Tangent: disturbing to see the BBC thinking they're going to get far by paywalling quasi-randomly in North America. At least right now it's trivial to ignore.
Tangent: disturbing to see many North American news sites thinking they're going to get far by region-blocking European visitors because they don't want to be GDPR compliant ;)
The argument that nothing will be saved is that I am trying to say, taxpayer money will be sunk into a failing business until the politicians will find something else to save by nationalizing it.
When I buy something, it doesn't cost my employer, it costs me.
the pedantry here isn't helpful, as its "not other peoples money" is a monetary system that the government lets us use.
I understand that frustration about frivolous spending. It would be better if the argument was on how we evolve and change the steel market here in the UK so its self funding.
BUT!
the whole discourse about "government shouldn't choose winners" is a bit flawed, because we have left it to business to invest in infra, and mostly they've just outsourced to someone else (who's government actually planned with an industrial strategy)
GBP is a fiat currency issued by government through government spending and destroyed by government through taxation, it does not cost the taxpayer it's at worst a bad allocation of resources or incentivization of resource allocation.
Interesting how they haven't repeated in this article earlier claims that the Chinese purchase of the steelworks was a strategic move to slowly destroy the blast furnaces by letting them cool under pretext of low demand.
Mike Parker, the school’s director of marketing, wrote on LinkedIn: “Whatever you read, this isn’t a VAT story. It isn’t a ‘falling rolls, unstoppable decline’ story. The truth is deeper and more complex and, eventually, the truth will out.”
UK private schools spent decades ingratiating themselves to Eastern European gangsters, Arab tyrants and the scions of Asian oligarchs probably including CCP kids. China-pandering has also undermined university education, although the individual Chinese students tend 5o be okay.
It's probably not a bad idea. Steel is one of the things that an industrialized country needs to produce to protect its own sovereignty. Letting it shut down and just hope you'll always be able to import enough steel from other countries is a bad long-term strategy. You'd be left unable to fend for yourself.
You can make this same argument about a great number of things. Why is steel any more critical than food or vaccines or the like? Indeed we got caught short of vaccines recently, and had some nontrivial consideration of running a military op against NATO member over it.
Obviously there are a lot of important things you need to keep a country running, but steel is a key input a in a huge number of very important sectors (infrastructure, military, automotive etc.) so having some ability to produce your own steel seems a sensible hedge.
Yep, same can be said of manufacturing capability in general. If you don't have a manufacturing base then inevitably when there's a war you may find yourself unable to build defense components.
Let's imagine a hypothetical symmetrical war between two modern countries. One can disable the other's satellites and maintain their own fleet. The other can't get access to any third parties' satellites.
You aren't going to send your steel navy out when one side can see you from space and you can't, almost regardless of the numbers. Your big army of steel tanks is useless against a bunch of drones directed by distribute satellites.
Everyone in this discussion seems to be forgetting Trident as well. There's a lot of assumption the next war will be helpfully similar to WW2, and some sort of reverse sweet spot where we are subject to naval interdiction but will not deploy the strategic nuclear deterrent, and at the same time have enough time to build things, but not things that require any of the rest of the supply chain than steel (I have bad news about the number of ASIC fabs in the UK).
Back to "dead men dominate UK politics". In this case, we're trying to refight a war from 70 years ago.
The absolute worst case is that it's not advantageous/useful at all in the next war to have the capability, but it wouldn't harm you at all if you do have it, it just wouldn't be useful. In every other case, from the worst case all the way up the continuum to the best case, having the capability is beneficial to varying levels of degree.
How many billions have you spent propping up useless industries in the years before the war though? What capacities could have been built with those billions otherwise?
i.e. if you have a lot of financial resources and can buy 1000 ships cheaply for the cost of propping up your steel industry to build 100 ships, should you buy 1000 ships (or the steel needed to build them quickly) to instead?
Steel on its own is inert and useless, you need to retain the entire downstream manufacturing ecosystem that consumes it. Like cars for example, producing steel but letting all your vehicle manufacturers sell off to foreign owners just so you can import BYDs doesn't do you any good.
