MAIL ON SUNDAY COMMENT: Don't let Net Zero scupper a chance to rekindle a vital asset
It was good to see Parliament taking the issue of the steel industry seriously yesterday. For far too long this crucial pillar of our economy and society has been neglected.
Those in our dwindling steel towns must have felt a special pain as they saw their crucial workplaces bought by foreign bosses and often closed.
This has been a long, sad story, beginning in the 1970s with the hapless reign of the war hero Sir Charles Villiers over the then-nationalised British Steel Corporation (BSC).
BSC, which had already been nationalised and denationalised in 1951, was taken back into public ownership by the Wilson government in 1967. Political interference of this kind did steel no good. Yet it was still a giant industry in 1970.
Alas, its losses were gigantic too, at more than £5million a day by today’s prices, while its world markets were collapsing. Many plants were kept open to avoid causing unemployment. Those losses continued after Villiers had shut 11 steelworks. Increasingly frantic, he closed Consett steelworks in 1980, with the loss of 4,000 jobs. He proclaimed a further 52,000 redundancies, and a pay rise of just 2 per cent, while inflation was 17 per cent.
Chinese bosses reportedly tried to enter key areas of British Steel's Scunthorpe plant only hours before crunch debate that could bring the furnace under government control (pictured: Protesters marching towards the football grounds)
British Steel plans to close its two blast furnaces and steelmaking operations in at its plant in Scunthorpe (pictured)
An English flag emblazoned with the words: 'Save our steel'
What the industry did not need was the futile three-month steel strike that began in January 1980. It cost BSC about £1billion in today’s values, and caused British steel-using industries to switch permanently to foreign suppliers. Disasters of this sort were common across British industry at this time, under the relentless pressures of wrong-headed union militancy, fierce new competition from within the Common Market, and years of weak investment and falling quality. It sometimes seemed as if the country had fallen under some sort of wicked spell.
Interestingly, the Thatcher government, supposed to be wedded to ruthless free-market methods, abandoned their original plans to cut subsidies. Instead, they pumped large piles of money into what was left of BSC in the hope of a successful privatisation later.
The industry was sold off in 1988-9, but steelmaking here has continued to decline faster than in comparable countries such as France. It has also fallen more and more under the control of foreign owners, as we see in Scunthorpe, where the owners are in China.
No wonder we are moving towards nationalisation for the third time, but let us hope we can do it better now. These are not good conditions to rebuild.
Business and Trade Secretary Jonathan Reynolds kicks off a Parliamentary debate on emergency legislation to 'save thousands of jobs' over British Steel's plans to close its Scunthorpe plant
Locals protesting as the Commons hold an emergency debate on the future of Chinese-owned British Steel
A world glut of steel (much of it from China) and a specially British problem of high energy prices partly caused by the pursuit of Net Zero have dimmed the prospects for a wholly British steel industry.
It is, of course, welcome that the Government is taking this issue seriously. Steel is vital to any developed nation, and the ability to make it is a national strategic necessity. Bitter experience shows such industries cannot simply be sustained by taxpayer aid.
But from the last surviving blast furnaces of Scunthorpe, intelligent government and management could still rekindle a competitive, advanced and flourishing British Steel industry.
As Ruth Sunderland writes in the MoS today, British Steel once built the world. Now perhaps it can rebuild Britain and – above all – our defences.
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