The weekend’s Scunthorpe drama was a distraction from endless chatter about Donald Trump and his tariffs. Perhaps Downing Street’s spinners stage-managed it with that in mind. Or perhaps the heroic tale of shop stewards confronting villainous Chinese managers while rescue teams scoured the horizon for emergency shipments of iron ore and coking coal was a different kind of smokescreen – to hide the fact that British steelmaking has been doomed for decades and what just happened is a job-saving nationalisation that will be a massive drain on public funds for as long as it takes to admit that the last British blast furnaces belong to history.
I’m sorry to take such a downbeat view. But look at the history of the Scunthorpe ‘long products’ plant since Corus – the defensive merger of privatised British Steel with the Dutch firm Hoogovens – was sold in 2007 to Tata of India, probably the UK’s most committed inward investor. Even Tata could not make the operation viable against global headwinds; it was offloaded to Greybull, an obscure private-equity shop which passed the parcel again in 2019, for a knockdown £50 million, to Jingye of China.
Was Jingye’s owner, former Communist party official Li Ganpo, excited about orders from UK infrastructure projects, despite the soaring energy costs that made his new asset so uncompetitive? Or was he, as I wrote at the time, simply planting a flag ‘to remind us of China’s industrial might’? And has he now been ordered to withdraw as a different show of Beijing’s merciless potency? That’s for another episode, but Scunthorpe’s cold denouement can only be a matter of time.
No Chevvies
‘They don’t take our cars [but] we take every-thing from them… millions of cars’ is a Trump less-than-half-truth lobbed at the EU rather than the UK.
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