This reminded me of an article in The Economist published last year, April 2025:
"Zombie politics: how Dead Man dominates British politics"[1]
Two prescient paragraphs related to today's news:
If British politicians worship voters who are no longer among the living, it is natural that they do the same to a version of the British economy that has long departed. “There are people in this country who love to talk down our manufacturing,” said Sir Keir Starmer, the prime minister, while speaking in Jaguar Land Rover’s (JLR) factory in Birmingham. During the 1970s, one in four people worked in manufacturing, like Sir Keir’s dad, who died in 2018. Now fewer than one in ten do.
Manufacturing, a small part of the economy, plays a big role in politics everywhere. Britain is no exception. A speech at a JLR plant has become a rite of passage for any leading politician in recent years. Dead Man’s old job comes first for Britain’s politicos. The lives of workers in Britain’s services economy come second. True, manufacturing’s weak performance after the financial crisis is one reason for Britain’s woeful productivity growth. Yet politicians cling on to a primitive vision of it. “He made things with his hands,” said Sir Keir of his father. That modern manufacturing requires oodles of educated workers is ignored. Living graduates play little role in political discourse beyond politicians moaning that there are too many of them. After all, Dead Man did not attend university. Why should his grandchildren bother?
It’s only possible for Dead Man valorizing politicians to be elected because much of the electorate worships the same. They all have parents too, naturally.
That is because fishing has multiple other factors. For one, it is a major component of certain towns and villages, so while it isn't important to big cities, it is on the smaller scale in particular areas. It keeps harbours open and is also a draw for tourists, so I would say it has different implications than, say, shoe manufacturing.
The British chocolate industry was a major employer in some places but has been decimated. British chocolate was certainly not the best in the world but it was better than what it has been turned into in the last few years, thanks to palm oil, international take overs etc.
what a bizarre article, completely disconnected from reality. in what world is manufacturing, a sector that has been neglected for decades at this point, having any sway on politics in Britain.
why does The Economist have so much disdain of manufacturing and people who work in it? look at China, look at their manufacturing industry and what they are able to do with it. then look at the UK, who is struggling to build HS2, that's projected to be the most expensive high-speed rail in the world. The Economist is an absolute f*ing joke.
The point is that manufacturing is a relatively small part of both the economy and the job market; AND the popular view of manufacturing (large plant staffed by a large number of men being the dominant employer of a nearby town or city) doesn't look anything like the reality of modern manufacturing (small run boutique high value stuff like satellites and turbines, highly automated and professionalized, relatively small number of employees).
This leads to stupid decisions like gutting the university sector, which is a major export industry.
It's not boutique vs large plant. It's base materials (paper mills, steel smelters, plastic etc) that tend to be low in added value, versus higher up the stack (like your examples) that also tend to be higher in added value.
Most countries didn't care much for the former other than historic reasons, but like the latter for obvious reasons (add £ to GDP).
That's changing due to "sovereignty". You can't build a satellite without metal profiles, wiring, tubes etc. Which requires manufacturing capacity for those. Which requires steel/alu/copper smelters & plastic extruders. Which requires plastic & thus a chemical industry.
This whole 'sovereign movement' is about keeping/bringing back capabilities across the stack which are deemed critical (like steel).
But I suspect there are few (if any) countries that have these dependency chains mapped out in detail.
> look at China, look at their manufacturing industry and what they are able to do with it.
"look at China" what ? Have you seen the population size of China ? Have you seen the geographic size of China ?
Remember what is often said when Mr Trump talks about bringing tech manufacturing back to the US ....
Yes great idea Mr Trump. But even with the most generously optimistic figures, due to the lack of available workforce and space the US could only ever provide the capacity equivalent to one Chinese manufacturing town of which the Chinese have dozens.
> and the US federally owns tons of land it can create manufacturing cities out of
Ok, being generous and accepting your point at face value ....
What about the people staffing those manufacturing cities ? Is the state creating them too ?
I seem to recall reading somewhere that – at most – the US could "find" 200,000 people for new manufacturing plants.
Sounds about right to me, no ?
I think even with a generous mind the US would struggle to "find" much more than that, let alone getting to or exceeding 1 million which is the value you would need for seriously thinking about >1 manufacturing city.
