The Government is considering using emergency powers to renationalise British Steel and save the Scunthorpe works from closure.
Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds wants to invoke the Civil Contingencies Act – which was designed for wartime, invasion by a foreign power or an act of terrorism – to take the company back into public ownership.
It is a measure of Labour’s desperation after Scunthorpe’s Chinese owners announced plans to close two remaining blast furnaces, with the loss of 2,700 jobs. The first could be decommissioned within weeks.
This would leave Britain as the only G7 country without the ability to produce high-grade ‘virgin’ steel, essential for the manufacture of everything from weapons to railway tracks.
Surkeir Starmer talks grandly about increasing defence spending and re-arming in the face of the Russian threat, while our ability to manufacture military hardware and munitions is being seriously depleted.
In pursuit of reducing carbon emissions, traditional steelworks are being replaced by eco-friendly electric arc furnaces, which are incapable of producing metal strong enough to make tanks, shells and other kit.
So while the Prime Minister puts the country on a war footing, his Net Zero nutjob Energy Secretary Ed Miliband rushes ahead with his drive to turn Britain into a post-industrial basket case.
Steel isn’t the only casualty. Manufacturers in every sector are being forced out of business by the highest electricity prices in the developed world, caused by ‘sustainable’ subsidies, Labour’s ban on fracking and refusal to license new North Sea oil and gas development.
Since the national steel strike in 1980, which I covered in my previous incarnation as an industrial correspondent, the number of people employed in steelmaking has fallen from 100,000 to three men and a dog. Former sites have been bulldozed and turned into housing estates or shopping malls.
If and when Scunthorpe shuts, we will be utterly dependent on foreign imports of high-grade steel. We won’t even be able to build railway tracks for HS2. We’ll have to go cap in hand to countries like India and China, where steel is produced using coal-fired blast furnaces which pump out far more planet-destroying pollution than Miliband’s War Of The Worlds windmills are designed to eliminate.
And you can bet your bottom Yuan that, in the event of a looming World War III, the Chinese would cut us off immediately, leaving us up the proverbial without a paddle.
How the hell did we end up at the mercy of potentially hostile foreign powers? We’d have to fall back on buying arms from an increasingly isolationist America. That’s if they agreed to sell under the new world order. Only yesterday it was revealed that the Pentagon has ruled out America coming to the aid of Europe with ground troops in the event of a Russian invasion.
We also learned that, despite Starmer’s fighting talk, Britain hasn’t built a single attack drone since Labour came to office last June. Ukraine, under daily bombardment, has turned out 200,000. The truth is that, despite a relatively healthy aerospace sector, Britain no longer has the capacity to manufacture arms on a viable scale.
In the run-up to – and during – World War II, car factories and other heavy industry were switched to manufacturing tanks, planes and other weapons.
For instance, Ford’s Manchester plant supplied 34,000 Rolls-Royce aero engines, including for the Spitfire. Vauxhall at Luton built the Churchill tanks.
The Midlands motor industry manufactured everything from Mosquito aircraft to tanks and armoured cars. Before the U.S. entered the war, the West Midlands corridor and the giant Ford plant at Dagenham were the arsenals of democracy.
All of these factories are long gone. Vauxhall’s commercial vehicle plant in Luton was the most recent casualty of the tough zero emissions mandate which Labour refuses to relax.
Britain’s biggest car factory is Nissan in Sunderland. Would the Government be prepared to nationalise that, too, if the Japanese owners refused to switch production to aircraft engines, drones and military vehicles?
As I wrote recently, while Surkeir poses as the wartime leader of a ‘coalition of the willing’, his paltry percentage increase in defence spending – which amounts to a post-dated IOU and a few coins found down the back of the Treasury’s sofa – won’t even scratch the surface.
To be fair, governments of all stripes – Tory, Labour, Coalition – have conspired in the shameful neglect of our Armed Forces over decades. They all are guilty of dereliction of duty when it comes to defence of the realm.
The Army was promised a new £5.5billion fleet of Ajax armoured vehicles from 2018. They still haven’t been delivered. We learned recently that Britain’s ageing rifles are ‘the laughing stock of Europe’.
Now the Government has belatedly woken up to the threat from Russia, it is reduced to considering invoking emergency powers to prevent our ability to produce adequate steel supplies from disappearing for good.
It would be a start but nowhere near enough.
Never mind ploughshares into swords. Where are the factories which will turn nationalised steel into tanks and other weapons vital to the defence of our realm?
If Mister Ed’s astronomical electricity bills don’t force them to shut down or relocate to a more economically friendly country, then a combination of Rachel From Complaints’ tax rises and Ginge Rayner’s workers’ rights reforms might deliver the coup de grace for what’s left of British industry.
As for the prospect of a newly nationalised British Steel, I suppose they could always have asked the Indian steel billionaire Lakshmi Mittal, a long-term UK resident, to run it. Unfortunately, though, he’s getting out after being stripped of non-dom status.
He’s not alone. Will the last factory worker in Britain please turn out the lights?
The Russians are coming, the Russians are coming. Don’t panic!
It’s always amazed me that Left-wing eco-loonies who claim to care about the planet don’t appear to give a stuff about nature.
Take the hypocrites currently torching and dumping Teslas in America and across Europe.
A couple of months ago they loved these zero-emissions electric cars.
Now, because of Elon Musk’s association with Donald Trump, they are targeting anyone who owns a Tesla and want to destroy his company, regardless of how many polar bears die as a result.
At home, ‘environmentalists’ are quite happy to carpet our green and pleasant with hideous windmills, solar panels and electricity pylons, even if it menaces wildlife and trashes the landscape.
In Scotland, scientists warn that plans for giant wind farms and battery storage facilities in the Highlands and elsewhere could pollute wetlands and rivers. They pose a clear and present danger to rare species such as the Freshwater Pearl Mussel, whose numbers are in steep decline and could now face extinction.
The Freshwater Pearl Mussel is a distant cousin of one of this column’s old favourites, the Depressed River Mussel.
If these schemes go ahead, Freshwater Pearl won’t only be depressed, she’ll be positively suicidal.
Pearl’s a goner...
The Ministry of Justice has prioritised bail for ethnic minorities, in line with the out-of-touch, unelected Sentencing Council recommending lenient sentences for the same ‘vulnerable’ groups.
Along with the daily decisions by judges to let illegal migrants, convicted foreign rapists, child molesters and drug dealers remain in Britain, our self-righteous Left-wing legal establishment is the best recruiting sergeant the fabled ‘far-Right’ could wish for.
If we want to avoid Trump’s trade war we could start by scrapping tariffs on imported American cars and trucks. It would be a goodwill gesture which would cost us next to nothing, since virtually no one here buys them anyway.
