The blame game over the British Steel fiasco has gone into overdrive.
Labour ministers, trade union leaders and even anonymous civil servants point to the Chinese owners of the Scunthorpe blast furnaces as the bad guys, saying they had always intended to close the plant however much government money was offered.
Treasury minister James Murray is even claiming that Jingye has ‘behaved irresponsibly’.
Some trade unionists are also making it be known that the Chinese firm brought British Steel’s furnaces to their knees because it wants to force the UK to import cheaper its virgin steel to be used in the rolling mills.
Not so, claims Jingye, the Chinese operator that is losing £700,000 a day from the steel-making operation – which supplies vital steel for Network Rail’s tracks and infrastructure for Hinkley Point C, among other strategic projects.
It blames the extraordinarily high cost of industrial electricity for the losses.
Targets: Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change Ed Miliband (pictured) has pledged to fight for Net Zero
Even if it were the case that China wants to dump cheap steel on the UK, that suggests that it is less expensive to ship virgin steel from China to Lincolnshire to be used in the mills than making it in situ. Utter madness.
No wonder China’s foreign ministry is accusing Keir Starmer’s Government of ‘politicising trade cooperation’ after passing last Saturday’s emergency law to take over the Scunthorpe site.
The foreign ministry is also warning that Starmer’s move could discourage future Chinese investment in the UK (whether that’s good or bad is for another day).
What is sure is that if the Government takes full control of Scunthorpe, the problems are not going away. The losses are merely transferred from the Chinese to the UK taxpayer. Sadly, new owners are not going to make it profitable.
If Scunthorpe is to be saved, then the Government has a choice: either the taxpayer will have to fork out millions of pounds more a year to keep the plant going, or its new bosses will have to make some dramatic changes to British Steel’s operating structure to try to curb the losses.
And there’s only one way to do that – slash energy costs that are being held deliberately high by the Government because of insane green taxes and the hideously complex carbon credits.
It can’t be repeated often enough that the UK’s energy prices are three times those of the US, nearly double Japan’s, a third above Germany and the highest of any comparable developed nation.
The reasons are manifold. Over the last 30 years British governments have failed to build nuclear plants, ducked out of fracking shale gas, stopped mining coal (even though we have miles of the stuff under our feet), failed to invest in the grid or battery storage for renewables and slapped on green levies forthe privilege.
All this leaves the UK a net importer of energy, mainly gas. As the current gas price is used to set the cost, renewable prices are high, too.
All told, successive governments and their obsession with Net Zero have left the country high and dry with eye-wateringly high energy prices for industry and households.
Yet what we are doing by de-industrialising the UK is shifting production and emissions overseas.
If Starmer wants to be the strong man of steel, particularly now that he has made national security and defence such a top priority, he must also be ruthless, abandon Net Zero and sack Ed Miliband.
If not, the collapse of the last vestiges of Britain’s industrial might – Scunthorpe, Port Talbot, Grangemouth, the block on North Sea drilling and new coal mines – will be on his watch.
Tax to blame
Rachel Reeves won’t be best pleased with the latest survey of top business leaders from the ICAEW, the trade group for chartered accountants.
It makes for dismal reading, with business confidence down into negative territory over the first quarter to 2022 levels.
This is what they report: Record levels of distress; a state of despondency; harrowing conditions; and that prosperity remains a pipe dream.
And who do they blame?
Well, first and foremost, April’s huge tax hikes ushered in by Reeves, made worse by the uncertainty provoked by Trump’s trade war. If Trump can flip-flop over tariffs, then the Chancellor is surely big enough to make changes, too.
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