The US labor force participation rate is currently at a relatively low level. There is plenty of surplus labor available with the right economic incentives.
>in what world is manufacturing, a sector that has been neglected for decades at this point, having any sway on politics in Britain.
Are you confusing the lack of effective interventions with "neglect"? Nearly every administration in the past decade had some sort of an industrial policy, but even though they failed to bring manufacturing back to britain, that doesn't mean "neglect". It just means the forces of globalization is too strong.
The Economist is a mouthpiece for the money power, specifically the banking interests of the Rothschild and Cadbury families. The idea of making money by making things (as opposed to arbitrage) is anathema to them.
They're pro free trade against government intervention. That's not the same as "making things ... is anathema to them". They're for planning reform in uk, to help build infrastructure and homes, for instance.
>As long as the reform is to cut taxes for the rich
Source? Strangely "tax" only has one hit within the wikipedia article, and it's not about tax cuts. If it's really such an important part of their editorial stance, you should update the article.
There is a completely made up number that is an increasingly large portion of GDP in OECD nations and that number is imputed rent [1]. This is a fictional number that owner-occupiers "pay" themselves to live in their own houses. So as housing prices go up, so does imputed rent. House prices have increasingly become the best vehicle for investment funds because the returns are esentially protected. But none of that produces anything.
The UK in particular has been described as buy-to-let economy.
It doesn't have to be this way. If you limit property speculation then capital will find something else productive to do, like manufacturing. Dish rags like The Economist present it as inevitable that Western nations become financialized. It's simply not true. Look at Germany. Also look at the fact that Germany greatly limits the collaterialization and speculation on property. That's not an accident.
But, the issue is about capacity. Steel and metals generally are a core part of the UK economy. Yes we could just buy it all in from outside, but when geopoltics intervenes it leaves us high and dry (see natural gas, chemical production, wire making, transformer making, etc etc)
If we end up in a war, which seems fairly reasonable, then we need to have access to a manufacturing, not only prototypes, but large scale manufacturing. we need not only the machines, but the people, experience and pipelines to keep that working.
The government is forced to sell steel at a loss, because all the buyers for whom this is a such a vital supply would otherwise buy cheaper imported steel, every single one of them.
And ultimately all the ore and coke used to make the steel are imported anyway.
2 things:
a) Government plays a part in the cost of things - especially years of mis-investment around energy generation has sent British prices to the stratosphere and employment taxation levels greater than those 'cheaper' producers.
b) The 'cheaper' producers are still _producers_ and thus have control - if they need to hoard their own supply they will, or if they need to leverage it for some political gain they might.
one of the most hilarious examples of how the current wh admins false protectionism, in my mind, is the crucible steel bankruptcy in jan/feb 2025.
its a technological tragedy because it was the only facility im aware of globally that could actually manufacture steel based carbide alternatives at commercial volumes. idk if the relevant equipment is being operated by anyone post bankruptcy. powder steel equipment is a bit less destroyed when turned off, but i think the key blocker is that heat cycling a 3k centigrade furnace will age the material and cause cracking thatmakes it hard to resume the powederization flows
I assume, ultimately western nations will have to adopt what already exists for agricultural goods for production as well. I am afraid it will end as a per-worker subsidy analog to per-area-of-land for lack of a better metric but in the end, that is what will be necessary if one wants to keep any industrial capabilities.
One can argue whether, in abstract, this was a good idea.
Back in the real world - any government or large org can do a genuinely good thing so badly that it would have been better if they'd done nothing at all.
And it's been many a decade since the British gov't had much of a reputation for competence.
One more tiny piece of the global system of international order falling apart.
There was a time when people would have felt safe enough to rely on the multiplicity of strongly allied nations with steel production capability. Now that is not considered safe. Now steel production has to be protected because nations that were previously considered reliable strategic partners no longer are behaving that way.
It will happen slowly but piece by piece things will move and we will all pay a cost for it.
> There was a time when people would have felt safe enough to rely on the multiplicity of strongly allied nations with steel production capability. [...] nations that were previously considered reliable strategic partners no longer are behaving that way.
Is this supposed to be referring to the US? Because as far as I know USA has never really exported much steel to the UK at all. It's an importer of British steel.
