who has taken a new brief, diametrically opposed to his previous one.
And he has every right to do this. It is how our system has long worked. In his brilliant essay on The Character of Sir Robert Peel, published in 1856, Walter Bagehot observed that public opinion “is a permeating influence” and “exacts obedience to itself”, which means that
“The most influential of constitutional statesmen is the one who most felicitously expresses the creed of the moment, who administers it, who embodies it in laws and institutions, who gives it the highest life it is capable of, who induces the average man to think, ‘I could not have done it any better if I had had time myself’.”
This is the politics of Starmer. He perceives that public opinion has changed, so he changes too, and makes with the greatest possible emphasis the case which his client, the British people, now wishes him to make.
He is remarkably agile, for lawyers need to be agile; he wants very much, within the rules of the game, to win, which is another characteristic of his profession; and he is fertile in finding the precedents which will help him to win the case on which he and his juniors are just now working.
The great source of precedents for nationalisation is the Labour Government of 1945. Pretty much everything it created contained either the word “National”, as in “National Health Service”, or the word “British”, as in “British Railways”.
There could be no doubt of that government’s patriotism. Its leading members had served loyally in the wartime coalition at the side of Winston Churchill, and Clement Attlee had once, as everyone knew, been Major Attlee, severely wounded during the First World War.
Ernest Bevin, the mighty Foreign Secretary, supported the creation of an independent British nuclear deterrent: “We’ve got to have the bloody Union Jack flying on top of it.”
Realising at once that Stalin must be defied, he also took the lead both in creating NATO and in setting up the free press and free trade unions in the British sector of what became West Germany, so that the greater part of Germany became firmly anchored in the West and helped to keep the Russians out.
Bevin refused too to join the fledgling European Coal and Steel Community, forerunner of the European Union, and regarded Churchill’s pro-European statements as an attempt to make political capital, not as a guide to what Churchill would actually do. So it proved.
Starmer, with his preference for coalitions of the willing, has placed himself in the Bevin tradition, and to the obvious retort that Starmer is no Bevin, one must ask whether anyone else is either.
Stephen Flynn, leader at Westminster of the Scots Nats, complained during Saturday’s debate:
“Why is this not being extended to Scotland? Why is Grangemouth not being included, why is the smelter up at Lochaber not being included and why are the Dalzell steelworks not being included? The answer to why they are not being included is that Westminster is only interested in Westminster; it is not interested in Scotland.”
How wonderful to find Flynn, one of the best debaters in the House of Commons, calling on Starmer to save Scotland by being a proper Unionist. Here too one sees the logic of Brexit at work. Only the British Government can create the conditions for Grangemouth, and the smelter up at Lochaber, to thrive.
The saddest face on the Government front bench on Saturday belonged to Ed Miliband, Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero. He looked like a man in mourning for his own career as the doomed prophet of universal remedies which have done no good to Grangemouth, or to the smelter up at Lochaber.
Meanwhile Richard Tice, for Reform, complained that Starmer has stolen Reform’s policy:
“My hon. Friend the Member for Clacton (Nigel Farage) and I have been calling for British Steel to be a strategic national corporation for some six years.”
Politics often requires the appropriation of one’s opponents’ policies, and Starmer performs such thefts with an air of virtue which infuriates his rivals.
He wishes to persuade voters that he, not Farage or Kemi Badenoch, is the true defender of the national interest. It is possible that within a few years the Labour Government will have failed in so many different ways that this claim becomes unsustainable. But one can meanwhile derive some encouragement from Starmer’s belated discovery that he, too, is a Unionist.
This article (Has the plight of British steelmaking reawakened Labour to the cause of the nation state?) was created and published by Conservative Home and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Andrew Gimson
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