Nationalising British Steel won’t fix a thing

There will be some stirring speeches about saving jobs. There will be lots of grand rhetoric about securing a great British industry. Who knows, some of the more mischievous Labour backbenchers may even break out into a chorus on the Red Flag. Parliament will vote on Saturday in favour of an emergency bill that will effectively take British Steel back into public ownership, and pave the way for full-scale nationalisation. There is just one catch. It won’t actually solve anything. 

British Steel has been in bad shape for more than a decade. Its Chinese owners, Jingye Group have decided it is no longer worth the vast losses it is racking up and have stopped delivering the supplies necessary to keep it open. As the last surviving blast furnace in Britain faces closure, even the slow learners in the Starmer government have suddenly worked out that in a world where it is ramping up military spending some steel might be quite useful, and in a world dominated by tariffs and trade wars it might be handy to make the metal at home.