Maybe it's referring to European allies? Or South Korea?
Steel production is on the decline in most first world nations. In case of a large-scale war there simply wouldn't be a lot of surplus to send Britain's way
The 2 remaining blast furnaces need about 500m to 750m GBP spending on them within the next 2-5 years or they are just scrap themselves. UK Gov has ditched plans to fully fund the armed forces (would have meant a lot of new warships etc), which would have provided orders for virgin steel from such furnaces. It's hard to see how this has a happy and sustainable ending.
it makes strategic sense to retain the full verticaly integrated industrial capacity to make anything.
but financialy , Britain has zero chance of bieng competitive on the open market
73 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 52.8 ms ] threadNo, BBC, the government doesn't have money. It costs the net taxpayer that much a day.
the pedantry here isn't helpful, as its "not other peoples money" is a monetary system that the government lets us use.
I understand that frustration about frivolous spending. It would be better if the argument was on how we evolve and change the steel market here in the UK so its self funding.
BUT!
the whole discourse about "government shouldn't choose winners" is a bit flawed, because we have left it to business to invest in infra, and mostly they've just outsourced to someone else (who's government actually planned with an industrial strategy)
Richest countries have a lot of government owned companies. USA is just an anomaly because of Chicago school of economy.
This is a common myth spreaded by free market freaks.
Original: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/07/02/chinese-company-...
https://archive.is/dRQsB#selection-2155.4-2155.79
Choice quote from the article
I suppose you reap what you sow.
Who needs the Chinese to ruin your country when your own people will happily kill successful companies for the tiniest scrap of profit?
Countries that import large shares of their food and medical supply chains are constantly trying to develop domestic capacity.
You aren't going to send your steel navy out when one side can see you from space and you can't, almost regardless of the numbers. Your big army of steel tanks is useless against a bunch of drones directed by distribute satellites.
Back to "dead men dominate UK politics". In this case, we're trying to refight a war from 70 years ago.
i.e. if you have a lot of financial resources and can buy 1000 ships cheaply for the cost of propping up your steel industry to build 100 ships, should you buy 1000 ships (or the steel needed to build them quickly) to instead?
"Zombie politics: how Dead Man dominates British politics"[1]
Two prescient paragraphs related to today's news:
[1] https://www.economist.com/britain/2025/04/09/zombie-politics...I still think some manufacturing is simply strategic, and you should maintain a capability even at a (financial) loss though.
The British chocolate industry was a major employer in some places but has been decimated. British chocolate was certainly not the best in the world but it was better than what it has been turned into in the last few years, thanks to palm oil, international take overs etc.
Like... commercial fishing with a net? Not sport fishing?
But some do sightseeing trips, diving and sports fishing too.
idk if that counts as sport fishing, or sport sexual assault?
why does The Economist have so much disdain of manufacturing and people who work in it? look at China, look at their manufacturing industry and what they are able to do with it. then look at the UK, who is struggling to build HS2, that's projected to be the most expensive high-speed rail in the world. The Economist is an absolute f*ing joke.
This leads to stupid decisions like gutting the university sector, which is a major export industry.
Most countries didn't care much for the former other than historic reasons, but like the latter for obvious reasons (add £ to GDP).
That's changing due to "sovereignty". You can't build a satellite without metal profiles, wiring, tubes etc. Which requires manufacturing capacity for those. Which requires steel/alu/copper smelters & plastic extruders. Which requires plastic & thus a chemical industry.
This whole 'sovereign movement' is about keeping/bringing back capabilities across the stack which are deemed critical (like steel).
But I suspect there are few (if any) countries that have these dependency chains mapped out in detail.
"look at China" what ? Have you seen the population size of China ? Have you seen the geographic size of China ?
Remember what is often said when Mr Trump talks about bringing tech manufacturing back to the US ....
Yes great idea Mr Trump. But even with the most generously optimistic figures, due to the lack of available workforce and space the US could only ever provide the capacity equivalent to one Chinese manufacturing town of which the Chinese have dozens.
Ok, being generous and accepting your point at face value ....
What about the people staffing those manufacturing cities ? Is the state creating them too ?
