Steel

Thursday

The Spectator

How much steel does Britain produce?

Double date This year, Orthodox Easter is on the same date as the western Easter, 20 April. How common is that? The Orthodox Church has a different date for Easter because it still calculates the date according to the Julian calendar, which runs 13 days behind the Gregorian calendar. But the dates coincide when the first full moon after the spring equinox occurs relatively late. The dates last coincided in 2017, but eight years is a relatively long run without this happening. This year is the ninth occasion this century when western and Orthodox Easters have been on the same day. A common date for Easter will next happen in

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

No one wants American cars

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

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: British Steel seized, army sent to Birmingham and slim told to stay home in Beijing

Home Parliament was recalled from its Easter recess to sit on a Saturday for the first time since the Falklands War of 1982 to pass a bill to take control of British Steel, which amounts to no more than the works at Scunthorpe owned by the Chinese company Jingye since 2020. Scunthorpe, which employs 2,700 directly and thousands indirectly, is the last plant in Britain capable of making virgin steel. The bill, passing through the Commons and Lords, received the Royal Assent on the same day. The race against time was to supply the blast furnaces with coal before they were ruined by going cold; supplies from the United States

Wednesday

Oscar Edmondson

What could a US-UK trade deal look like?

13 min listen

Trump’s levies have kicked in today: including an astonishing 102 per cent tariff on China – after it missed the deadline to withdraw its retaliatory tariffs – and 20 per cent on the European Union. The combination of these explosive tariffs has sent markets sliding once again. This follows a slight recovery in the markets yesterday after suggestions by some in the Trump administration that they may be willing to negotiate the tariffs down. In the UK, the economic uncertainty has ‘turbocharged’ plans which have been whispered around Westminster for some time, including nationalising the British steel industry. Attention has also turned towards a trade deal with the US, and

Tuesday

Philip Marsden

Whoever imagined that geology was a lifeless subject?

Rocks are still and lifeless things, and geologists are men with beards whose emotional bandwidth is taken up with an unnatural attachment to cherts and clasts and the chill beauty of the subducted lithosphere. Such is the stereotype. The academic geologist and New Yorker contributor Marcia Bjornerud has managed to go a fair distance towards dispelling it. In her previous book, Timefulness, she wrote for the general reader and with persuasive lyricism about readjusting our focus to thinking in geological time.  Compared with Mars or any of the known planets, Earth’s surface is a riot Now, in Turning to Stone, she looks back over a lifetime of teaching geology in