I seem to recall reading somewhere that – at most – the US could "find" 200,000 people for new manufacturing plants.
Sounds about right to me, no ?
I think even with a generous mind the US would struggle to "find" much more than that, let alone getting to or exceeding 1 million which is the value you would need for seriously thinking about >1 manufacturing city.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART
and there isnt a lack of people that would accept working in one of said manufacturing towns for 10 years or something to get US citizenship?
If manufacturing was a serious problem, the US could definitely solve that problem too.
Are you confusing the lack of effective interventions with "neglect"? Nearly every administration in the past decade had some sort of an industrial policy, but even though they failed to bring manufacturing back to britain, that doesn't mean "neglect". It just means the forces of globalization is too strong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Editorial_stance_of_The_Econom...
They're pro free trade against government intervention. That's not the same as "making things ... is anathema to them". They're for planning reform in uk, to help build infrastructure and homes, for instance.
As long as the reform is to cut taxes for the rich
Source? Strangely "tax" only has one hit within the wikipedia article, and it's not about tax cuts. If it's really such an important part of their editorial stance, you should update the article.
There is a completely made up number that is an increasingly large portion of GDP in OECD nations and that number is imputed rent [1]. This is a fictional number that owner-occupiers "pay" themselves to live in their own houses. So as housing prices go up, so does imputed rent. House prices have increasingly become the best vehicle for investment funds because the returns are esentially protected. But none of that produces anything.
The UK in particular has been described as buy-to-let economy.
It doesn't have to be this way. If you limit property speculation then capital will find something else productive to do, like manufacturing. Dish rags like The Economist present it as inevitable that Western nations become financialized. It's simply not true. Look at Germany. Also look at the fact that Germany greatly limits the collaterialization and speculation on property. That's not an accident.
[1]: https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2023/02/14/10-or-gdp-is-...
But, the issue is about capacity. Steel and metals generally are a core part of the UK economy. Yes we could just buy it all in from outside, but when geopoltics intervenes it leaves us high and dry (see natural gas, chemical production, wire making, transformer making, etc etc)
If we end up in a war, which seems fairly reasonable, then we need to have access to a manufacturing, not only prototypes, but large scale manufacturing. we need not only the machines, but the people, experience and pipelines to keep that working.
And ultimately all the ore and coke used to make the steel are imported anyway.
its a technological tragedy because it was the only facility im aware of globally that could actually manufacture steel based carbide alternatives at commercial volumes. idk if the relevant equipment is being operated by anyone post bankruptcy. powder steel equipment is a bit less destroyed when turned off, but i think the key blocker is that heat cycling a 3k centigrade furnace will age the material and cause cracking thatmakes it hard to resume the powederization flows
Back in the real world - any government or large org can do a genuinely good thing so badly that it would have been better if they'd done nothing at all.
And it's been many a decade since the British gov't had much of a reputation for competence.
There was a time when people would have felt safe enough to rely on the multiplicity of strongly allied nations with steel production capability. Now that is not considered safe. Now steel production has to be protected because nations that were previously considered reliable strategic partners no longer are behaving that way.
It will happen slowly but piece by piece things will move and we will all pay a cost for it.
Is this supposed to be referring to the US? Because as far as I know USA has never really exported much steel to the UK at all. It's an importer of British steel.
Maybe it's referring to European allies? Or South Korea?
(British Steel's predecessor was itself a nationalisation effort in the 60s.)
1951 - Nationalised by Attlee (Labour)
1953 - Re-privatised by Churchill (Conservative)
1967 - Nationalised again by Wilson (Labour)
1988 - Privatised again by Thatcher (Conservative)
1999 - Allowed to merge with Dutch Hoogovens into Corus by Blair (Labour)
2007 - Allowed to be sold to Tata Steel by Blair (Labour)
2016 - Tata allowed to sell to Greybull Capital by Cameron (Conservative)
2020 - Takeover by Chinese Jingye under Johnson (Conservative)
I worked there for three years in the mid 90s.
Personally, I think it should have been left alone after 1951.
But it is arguable whether ideologically driven militant unions would have destroyed it in the 1970s and 1980s.